While creating and disseminating new content is the most logical approach to achieving your content marketing objectives, this approach often leads to existing content needing to be noticed and utilized.
Updating and repurposing existing content can be a highly effective content marketing strategy, and conducting regular, thorough content audits can help you identify content that can be enhanced or transformed into different formats.
What is a Content Audit?
A content audit is a methodical examination and evaluation of all the content on your website. The primary goal is to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your content strategy and development process and adjust your content plan to align with your current marketing objectives. Content audits can benefit businesses of all sizes, from small enterprises to large corporations.
In this guide, we’ll outline the five crucial steps for auditing your content:
Step 1: Establish Your Goals and Metrics
Since content audits can be complex and time-consuming, it is crucial to start with well-defined objectives to ensure a successful outcome.
Begin by considering your business objectives. What advantages can a content audit provide? What outcomes do you hope to accomplish?
Here are some samples of goals you can set for your website content audit:
Goal 1: Enhance Your SEO Results
Identify web pages with high SEO potential for top 10 rankings;
Determine which content needs to be updated or removed from your website, and review and optimize your internal linking.
Goal 2: Boost Audience Engagement
Identify the most engaging content types for your audience;
Discover the topics that interest your visitors, and determine the content that generates the most social engagement.
Goal 3: Increase Conversion Rates
Determine pages that offer the optimal user experience for your visitors, pinpoint content that yields the highest number of leads, and identify the most effective content forms for each phase of the buyer’s journey.
After establishing your objectives, align them with pertinent content metrics. Content marketing metrics can generally be classified into four categories:
- SEO metrics: Organic traffic, keyword rankings, backlinks, dwell time, etc.
- User behavior metrics: Pageviews, bounce rate, average session duration, etc.
- Engagement metrics: Likes, shares, comments, mentions, etc.
- Sales metrics: Number of leads, conversion rates, ROI, etc.
For example, if you want to determine the most popular topics and create more content within them, analyze user behavior and engagement metrics. If your focus is on improving SEO performance, examine the number of backlinks and analyze your search engine rankings.
Discover a comprehensive list of content metrics that you can apply to your content, as well as tools that can be used for measurement.
Step 2: Inventory Your Content
Before assembling an inventory of URLs and metrics, decide which content types you want to review. You may audit your internal content, such as blog posts, educational materials, news, product descriptions, landing pages, or your external publications. You can also consider other content types, such as videos, PDFs, or interactive content like quizzes, tests, and games.
In this guide, the focus is on conducting an audit of textual content published on your website.
Gather Your URLs
Begin your inventory by collecting all the URLs of the web pages you want to analyze.
The most efficient way to obtain these is by using an online content audit tool like Semrush Content Audit. This tool can swiftly audit your content based on your sitemap data, providing you with a list of URLs and their corresponding metrics. You can also analyze specific sections of your domain, such as the /blog subfolder.
If your website lacks a sitemap, utilize a sitemap generator tool to produce one. A sitemap is advantageous for a content audit and simplifies the process for search engines to understand your website’s structure and find crucial pages.
Consult this blog post to discover leading sitemap generators and complimentary WordPress plugins for sitemaps. After finishing this step, remember to submit your sitemap to Google Search Console.
Organize Your Content
After gathering your URLs, use an online tool or a spreadsheet to sort them according to different criteria and collaborate with your team members.
You can categorize your content by:
- Buyer’s journey stage (consideration, awareness, decision)
- Content type (blog post, manual, landing page, product description)
- Content format (images/video present, text only, with/without call-to-action)
- Word count
- Publication date or last modification date
- Content hub (or cluster)
- Author (if your website has multiple writers)
It’s also helpful to gather metadata (title, meta description, h1) for each piece of content so that you can review and update all metadata in one location.
Lastly, create columns with your metrics to collect data for each web page.
Step 3: Gather and Examine Data
Collecting data can be complex and time-intensive, as it requires extracting information from multiple sources and manually incorporating it into your spreadsheet. To streamline this process, utilize a content audit tool that automatically compiles data according to your objectives and metrics.
The Semrush Content Audit tool evaluates your website content, providing an array of data points such as social shares from Facebook and Twitter, metadata, backlinks, content authors, and content length for each URL.
By connecting your Google Analytics and Search Console accounts, you can expand and enhance your data. This enables you to access additional metrics for each URL, including sessions, average session time, page views, average time on the page, search queries, and bounce rate.
You can toggle between Sessions and Pageviews data for each page with a single click.
To gather performance metrics for your guest posts or content published on third-party websites, use the Post Tracking tool. This tool monitors articles’ keyword rankings, shares, backlinks, and referral traffic daily.
If you wish to capture a more extensive range of data, consider using these analytics tools for content auditing:
- Google Analytics helps you understand which content performs best regarding traffic, engagement, and conversion rates. It also enables you to evaluate your content’s effectiveness in meeting your marketing and business goals.
- Semrush Position Tracking lets you track your rankings for target keywords. This tool can assist you in finding content with strong SEO potential (for example, web pages that previously ranked in the top 5 or those ranking close to top positions). By updating these pages, you can quickly improve your search engine rankings.
- ContentWRX Audit provides information about file types, metadata, and page-level details, including each page’s images, documents, videos, and screenshots. You can also sort your results and export data for offline analysis.
- Content Square helps you examine user behavior to determine what is and isn’t working on your web page and perform a customer journey analysis. You can evaluate your page elements in terms of performance, impact, and usability to identify areas for future updates.
- Semrush Site Audit is useful if one of your primary audit goals is to improve your rankings, as it allows you to detect technical issues on your website.
Examine your content metrics holistically to gain a clear understanding of your site’s content status.
For instance, your web page might attract significant traffic but have a high bounce rate and low session time. This indicates that users are interested in your topic, but the content needs to provide what they want. In this case, you must evaluate various elements of your content to determine why users are leaving your web page. The issue could be related to the relevance of your content to titles, CTAs, or page load time.
Also, consider the various stages of the buyer’s journey. Your ‘Awareness’ content may entice more traffic but have a lower conversion rate. Your ‘Consideration’ content may obtain less traffic but generate more leads, and so on.
Evaluate Your Content Assets
Using the data and metrics you’ve collected, evaluate each part of the content according to your goals and allocate one of the following statuses:
Keep
If your content performs well and stays relevant, you don’t need to update it. Consider reusing this content as part of your current content marketing strategy.
Examples: Evergreen content, success stories, FAQs, and general business information.
Update
The content audit may reveal web pages that could be performing better. You might also find content with outdated information that requires revision. Review this content and determine how to make it more effective.
Examples: Blog posts with statistics, crucial articles with outdated information, and low-traffic or low-conversion content.
Delete
If you cannot improve a piece of content, or updating it would consume too many resources, removing it from your website may be a suitable option. You may also have old seasonal marketing campaigns that are no longer necessary.
Examples: Content related to specific events or activities, information about out-of-stock products, duplicate content, and old campaigns.
Incorporate a new ‘Status’ column into your content audit spreadsheet to monitor your action plan effectively.
With the Content Audit tool, you can automatically categorize your content for in-depth analysis and implement the required steps:
Revise or eliminate older articles published over 24 months ago with minimal or no recent views
- Refresh outdated pages with some recent traffic to boost their rankings
- Promptly assess new pages with more than 150 views in the past month, considering ways to optimize them
- Detect subpar content, such as brief articles with fewer than 200 words that necessitate action.
Step 4: Develop an Action Plan
Once you have evaluated your content, you need to formulate a plan to enhance it. Your action plan should be grounded in your objectives and the insights gained from your analysis.
Prioritize Your Actions
Before creating an action plan for each URL, refer to the goal(s) you established in Step 1. Every investment in your content plan should align with a business objective.
Next, prioritize your actions based on the feasibility of your business goals and the required effort. For example, when aiming to improve SEO results:
- Actions such as adding a few links to an article may demand minimal effort and yield significant results
- Actions like developing a comprehensive e-book may require substantial work but produce minimal results
Incorporate a priority column in your spreadsheet after weighing the required resources against the expected results.
With your priority list organized, develop an action plan for each content piece. Here are some useful recommendations to incorporate into your website content audit workflow for individual pages:
- Repurpose your content: Think about combining various content pieces to produce a new one or release it in an alternate format (e-book, infographics, slides, etc.).
- Rewrite your content: If certain blog posts underperform, consider rewriting them with updated examples, advice, and practical information.
- Expand your content: Contemplate adding more depth to your existing articles. According to our research, long reads of 3,000+ words gain 3x more traffic, 4x more shares, and 3.5x more backlinks than average-length articles.
- Update your content: At times, you don’t need to rewrite your article; incorporating pertinent information (e.g., current statistics, trends, or product details) is enough.
- Arrange your content: A clear and logical structure with relevant H2 and H3 tags can assist users and bots in better comprehending your content, thereby increasing your traffic. Furthermore, well-structured how-to articles are more likely to rank for Featured Snippets.
- Refresh your CTAs: Update banners on your blog or other web pages. Swap them with relevant offers to rejuvenate your content marketing funnel and boost your conversion rates.
- Integrate videos: 87% of video marketers surveyed by Wyzowl stated that including video content increases website traffic. Additionally, 81% said that users spend more time on web pages with video content.
- Add images: Pictures can make your content more engaging and attract more traffic to your site from Google Images. Combining videos and images on a web page enhances the chances of appearing in SERP features.
- Optimize metadata: Experiment with rewriting your titles, meta descriptions, and H1 tags. Use different keywords to make them more natural and attractive to users and search engines.
- Enhance internal linking: Insert links to new articles in blog posts covering related subjects. This can improve your website organization and decrease your bounce rate. You can also optimize internal linking based on the buyer’s journey: Awareness content should connect to Consideration articles, and these articles should link to Decision content, not the other way around.
Employ 301 redirects for web pages that have been removed from your website. This permits you to avoid “not found” pages and enhances user experience.
Inform Google about your content modifications using Google Search Console. The URL Inspection tool within Search Console enables you to submit recently revised web pages to Google’s index.
To facilitate collaboration after a content audit, you can use the ‘Workflow’ functionality in Content Audit—add a task or store current metric data for each URL.
The article then moves into the ‘In Progress’ workflow status, allowing you to monitor metric changes and assess your progress directly within the tool.
Step 5: Modify Your Content Marketing Approach
While conducting a website content audit, always consider your long-term marketing strategy. By monitoring your successes and shortcomings, you can adapt your content approach to better connect with your target audience, enhance organic reach, and boost conversion rates.
Please take note of what works and build upon it. Examine your least successful content and compare it to similar successful content from competitors to identify areas for improvement.
Regularly reviewing your content marketing strategy is essential, ideally at least once a year, to ensure your tactics and activities align with your company’s goals. If your industry experiences frequent changes, you may need to schedule more frequent reviews, such as monthly or quarterly. Staying current with these changes and discovering innovative ways to continue engaging your audience is crucial.
Keep in mind that what works today may not work tomorrow, so constant adjustments should be part of your plan. Performing content audits at least twice a year is an excellent way to determine if your modifications and overall focus benefit your business.
See also: Why Agency Transparency With Clients Is Necessary?
Content Audit FAQs
What Is a Content Audit?
A content audit is an extensive review of all the content on your website, including text, images, videos, and other multimedia elements.
The purpose of a content audit will depend on your goals. Common objectives include:
- Assessing the efficiency and pertinence of online content
- Pinpointing opportunities for enhancement
- Guiding the formulation of a comprehensive content approach
What Steps Are Involved in a Content Audit?
Typical steps in conducting a content audit include:
- Identifying the pages on the website to be included in the audit
- Collecting information on page performance, including keyword rankings, page views, bounce rates, and conversion rates
- Evaluating each piece of content’s compliance with SEO and content marketing guidelines
- Examining the data and highlighting areas that need enhancement
- Formulating a strategy to update and optimize the website’s content
Why Are Content Audits Necessary?
Content audits help you comprehend your content’s performance, identify gaps in your content offerings, and make informed decisions on enhancing your content to achieve your business goals.
Content audits also assist in identifying and removing duplicate or outdated content, which can boost your website’s SEO performance.
How Frequently Should I Do a Content Audit?
You must conduct content audits regularly. The frequency will depend on your website’s size and complexity, as well as how often you publish new content and update existing content.
A general guideline is to conduct a content audit at least once a year. However, for larger or rapidly evolving websites, you should audit your content more frequently.
Which Metrics Are Essential for Assessing My Website Content's Performance?
Key performance indicators like page views, bounce rates, conversion rates, time spent on a page, targeted keyword rankings, social media interactions, and more offer crucial insights into the performance of a content piece on a website.
However, the specific metrics you select should align with your website or business goals.
For instance, if your primary objective is to increase sales, measuring page views might provide little insight into content performance. In such a case, conversion rates might offer more relevant information.
How Do I Examine the Data I Gather During a Content Audit?
Find patterns and trends by comparing your chosen metrics for the various content assets being audited.
Also, look for outliers. For instance, do some of your blog posts have significantly higher page views than others? Try to understand why that might be and take notes on your findings.
How Do I Know Which Pages on My Website Need to Be Audited?
Primarily, select pages for the audit based on their importance to your website’s goals. Additionally, consider pages that last updated a long time ago or pages experiencing a downward trend in performance.
How Can I Ensure My Website Content Remains Current and Relevant?
The most effective way to keep your content up-to-date and relevant is by conducting regular content audits and using the results to update pages that require attention.
Which Tools Can I Use to Conduct a Content Audit?
Various tools can aid you in completing a content audit, including website crawlers, analytics tools, and spreadsheet software.
Some popular content audit tools include:
- Semrush’s Content Audit tool
- Google Analytics
- Google Search Console
- Excel or Google Sheets
How Can I Arrange and Showcase the Results of a Content Audit?
The arrangement of content audit findings may vary depending on the particular goals and target audience of the audit.
A popular method involves constructing a spreadsheet that lists all pages examined during the audit. Document crucial metrics such as page views and bounce rates, and associate each page with qualitative evaluations of the content’s pertinence, quality, and user interaction.
Display your audit findings in a report or presentation style, using visual elements like charts and graphs to convey essential insights in a comprehensible way.
How Can I Keep the Improvements Made Through a Content Audit?
After implementing improvements based on your content audit findings, you’ll likely see positive results. However, these results may fade over time.
To maintain a positive trajectory, conduct routine content audits. This will help you continually enhance your content, ensuring it remains up-to-date and relevant and, ideally, continues to perform well.
How Do I Utilize the Results of a Content Audit to Inform My Content Strategy?
Focus on what is performing well and update the content that needs to be added.
Your content audit will reveal well-performing and underperforming content, providing immediate guidance for your content strategy: follow what works.
For instance, if your content audit shows that short “how-to” guides perform better than other content types, create more how-to content. If your long-form blog articles are underperforming, place them in the queue for updates.
What Are The Ways to Engage Diverse Stakeholders in the Content Audit Procedure?
Start by recognizing the unique content requirements and objectives of various stakeholders, including marketing, sales, and product teams. Request their input on the audit discoveries and work together to establish a content strategy based on the audit outcomes.
What Are The Steps to Evaluate The Performance of Non-text Content During a Content Audit?
Since the metrics used to assess written content may not be applicable to non-written content such as videos and images, it is important to select metrics that are relevant to the specific content type being audited. For instance, video completion rates for videos, social shares for images, and so on. Using these appropriate metrics, evaluate the non-text content accordingly.
How Can I Determine The SEO Performance of My Website's Content While Conducting a Content Audit?
Conducting a content audit provides a great opportunity to evaluate the SEO performance of each page on your website. You can utilize tools such as Google Search Console and Semrush to measure the performance of each audited page. Consider metrics such as organic traffic (traffic from search engines), the keywords that the pages rank for, the pages’ ranking positions for relevant and important keywords, and user experience metrics such as Core Web Vitals that are valued by Google.
What Are The Ways to Assess the SEO Effectiveness of Website Content During a Content Audit?
Conducting a content audit provides an excellent opportunity to evaluate the SEO performance of each page on your website individually. Tools like Google Search Console and Semrush can be used to assess each audited page’s performance using metrics such as organic traffic (traffic from search engines), the keywords that the pages rank for, the ranking positions of the pages for relevant and significant keywords, and user experience metrics such as Core Web Vitals that Google values.
To initiate the content audit process for SEO performance, you can sign up for a free Semrush account.
What is The Method for Evaluating The User Experience of Website Content During a Content Audit?
You can evaluate the user experience (UX) of your web content using metrics such as:
- Page speed
- Bounce rate
- Time on page
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
- First Input Delay (FID)
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
If feasible, consider conducting user testing to obtain qualitative data on the user experience (UX) of your website content during the content audit process.
Website Content Audit Checklist
Here’s a brief summary of how to conduct a website content audit, which can be used as a cheat sheet:
- Establish clear business objectives for your content audit, such as improving SEO outcomes, audience engagement, or conversion rates. Correlate them with pertinent content metrics, e.g., organic traffic, bounce rate, shares, and ROI.
- Gather URLs of your content and categorize them by buyer’s journey stages, content type, author, and other categories that are essential to you.
- Gather data on the performance of your content assets using analytics tools. Evaluate your content assets using specific metrics and designate them as “Keep,” “Update,” or “Delete.”
- Prioritize your actions based on the business objectives determined in the first step and develop an action plan for each content asset.
- Adjust your content strategy at least once a year based on the audit findings.
By following these steps, you will be able to conduct a comprehensive content audit that will help you identify areas of improvement, make data-driven decisions about your content strategy, and, ultimately, enhance the overall performance of your website’s content.
Regular content audits ensure that your content remains up-to-date, relevant, and engaging, which is crucial for achieving your business goals.
Read Next: How Many Keywords Should You Focus On When Doing SEO?
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