Let's be real—a content audit is probably not a task you're willing to bump up to number one on your to-do list. It won't be the thing that gets you a promotion, and isn't exciting enough to merit a mention to your spouse.
But even with all this said, a content audit is imperative to improving your content marketing ROI. This is why it's time to start Spring cleaning your content now!
Why conduct a content audit?
The goal of conducting a content audit is to perform a qualitative analysis of your website's content, or of any and all online content produced by your brand.
At the forefront, a content audit helps you understand if your online content is relevant, meets the customer's needs and pushes your brand forward towards its underlying goals.
Audits also allow you to answer vital questions concerning your content:
- Is my content factually precise, and is that same precision consistent throughout all content channels?
- Does my content have a consistent voice that embodies my brand and what it stands for?
- Is my content optimized and search engine-friendly?
- Are my content marketing tools and content management system able to monitor the above and help us achieve content goals?
All-in-all, content audit's assess your strengths, highlight areas that need improvement, and shape your content marketing strategy for a better user experience.
Pre-audit content inventory.
Before we get into the steps involved in conducting a content audit, it's a good idea to first create an inventory of your site's content. You can use a spreadsheet, regular text document, template or whatever works for you.
Organize your content list by URL, title or assign a number to a particular content channel. You can get more specific by adding in headings and subheadings, and sorting your list by the content's author and the content type, such as text, image-based, infographic, video, press release, PDF, etc.
These are the basic principles of creating a content inventory, and while it's not mandatory, it helps you organize and manage the following steps.
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Conduct a content audit in 5 steps.
Throughout the auditing process you need to determine the quality of each piece of content. Grade your content through whatever grading method your prefer. You can assign letter grades from A+ to F, or you can stick with a number scale of 1 to 5 or even 1 to 3 if the differences in quality are small.
Just keep in mind that less is more, so the more time you spend scrutinizing your content, the less focused you'll be on the following questions that should make up the core of your content audit.
1. What is the content about and what should it be about?
What is each piece of content about? Are titles, headings and subheadings in sync with one another? Do they deliver what's being advertised to the consumer? Is each promise being followed up through the post's copy? Does your website's content contain a balanced mix of helpful information, product and service recommendations, "who we are" details? Make sure to address any discrepancies and inconsistencies.
2. Is my content outdated or factually wrong?
Is your content up-to-date and relevant to the consumer's problems today? If it's a news piece, don't hide the date. Are you recommending any outdated products or services? What about broken links? Broken links not only waste the customer's time, but they can also negatively impact on-page SEO.
What about fact-checking? Have you ever thrown a statistic on your website that you saw on another website without doing your due-diligence concerning its accuracy? Take an hour or two, or hire someone, to dig into your industry data and sources to make sure they're correct.
3. Are people engaging with my content?
Use your analytics platform to find which specific types of posts are the most and least popular. Where are your site visitors spending most of their time? Which pages are causing people to quickly click away? What actions, if any, are they taking and why?
Which keywords bring the most organic traffic? The least? If social media is a primary part of your content marketing strategy, then use a tool like Buzz Sumo to find what content people are sharing the most with their friends and followers. Uncovering this data tells you which content type your target audience prefers the most. Run with these insights.
4. Is my content fully optimized for search engines?
This part of your content audit should be a no brainer, but its importance cannot be overstated. Review each page's titles, headings, subheadings, meta information and image alt tags.
Keyword density should not be your main focus, but you definitely want to make sure your key words and phrases appear naturally throughout. And while placing captions over images, videos and infographics won't help you in terms of SEO, they do improve the user experience—and we know how much Google loves good user experiences.
5. What am I missing?
A vast majority of the content audit process revolves around looking at what's already there. So much so that it can be easy to overlook what is not there. Finding what's missing is essential to uncovering content gaps, weaknesses and what you desperately need to do to take your content game to the next level.
As an example, let's say you run a web store in Australia selling high-end fishing equipment (no, seriously.) You can have the most information-packed website in the world covering fishing tips, but if you fail to adequately cover topics related to your own products, such as on how to assemble X product together or how to address a certain issue with product Y, then you're setting yourself up for failure.
A few questions to ask yourself concerning your brand and its content needs are:
- Do I have a balanced mix of different types of content?
- Am I using videos too much or not enough?
- Are our website photos great but the images on our press releases stink?
- Are we addressing specific company issues and common problems enough or not at all?
- Are we too focused on selling our own services that we forget about addressing industry trends?
When you find what's missing through a content audit, you're pushing your brand's content strategy in a positive, more succinct direction.
So what about you and your brand? How did your content audit help your business grow? Let us know. And if you happen to be struggling with content at your business, feel free to contact Milwaukee content marketing firm, Accelity Marketing today for content marketing assistance.