It’s not often you get a chance to examine your content for quality, but the practice of content auditing may be the difference between success and failure in the content marketing game.
Here is a simple guide to content audits and the benefits they can provide for your site.
What Is a Content Audit?
Simply put, a content audit is a systematic review of your site’s blog and content activity. You might think that such a practice, to be successful, would be exhaustive and time consuming and you’d be right.
Content audits combine methods of cataloging every page of your site and examining the analytics for each: factors such as keyword density, conversions and load rate. The Content Marketing Institute has a list of top analytics to use when auditing your site.
Interested in performing your own content audit or simply learning more about the process? Quicksprout has a useful, step-by-step guide to conducting an audit, as well as helpful tools you can use to ease the process.
What Are the Benefits of a Content Audit?
For marketers, there are several key benefits to conducting a comprehensive audit for your site:
1. Find Out Precisely What’s Working (and What Isn’t)
For a content marketing campaign, you may have a hunch or a feeling about the effectiveness of certain strategies, but until you look at the full picture, you can’t know for sure.
As you examine your content, you’ll be able to see which pages are driving traffic and which ones aren’t, and key into the reasons behind these factors.
2. Develop a Concrete Content Marketing Strategy
The cohesiveness of your content marketing campaign is never more visible than when looked at from a birds’ eye.
Ask yourself if there are inconsistencies in your strategy and figure out how to fix them. This is also useful in developing a best practices guide for future content.
3. Analyze Your Content For Problems
Gaps, SEO flaws and outdated content are a few examples of problems that you might find with your content when you audit, but you may simply want to re-read old content for quality.
A good writer can identify poorly written and ineffective content almost instantly.
4. Refresh Your Memory
If your site has an abundance of pages, you can’t be expected to have clear recollection of your past content.
Reviewing your content can allow you to find articles to re-purpose, multiple articles on the same subjects to consolidate, and allow you to take inventory of everything written on your site.
What Benefits Do the End Users Get?
When marketers review their content frequently, they learn more about their audience and the questions they want answered. In return, the audience gets fresher, greener, more practically valuable content that suits their needs more effectively.
Have you ever done a content audit or helped a client with a content audit?
Share in the comments section.
