It’s easy to get lost in content marketing.
Producing lots of content of a high quality on a regular basis takes a lot of work, time and effort. After a while, if you’re not careful, it’s easy to get swamped with so much content and so many things to organize that you can’t keep a clear eye on your content marketing strategy goals.
When this happens, it can help to slow down, take stock and make sure that your content campaign is headed in the right direction. To make sure your content marketing is as effective as it can possibly be, you need to run regular content audits.
The Content Audit
Content audits work the same as audits of any other resources and funds that a company might produce. Essentially, it involves creating a detailed list of all marketing assets, and evaluating which ones are effective to better help your content engage with users.
It’s useful to undertake a content audit at least once a year – ideally, every six months or more frequently, depending on the amount of content you’re producing.
Content audits should be long and in-depth. By the end of one, you want to know everything there is to know about your content strategy and its effectiveness. This can be supplemented by monthly and weekly analysis, but for the purpose of this article, we’re going to be looking at how to undertake a complete and thorough audit of all content.
Let’s get started!
Step One: Conduct a Thorough Content Inventory
Before you can undertake a content audit, you first need to know what content you have.
If you don’t already have a full and up to date content inventory, now is the time to collect one.
You want to know about every piece of content you have, including where it is, what is says in full and how it’s currently organized. There are plenty of specifics to detail, but to give you some examples, your inventory should include:
- Web page text and images
- Blog posts
- Videos
- Site URLs
- Metatags
- Podcasts
- White papers and PDFs
- Infographics
- Social media posts
Basically, there’s a lot of content that you’re producing that can easily be overlooked during an inventory, meaning you won’t get a full picture of how all your marketing efforts stack up.
Obviously, it can take a lot of effort to collate all your content, so it’s up to you how thorough you choose to be. My recommendation, though, is to be as precise and inclusive as possible – this is the best way to get a crystal clear picture of how your content is performing.
Creating a Content Inventory Quickly and Easily
Luckily, while it can be a bit of a pain to get all of your content details together in one place, there are a lot of commonly used tools that’ll make this easier for you.
If you’re a WordPress user, it’s easy to collate web addresses – simply navigate to all of your Published articles in the Posts section.
We’ll be coming back to WordPress in a little while, as there’s a lot of neatening and tidying that can be done easily in this platform.
Alternatively, if you’re regularly using Google Analytics, there’s a lot of good data that can be easily collected from this tool. For instance, in Analytics, under ‘Behavior’, you can find a full list of all the pages on your site.
Click ‘view full report’ at the bottom of the Behavior Overview to see the full list of pages.
This is a handy tool because it’ll also show you which pages have the most page views, and the bounce rate for each page, which will help you to evaluate the effectiveness of every piece of content you have.
Step Two: Review Content Marketing Strategy and Goals
The next step in the content audit process is to make sure you’re completely familiar with your existing content marketing strategy. In order to get the most out your content marketing efforts, you need to have a solid strategy in place (as an added perk, having a documented content marketing strategy is linked with a 48% increase in effectiveness).
If you don’t already have a documented content strategy, I strongly urge you to put one together that covers the specific goals you want your marketing efforts to achieve, including measurable key performance indicators, such as:
- Website traffic
- Social media engagement
- Lead generation
- Sales and conversions
The problem a lot of marketers run into when they don’t have a documented strategy and goals is that they get sidetracked or end up chasing metrics that don’t help their business to grow.
Alternatively, lots of marketers end up creating content on an ad-hoc basis and wonder why, without a clear strategy and upload schedule, their efforts don’t seem to be making a dent on their metrics.
Reviewing your content marketing strategy gets you ready to tackle your audit in earnest. Doing so allows you to identify what the intended goals for your content are, which makes it easier to then compare your achievements against the intended results.
In addition to looking through your strategy, it’s helpful at this stage to compare your metrics with the goals you initially set:
- Is your content meeting the goals in a way you’d hoped for?
- Has your strategy produced unexpected results?
- Are some aspects of your content that are performing better than others?
At this point we’re just going to create a loose overview – we’ll go into further detail on what content is working in future steps. You may find that your content is producing results, but not for the goals you’d originally anticipated, so it helps to take a broad approach here. Essentially, you want to create a basic list of what’s working and what’s not when it comes to your content.
Step Three: Run an Automated Sweep
Auditing all of the content on your site can be a very big job, but thankfully there are some automated tools available that can take care of a lot of the nitty gritty work for you.
One of the more popular tools is Screaming Frog SEO Spider, which automatically runs through your site and checks URLS, meta tags, images and links to make sure that everything is still running smoothly and nothing’s gone missing or in need of updating.
If you’re running a full, detailed audit of your content, SEO Spider can save you a lot of time checking details. It’s also worth running periodically between audits to make sure things don’t get too messy before the next time you go through your whole site.
The site comes with some basic tools and more advanced options, so depending on how thorough you’re being with your audit and how much time you want to spend on it, you can tailor your experience appropriately (that said, thorough is always better if you want to really improve the quality of your website).
It’s relatively easy to use SEO Spider – all you need to do is enter the domain you want it to crawl through (being sure to check ‘Crawl all subdomains’) and then select any other settings you want the program to pay attention to. There are plenty of different options to be found here, so if extra data is just going to confuse your results, it’s worth sticking to familiar data types.
Automated tools like SEO Spider can export to Excel, which will be useful later on when we’ll be relying on a spreadsheet to run through our audit in full. Tools like these are helpful in identifying elements of your website which need work, without having to spend too long checking every single link. That said, they have their limits, so there’s a fair amount of analysis you’ll have to do yourself as well.
Step Four: Review Customer Profiles
Ideally, by the time you’ve started producing marketing content, you’ve already undertaken a significant amount of market research and identified your target audience and customers. Marketers that are most prepared often create representative personas for fictional clients, which make it easier to keep audience needs clear in their minds.
If you don’t have customer profiles, then you’ve already discovered a valuable way of improving the effectiveness of your content: performing the research you need and deliberately targeting the right users is the first step to auditing your work.
Whether you’re producing customer profiles for the first time or reviewing existing market research data, going through your content with an idea of who it’s meant to be aimed at is a very important step in undertaking a very thorough audit.
Step Five: Rank Your Content
Okay, so now, you’ve got your content organized, and you’ve reviewed your goals regarding what it’s meant to do and who it’s meant to be aimed at. The next step in your process should be to carefully evaluate every piece of content to see how well it meets your needs.
There are a lot of variables that will affect how well your content is performing, so you want to be thorough in analyzing every aspect of each piece of content.
For every piece of content, ask the following questions:
- What is the purpose of this content?
- Does it meet the needs of its target audience?
- Is it easily searchable?
- Is the information within the content up to date?
- Does it have a compelling title?
- Are all links within the content still relevant?
- Does it carry the standard tone of your other branding?
- Is SEO formatting in place?
These questions will give you a basic idea of how well your content is doing at meeting the needs of your customers and helping your content marketing strategy to achieve its targets. Keep in mind, though, that these are just a few starter questions – there are plenty more to dive into, and you can (and should) feel free to add your own questions based on your content needs and goals.
Beyond this, there are additional questions about the structure and design of the content that need to be asked:
- Is the content engaging?
- Is the content informative?
- Is the content authoritative?
- Is the content properly formatted?
- Is the content free from typos?
- Is the content organized clearly?
You want to be able to look through the answers to the questions to quickly see how each piece of content is performing. To do so effectively, the trick to auditing is to ask specific, clear questions of your content, which ideally have ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers. In instances where you won’t be able to answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’, instead, try grading each piece of content with a 1 to 5, depending on its performance (or, alternatively, grade it from A to D based on its success). Use the grading system that makes most sense to you.
Grading your content on each element of its design, style and performance will help you to see where improvements can be made. One piece of content might be excellently organized, in which case nothing needs to be changed, while another piece could be relatively well organized, but still do with a bit of tidying up or reorganizing.
Collating data of this kind works best when you use a clear table or spreadsheet, so that you can quickly scan through your content results to find out how well a piece is doing.
Here’s how I’d recommend setting it out:
Create a table with each piece of content on one side, and columns for all the questions you’re going to ask about its effectiveness. You can then go through the list with each page, ranking the content by its effectiveness.
Finally, I’d recommend having a column at the end where you can enter notes about what specific actions need to be taken to improve the page, such as changing titles or URLs, or making changes to content structure and format.
Remember, though, your content is more than just web pages – the spreadsheet may need to be altered or adjusted slightly for content like videos, images and even social media posts. Here, though, the principle is the same: run through every relevant aspect or attribute of your content, and give it a grade to establish how well it meets your content needs.
There’s no perfect list of everything that you need to rank as every content campaign is different, but hopefully with the suggestions above, you’ll be able to come up with a good idea of what elements of your content can be audited for better quality overall.
Step Six: Analyze Your Competitors
Once you’ve run through all the pieces of content on your own site, it can be helpful to also look at outside examples of similar content, as analyzing your competitors’ work is an excellent step towards finding new additional ways to make your own content shine.
When you conduct a competitive content audit:
- You’ll be inspired by ideas and techniques you can utilize.
- You’ll spot areas that your competitors do well in that you could do to improve.
- You’ll identify potential weaknesses or flaws that you can avoid in your own content.
- You’ll also be able to make sure that your content isn’t too similar in style, tone or material to other similar brands on the market.
The easiest way to analyze your competitors is to take representative pieces of their content and run them through the spreadsheet you’ve created for auditing your own content. Look at what works well and what your competitors can improve about the presentation and design of their content, and you’ll be able to find more ways to make your own content stand out.
Step Seven: Identify Changes to be Made
In running through your content, you’ll likely come across various pieces that need to be improved. Even if there aren’t any huge glaring errors or broken pieces that need fixing, there will still be plenty of elements that can be tweaked to get more out of your content.
The next step is fixing it.
In your spreadsheet, you should now have a variety of pieces rated between 1 to 5 (or A to D, depending on the scale you prefer). As you were going through the content, you made notes about ways of improving them.
This is a big step, obviously. Sometimes changing a piece of content means tweaking its URL slightly. Sometimes it can mean rewriting the content entirely. Sometimes you’ll need to entirely ditch a piece of content and start over. It can be hard to bring yourself to do this, but it’ll make your content marketing campaign far better as a result.
No matter how good your content already is, I’d recommend trying to find at least one element of each piece of content that can be improved or altered. There will always be something that can be improved, and you never know what discoveries you’ll make about the effectiveness of your content by making tiny changes, just to see what happens.
Tweaking Through WordPress
Some things can be fixed relatively easily.
As I said earlier, if you’re using WordPress, the tool has a big list of all your published content, and an easy system for going through and making changes.
One aspect of your content audit should be tackling the little bits and pieces that can be tidied up relatively quickly in WordPress.
If you’ve got a plugin like Yoast SEO in WordPress, you can easily edit each article’s:
- URL
- Keywords
- SEO title
- Meta description
- Image alt tags
Running through these SEO steps doesn’t really need to be noted in your spreadsheet – you should be making edits to every piece of content on your list anyway, so stopping for half a second to check over these data fields is a pretty tiny effort.
That said, while there’s not much effort that needs to be taken to clean up some of these elements, their cumulative effect can help give your entire content campaign an extra layer of polish.
Drastic Overhauls
While some elements of your content can be quickly and easily edited, some things are going to take a little longer. And at this point in the process, you should have a clear idea of what pieces of content need work, and which ones are the most seriously in need of being altered.
When making these changes, it’s important to keep in mind the purpose of the content, and what it’s designed to achieve. Throughout the process of reworking content, focus on making sure the new version of the content is inspired by:
- Your content marketing strategy
- Your existing goals and KPIs
- Your company’s target audience profiles
- The tone and style that your other pieces of content follow
- The quality and design of existing pieces of content that have ranked highly throughout your audit
- Your analysis of your competitors’ content
Work to make each piece of content stand up as a high quality example of your work.
Obviously, this can take a lot of time and effort, so it’s up to you how much you prioritize quality. Just remember: the higher the quality of your content, the more effective it will be at drawing visitors to your website and potential clients to your business. After all, that’s the whole point of having a content audit.
Keeping Things Tidy
Once your content is nicely polished up, you can pat yourself on the back and call your audit finished.
Now the only important thing is to make sure you carry the lessons you’ve learned into future content.
Ideally, you should be auditing your site semi-regularly, especially if you’ve got a lot of content on your site that could potentially become out of date or require a facelift. By continuously producing high quality, thoughtfully designed content, though, you can avoid having too much of a nightmare to deal with during your next audit.
So make sure that all your future content abides by the rules you used during your audit, and make sure to keep your target audience and goals in mind when designing all future work. The time invested will pay dividends in the end.
Do you conduct regular content audits? If so, share your best tips and tricks by leaving a comment below:
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