How to Write a Content Audit

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A well-conducted content audit, performed by a digital marketing agency, can improve your content marketing branding and overall performance of your marketing strategy. In this report, all of your website pages are analyzed and sorted into three categories: pages to keep, pages to update, and pages to delete. Knowing this information helps us see which content is working for your business, where easy opportunities for improvement lie, and which areas are hindering your marketing efforts. Our marketing agency performs a thorough audit for our clients a minimum of once per year. It’s a time-consuming process but when done properly it yields great insights. 

This is how we do it.

Before Beginning Your Content Audit

The first step is understanding what you want out of the content audit. Clear goals are necessary in order to determine appropriate action afterward. Some possible content audit goals are as follows:

• Identify ways to improve organic search performance 
• Pinpoint which past content marketing pieces have performed best
• Determine which content topics your audience seems to prefer
• Find out which content produces the most engagement
• Locate gaps in the content you’ve provided for different stages of your sales funnel
• Discover pages to be consolidated because of overlapping content
• Highlight pages with high impressions, but low conversions
• Generate ideas for future content pieces
• Eliminate content that no longer reflects your business, niche, or corporate culture

We will then need to determine the scope of the audit, and review content from a minimum of one year prior or back until the last audit was performed. If completed on an annual basis, you will only need to analyze the previous year’s content. 

Beginning Your Content Audit

Our marketing agency will audit your internal content, such as blog posts, news, educational materials, product descriptions, landing pages and even external publications. We can also assess other types of content such as videos, PDFs or interactive content (quizzes, tests, games, etc).

We plug all of the relevant information into a template similar to this content audit template. We can also add or remove certain metrics depending on your goals. 

Collecting URLs

As a digital marketing agency, we have access to and experience using valuable tools like SEMrush’s Content Analyzer. This allows us to select URLs to be analyzed. The data can be exported into an Excel file as well. We may also choose to use the following programs for further insights:

• Google Analytics helps us to understand which content is performing the best in terms of traffic, engagement, and conversion. We will also be able to estimate how effective your content was in achieving your marketing and business goals.
• SEMrush Position Tracking allows us to track your rankings for target keywords. This tool can help us find content with good SEO potential (for example, web pages that once ranked in the top five spot or pages ranking close to the top results). By updating these pages, you can quickly reach better positions in search engine results.
• Content Insight helps us get information about your file types and metadata to produce page-level details. This includes images, documents, videos, and screenshots of every page of your site. We will also able to sort your results and export data for offline analysis.
• Content Square helps us analyze user behaviour to understand what is working and what is not on your web page. You can assess your page elements in terms of impact, performance, and usability to identify areas for subsequent updates.
• SEMrush Site Audit allows us to identify the technical issues of your website if one of your main audit goals is to improve your rankings.

Scoring The Data

After reviewing each page of content, we’ll decide whether to keep it, update it, or delete it. Our marketing agency assigns each page a letter grade based on its overall performance. A page with a score of A or B is a top-performing page and should be kept. Assets with a score of C or D are good but could be improved. Pages that get an F should be removed or combined with other assets. With our technical expertise, we complete a 301 redirect for any post that is absorbed into another one. 

If a blog post has been on your website for years, has no backlinks pointing to it, and is never visited, it could be hurting your rankings. If no one is visiting a URL, and it doesn’t add value to the site, it doesn’t need to be there. We suggest adding a “No Index” tag to these kinds of pages.

Taking Action

Here are some actionable items that we may recommend based on the findings from your content audit:

1. Reusing your content. Combining different pieces of content to create improved pieces, or publishing the content in a different format (ebook, infographics, slides, etc).
2. Rewriting your content. If you have blog posts that are not performing well enough, we can rewrite them with new examples, tips, and practical details.
3. Refreshing your content. Sometimes, we don’t need to completely rewrite an article; we can just add some relevant information (for example, new stats and trends or new product details).
4. Structuring your content. A clear and logical structure can help users and bots better interpret your content. Besides, well-structured “How to” article is more likely to rank for a featured snippet on Google.
5. Updating your CTAs. You may have some outdated banners on your blog or other web pages. Replacing them with relevant offers to reactivate your content marketing funnel may improve your conversions.
6. Adding videos. Adding videos can drive up organic traffic 157%. Also, users spend more time on web pages containing a video.
7. Adding images. Images can make your content more engaging and attract more traffic to your website through Google Images. By integrating videos and images on a web page, you increase your chances of appearing in SERP features.
8. Optimizing metadata. Rewriting titles, meta descriptions and H1 headings can help give your SEO a boost.
9. Optimizing internal links. Adding links pointing to newer articles in blog posts with related topics can help improve your website organization and decrease your bounce rate.
10. Checking your issues. The “health” of your website can have a significant impact on SEO. We will check and make sure there are no performance issues that Google is penalizing you for.
11. Using 301 redirects for web pages removed from your website allows you to avoid “not found” pages and improves the overall user experience.
12. Informing Google about your content updates by using Google Search Console. The “Fetch as Google” feature allows you to submit recently updated web pages to Google’s index.

 If you’re looking to improve your online presence, give us a call at 604.559.7509. or visit our digital marketing agency in Vancouver – we always have chocolate.