Content Auditing 101
Doing a content audit is important especially if you have done a lot of different content marketing strategies over a period of time.
Content auditing is basically checking and analyzing all forms of content on a website to determine whether they have been performing well or not. Sometimes this can also include social media content or any other content for which your business is responsible.
Moreover, a content audit gives you an idea which ones to keep or consolidate, improve, or delete. It essentially tells you if the content you have created is still relevant to your goals and your customers’ needs.
Why perform a content audit
Content auditing is a tedious and painstaking process. However, its importance is hard to deny.
As mentioned earlier, a content audit assesses the relevance of every content on your website. Apart from that, it can also tell you:
- if your content is optimized for search,
- which page/s on your website are visited the most and how you can further use them to your advantage, and
- identify other content marketing opportunities.
This will help give your content strategy a more solid or a new direction. If your hand is tied with other more important tasks relating to the running of your business, you should consider outsourcing virtual assistance. Hire a part-time virtual assistant and ask him/her to prepare a content audit report for you.
How to do a content audit
- Make an inventory of all your content.
List all the content you have published on a spreadsheet. It would save you a lot of time if you already have a record of all your content prior to the audit. If not, you could export the URLs from your internal database or use tools like crawlers to pull up URLs from your website.
Most crawlers can also provide other data aside from the URLs including titles, meta descriptions, and tags. Additionally, you might want to manually add a column for content classification to easily know the categories or types of content that you have created so far.
- Create a checklist of requirements that your content should meet.
You can do this by adding columns to your content audit spreadsheet. On these columns, you could mark whether a content is indexed or not or if it is a duplicate. You should also have a column indicating traffic from organic search, typically over a 90-day period. Other things that should be included in your metrics are conversions, page speed, internal and external links, etc.
- Identify the issues to be prioritized.
Lastly, create a column where you can note actions to be done on each content based on the metrics above. Does your content need to be improved or updated? Should you retain it? Will removing it be the best thing to do?
It sounds like a lot of work, but content auditing must be done in order to maintain or improve your website ranking in Google. Any issue with regards to your content should be dealt with to avoid any penalty from Google.
