Most of the activities in B2B marketing produces immediate results. But long sales cycles indicate that it may take months for your work to positively affect your business. Content Audit is one such exercise that helps in tracking down and organizing all the content produced by your company.
What is content audit?
Content audit is the foundation of content strategy that governs content marketing. Audit helps in determining if the digital content is relevant to the customers and goals of the company. It helps in answering the following questions:
- Is your content accurate and consistent?
- Is it optimized for search?
- Does it speak in the voice of the organization?
- Are the tools and software, such as the content management system up to the task of handling it?
What is the purpose of content audit?
The aim of content audit is to put together listing of the website’s content in a content audit tool or in a large spreadsheet. The long list of content will be useful at various stages of the website redesign project. Content Audit tells the whole story, provides qualitative analysis of your website’s posts, pages and more. Audit helps in finding optimization drawbacks which you can correct, but it also provides insight about the user experience.
Key steps to perform a successful audit of your website:
Content audit is all about making an inventory of all search engine indexed content and follows the given metrics and decide what action needs to be taken regarding the various pieces and page of content.
- Gather all your data: First open and create an audit spreadsheet. One also needs to keep the work neat and tidy. Later, compile all the sitemaps and internal databases. Gather them separately, and later organize them all in a single file.
- Use more metrics and information: Consider and use more metrics than you are accustomed to, and the one’s apart that you already get from crawlers. The time-on-site and pages-per-visit is also very important. Any result should be taken with a pinch of salt, as they can point out to more than one situation.
- Use a dash board: After gathering all the required content audit data, it’s time to organize all the information in a dashboard. If the site is small, then one can do it manually, but if its larger, one should use a screaming frog to auto generate a list of your URLs.
- Perform the content audit: Once you have added all the information down in the dashboard, begin to perform the content audit on it. Later, check what content can draw penalties, and see what needs rewriting, meta descriptions, page visits, last updated page, page bounce, page entries and average time spent on page etc.
- Get into action mode: After completing your content audit, it’s time to dwell dip into the gathered data, draw conclusions, and gain actions. Then, later, remove the low-quality content pages, go for promotion and create more trending content pieces.
Benefits of a website content audit
- Determines problems in the website content: Once you review your content assets, you can also begin to address the performance issues, improve your site visibility and fix the broken issues. Fixes will make your site more appealing to the new and returning visitors.
- Pinpoints site’s content gaps: Audit also pinpoints areas where the site lacks the information your audience is seeking. Highlighting the site’s content gaps, can help you to become more equipped to create new content, that adds value to the brand and the site in general.
- Improves information structure: A website with a strong content is not helpful if it is not visible. Hence, analytics data, including the search terms determine how to make your most effective content easy to search by audience as well as search engines.
Content Audit is needed when you want to have complete idea regarding the content assets, where gaps need to be filled and even the usefulness. Content Audit is an opportunity to align your content marketing processes. If you want your content to perform, you should run a content audit from time to time.