How to do a Content Audit?

You must determine whether your content is effective based on your initial content goals. With our ultimate checklist, here’s how.

How long has it been since your last comprehensive content inventory and analysis?

This is called a content audit, and the majority of content creators are so preoccupied with producing new content that they neglect to audit the content they have already produced.

Your content strategy may be based on outdated data if it has been more than a year.

What is a Content Audit?

A content audit is a methodical analysis and evaluation of all of your website’s content.

The final goal is to determine your content strategy’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as how your content development workflow works, and to adapt your content plan to your current marketing objectives.

Companies of all sizes, from startups to multinational corporations, stand to gain from it.

You need to regularly audit your content for the following reasons:

• Goals: Are your content’s objectives being met? What is your content’s return on investment (ROI)? You won’t know unless you regularly audit your content and measure how well it performs.

• Staleness: Over time, your content may become stale or even out-of-date. However, don’t beat yourself up. Content that has aged is not always your fault. What was important two years ago might just need to be updated now.

• Accuracy: Facts and data that were once accurate can become inaccurate as your content ages. Regularly auditing your content will guarantee the accuracy of your post and help safeguard both your search rankings and your brand’s reputation.

• Find out what is working: If you never go back and audit all of your content, how will you ever know which type of content or blog post is your most successful? It’s possible that writing three blog posts per week is just exhausting and ineffective. If you don’t go back and conduct a content audit to determine which pieces performed best and which did not, you won’t ever know.

Hopefully, at least one of those points made sense to you, and you now know why it’s so important to regularly audit your content.

Let’s get into the breakdown of the audit now:-

A content details audit is a one-time entry on your audit that examines the fundamentals of each piece of content.

Take a look at the fundamental publishing information, as well as the method by which the content was created and the number of people involved.

For each piece of content, you should keep track of the following in a separate content details audit spreadsheet:

1. Audit of Content Data

This is where the fun begins. Your audit’s content data section needs to come with its own handy Excel document.

2. Conduct a previous audit

You need to go back and review the content you’ve produced in the past before we can get into the data.

You will be able to determine what kind of content you need to create in the future and what kind of content you should avoid creating if you know how the content you have published performs.

At least initially, this portion of your content audit will take a long time.

After deciding how far back you want to start your content audit, you’ll need to gather all of the content URLs for that time.

However, you don’t have to manually collect all of your previous content URLs.

Fortunately, numerous website analytics tools, such as Google Analytics or the Content Audit tool from SEMrush, can quickly inventory your content using data from your sitemap. You might be able to get a list of content URLs from these to audit.

3. Prepare for Ongoing Audits

Once you have caught up and added all of the content from the previous year to your Excel document, you can do this audit activity for new content every week. When you only need to go back one week to input data, it will be much simpler to monitor your content and conduct regular audits.

Upload the most recent numbers and statistics weekly to your Excel document, and then add the data from the following section.

Keep an eye out for any significant changes over time.

It can take months for content, particularly evergreen content, to really take off.

4. Metrics to Monitor

The following are the metrics to monitor for your content data audit:

Your blog posts and articles can benefit from user-generated content if your comments section is properly moderated.

If one of your content goals is to build a community on your website, you’ll want to know what kinds of content and subjects bring people together.

If you don’t allow comments on your blog, look for content-related comments on your social media posts.

• Social shares

Some marketers dismiss social shares as a gimmick statistic. However, you can identify the subjects that are most likely to pique the interest of specific social audiences by keeping an eye on the popularity of your content on social media.

For instance, businesses that are aware that Facebook accounts for the majority of their conversions would want to produce content that is well-liked by Facebook audiences.

A good way to determine which subjects may succeed in the future is to examine which Facebook posts have received the most social shares in the past.

• Organic Traffic

In an ideal world, a lot of organic traffic would come to your content.

That could be a warning sign if you aren’t getting traffic from natural sources.

Perhaps there is a problem with:

• Your plan for content.
• how the content is distributed.
• The type of content.
• The material itself.

You will know when you can congratulate yourself or when you need to start over if you regularly evaluate the organic traffic metrics in your audit.

• Bounce Rate

Are website visitors leaving your pages without reading any of the content? A bounce is when Google Analytics cannot identify scrolling, clicking, or other content-related interactions before a user leaves.

Additionally, a high bounce rate may indicate poor content.

Ideally, your content serves as a gateway to your website, entertaining or educating visitors before directing them to additional content based on their requirements.

A low bounce rate in conjunction with a long time on the page indicates “sticky” content that keeps users interested enough to continue reading your content.

Note:- Many people think that the best range is between 26 and 40 percent, though it could go as high as 55 percent on average.

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