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What is a content audit?

A content audit is an inventory and analysis of your organization’s existing piece of content according to your chosen criteria: the criteria related to the content you want to audit and the data you want to analyze. Content audit helps in ensuring that your overall content is organized. It can be made further organized by having a content audit spreadsheet.

Content audits can be time-consuming and labor-intensive, but they are essential for creating high-quality content, building brand and reputation, and improving the overall performance of your team. Let’s talk about each in detail.

Inform your team about the content marketing strategy

While your content strategy needs to use regular reports to keep things going, auditing can help you get more comprehensive information, identify where adjustments need to be made, and drill down on specific issues. You can solve it or optimize a specific problem. A spreadsheet for this purpose would be most helpful, along with content audit tools. Having an SEO content audit is a must.

Perform a content audit to build up your reputation and brand name

All the content you present to your audience tells them something. Do you want to be told that you are late, careless, or incompetent on time? Your industry, your products and services, and your brand are constantly evolving and you need to stay on top. Content management plays a crucial role here.

Improve output organization with a content audit tool

Comprehensive content reviews are used to create and maintain your organization’s content library. And the shared content library is a gold mine.

Usually, for a website content audit, there are 2 types; Informational and qualitative. We will see in detail about them here.

Informational audit/quantitative audit with content data

Useful data provides all the objective facts about the checked content. Some of this needs to be retrieved manually, but website plugins and tools can also export the data. This audit is a list of all the content you have on your site and where it is located. It provides basic content performance data and helps you easily determine which websites to keep, which to clean up, and which to kill.

This allows you to do content reviews of the most comprehensive insights with minimal effort. However, it does not give insight into the strategic or brand equity of the content. Quantitative content inventory displays all the content on your website, much like store inventory.  Conducting an SEO audit will be immensely helpful. You can improve your content with the help of various content audit tools

Qualitative website content audit

This does two great things for you, along with helping you design your content goals.

• Benchmark your content against industry best practices to understand your content’s performance better.
• Looking at your content from a strategic business perspective gives you valuable and detailed insights into how your content is aligned with your strategic goals.

The only downside is that it requires more time, effort, and intelligence. Qualitative audits help you prioritize your content efforts, find low-quality content to kill or clean up, and find bright spots to learn. It also helps ensure that your content meets your target audience’s needs and business goals. Understand the content type that appeals to your audience, and attract the readers with your meta description. The performance of your content can be measured here.

What to include in website content audit template checklist

• Organic Page View: The number of users who viewed this page from search engines.
• Bounce rate: Percentage of visitors who left the page without displaying any more pages.
• Internal Links: Check the number of internal links, or whether they are broken or can be replaced with new content.
• Page load speed: This metric can include technical SEO, but you can make adjustments at the content level.
• Page Stay Time: This metric helps determine if something on the page isn’t working, is offensive, or the content doesn’t match the intent of the keyword.
• Conversions: This is a good indicator for landing page content audits, as conversions can mean a lot in Google Analytics. However, setting goals in Google Analytics can be helpful.
• Conversion rate: It is necessary to accurately grasp the high-performance content as well as the conversion rate. In addition, UX can affect conversion rates.
• Bounce rate: This data point is useful for many types of content reviews. However, keep in mind that a high bounce rate is not always bad. Reasonable page times and high bounce rate blog posts may indicate that you are providing the exact information your searchers were looking for.
• Exit Rate: The termination rate indicates the number of times this page was last accessed in a session.

There are also sales indicators such as CPA, generated leads, cultivated leads, contracts, ROI, etc.,

Other key factors for analysis to run a content audit

• Broken?: This is a “yes” or “no” drop-down menu that just asks “Is this site working?” If the page doesn’t load, you don’t see the embedded content that you should see, or if the page has broken links, mark Yes and add more details to the Notes column.
• Findability: How easy is it to find your page on a scale of 1-5 ( Think of search optimization, onsite search and navigation.
• Ease of use: Can you quickly understand what your site is and what you get from it? Is the page easy to scan and understand? Can good headlines, subheadings, bullets, and visuals guide your visitors? Evaluate consumption on a scale of 1-5.
• Practicality: Do you know what to do next, or is the page a dead end? What is the conversion rate of the page? Make sure your page helps visitors know what to do (or can) next. Evaluate this again on a scale of 1-5.
• Audience: Enter your business-specific audience (prospects, employees, media, and so on) in the drop-down menu and select the audience that this content item is most relevant to.
• Industry: If you want to target your content by industry, enter the industry you want in this drop-down list (you can also select General, Other, or Not Applicable). Select the industry audience for your content.
• Services: This could be you, a product, or any other service. But basically, the audience wants to know what this content is, or what it is meant to be.
• Important Themes: If you have a specific theme or important message for which you want to adjust all your content, you know that the current content is stacked.
• Goal Achievement Process: Where is this content best suited for the Goal Achievement Process or the Buyer’s Journey? Template selection provides TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU (top, center, and bottom of the goal-achieving process), but you can refine this as needed to map to your content marketing efforts.
• Purpose: What is the purpose of brand marketing for this content? Think about reputation/brand building, sales promotion, demand generation, employee engagement, and more. Make your content stand out from the rest of the web pages.

Essentially, running an audit helps you determine engaging content.

Things to remember before beginning to conduct a content audit of your website

• Of course, content checks can quickly become black holes. The possibilities and indicators to collect are endless. Also, in most cases, you can find additional metrics to collect at the start. Therefore, ensure you have a clear purpose so you can collect only what you need. Perform a content audit and find the content gaps.
• Content reviews do not replace regular reports. Audits are usually comprehensive and are conducted quarterly or yearly (except as necessary to fix a particular problem). Regular reports are needed to ensure that your content meets KPIs and identifies long-term patterns.
• Minimize open cells, especially for large audits. This makes it easy to organize and sort your data the way you like it. We recommend that you use certain options to create the dropdown feature, especially if multiple people are reviewing the same sheet.
• Ensure that your content audit process assesses your existing content assets to identify content that would appeal better to your audience. Creating a content calendar is considered to be helpful too.

Refer to this link for a free template website content audit template!