The ultimate guide to content marketing audit

What is a content audit and why you should do it frequently

A content marketing audit is an analysis of a company's existing content marketing efforts. It examines the effectiveness of the content in achieving business objectives, identifies areas for improvement, and provides recommendations for changes.

The audit should provide an in-depth analysis of the content and suggest strategies to increase its relevance and impact. The audit should also identify areas where content can be created or improved, or where existing content can be optimized to better meet the company's goals. Frequent, well-conducted content audits can help you identify content that needs to be changed, deleted or repurposed into other formats.

What you want to learn from this audit

The number of pieces of content you have. This will allow you to get an idea of how deep your site is. The deeper the site, the better and more complete the experience for the visitor. This can also be an indication of how well you have been getting across your message.

The engagement rate of your content. You want this to be as high as possible. The easiest way to do this is to have good, valuable, and original content. To be able to know this you need to have some tracking mechanisms in place. To find out your engagement rate you will need to be looking at things like: visits, page views, time on site, and bounce rate. These are all good things to have in an analytics tool.

To get an idea of the amount of content you have you will need to look at your social media pages. Social media is a good indicator of the amount of content you have. If you are getting a lot of engagement on social media, you are likely producing a lot of content.

To get more accurate information you could use tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs. These tools will give you a list of all the pages on your website including blog posts, pages, and other things.

5 steps for a deep audit of your content

1. Set your objectives and metrics

To do a content audit successfully, you need to have specific goals in mind. These might include learning about what content is popular on your site, understanding what your audience is interested in, or improving the quality of your content. To succeed in your business, you need to have clear goals. What content is most engaging for your visitors, and what content is most useful to your audience? What are the outcomes you want to achieve?This information can help you create more effective content for your website.

There are different types of metrics that can help you measure the success of your content marketing. Some of these metrics include things like organic traffic, backlinks, and keyword rankings. Other metrics focus on how people are using your site, such as how long they stay on it and how many times they bounce. And finally, there are metrics that measure how people are reacting to your content, such as the number of likes and shares it gets. Which kind of content gets the most likes, shares, and comments? We want to make sure that our visitors have the best possible experience when visiting our website. This means finding pages that are easy to use and full of helpful information.

We also want to make sure that the content we provide is the most effective at generating leads. Finally, we want to make sure that the different content types we use are best suited for different stages of the buyer's journey.

To reach your goals, you need to figure out what metrics will track your progress. This information can help you stay on track. Metrics that measure how well a website is doing in terms of attracting organic traffic, improving its online presence through links and keywords are called SEO metrics. Behavior metrics focus on how many people visit a site, how long they stay, and what kind of actions they take (such as clicking on a link or filling out a form).

Engagement metrics gauge how much interest people show in the site, such as the number of likes, shares, and comments. Finally, sales metrics track how many sales are made through the website, either through lead generation or actual sales.

2. Inventory

We will start by looking at pages that have high SEO potential and see what we can do to help them rank higher. You can review your own content, such as blog posts, news articles, educational materials, product descriptions, and landing pages, or your published materials. You can also look at different types of content, such as videos, PDFs, and interactive content, like quizzes, tests, and games. This can help you check the accuracy of the text on your website.

Collect all the URLs of the web pages you want to analyze. To get the most out of your content, you can use a tool like Semrush Content Audit. This will help you identify where your content is weak and where you can improve it. The tool can audit your content and tell you how popular it is, based on your sitemap data.

You can look at a specific part of your domain, such as the subfolder /blog. This will help you keep track of all the pages on your website. Having a sitemap can help you find all of the pages on your website and make sure they're in the right order. This makes it easier for search engines to find your pages and help you find what you're looking for. There are many different sitemap generators and free WordPress plugins available to help create and manage your website's sitemap.

3. Pick and analyze the information

Recovering data from multiple sources can be a time-consuming process. You may have to do this manually, which can be tedious. A content audit tool can help you save time by automatically collecting data that is important to your goals. The Semrush Content Audit tool helps you check the quality of your website's content. It provides data such as social shares and backlinks, as well as information about the authors and length of each page's content.

By connecting your Google Analytics and Google Search Console accounts, you'll be able to get more in-depth and broad data about your website. Moreover, you'll be able to see additional information about each URL, including how many sessions it has had, how long people stay on the page, how many pages they view, and how often they leave the site. To see how well your guest posts or other content is performing, you can use the Post Tracking tool. The tool monitors the keyword rankings, social shares, backlinks, and referral traffic for articles every day.

4. Design your plan

After checking on your content, you need to set out a plan to improve it. Your action plan should be based on your objectives, and the conclusions that you have drawn from the previous analysis. Think about your priorities before taking any action plan for each URL, refer back to the goals you set out in step 1. Every investment in your content plan should align with a business goal. Add a priority column to your spreadsheet after you've weighed up the resources required against the expected results.

Once your priority list is sorted, create an action plan for each piece of content. Here are some tips to include in your website content audit:

• Delete, Reuse or Rewrite your content
• Expand /Refresh /Restructure your content
• Update your CTAs
• Add images and videos
• Optimize your interlinking

5. Maintain your content marketing strategy

When doing a website content audit, it's important to keep in mind your long-term goals. If you keep track of what you're doing well and what you're not doing well, you can adjust your content strategy to make it more appealing to your target audiences. This can help you get more people to see it, and it might even lead to higher conversion rates. Some things that work for you may not work for others, so it's important to take note of what works for you and to keep doing so.

What could you do to make your content more successful? Look at your content that isn't as popular and see what other websites are doing that is similar and helpful. This could give you some ideas on how to improve your content.

Reviewing your content marketing strategy is important so that you can make sure that your marketing activities still align with your company's goals. If your industry changes often, you'll need to set up review periods more often, like every two weeks, once a month, or every quarter. You have to keep up with the changes and find new ways to keep your audience engaged.

Always be prepared to make changes to your plans as times change. This is important so that you can stay successful over the long term. Regularly checking your website to see if changes you've made are working is a good way to ensure your business is headed in the right direction.

Conclusion

Have you ever done a content audit? What were your actions and results? What did you learn while you were auditing? We'd like to hear everything about it in the comments. Thanks for reading!