How To Perform A Content Audit in 2023

How To Perform A Content Audit in 2023

Have you ever looked back into the time capsule of your company’s content? Do you have a way to do so without scrolling down in your feeds forever? If your answer is no, we would strongly recommend that you consider a content audit. A content audit can help you identify, improve and repurpose content that’s previously been published. It’s the process of collecting and analyzing all your creative assets on your website, landing pages, blog posts and social media. It’s your creative inventory that shows you where the strengths and weaknesses are in your current content marketing goals. Other great benefits of conducting a content audit for your company are…

  • Helps to identify areas for content repurposing 

  • Identifies best content that you can use for promotional materials 

  • Gives you an inside look on your audience

  • Shows you insight to all your content’s performance for further insight

  • Improves organic search performance

  • Helps identify which topics your audience likes best

  • Eliminates repetitive content or content that no longer fits with your brand

So before you get your creative team working on next year’s content, consider your marketing goals and resist the impulse to instead create an audit that will help you achieve your content marketing goals for the next year. Here’s a step by step on how to perform a content audit!

Step 1: Define Your Goals and Metrics

If you’re a veteran to our blog, you’ll know that we always recommend determining your goals with a marketing plan and strategy first. The plan should include audience engagement, conversion and bounce rates, shares, SEO results and ROI. If you’re new here, please take a look at our blogs about creating a marketing strategy first before performing your content audit.

Step 2: Take an Inventory of Your Content

In a spreadsheet, you’ll want to collect the links to all of your content and sort them by either content type or your own strategy’s categories like awareness and promotion. Make sure to catalog items in your spreadsheet as:

  • Title 

  • Link

  • Word count

  • Author

  • Date

  • Content Type

  • Format

  • Meta description 

  • Header one 

This way you can look and update all your content in one place.

Step 3: Collect and Analyze Data

Now it’s time to see how well each piece has performed! You’ll do this with the help of analytics tools such as Google Analytics. Make sure to add the metrics described in your marketing plan to each piece of content. These analytics can include session, average session duration, average time on page and bounce rate. 

Step 4: Assess and Update Your Content

Using this data, you can now see clearly what piece of content you’ll want to keep, upgrade or toss. Make sure to mark them as such so your team can start making the updates on all channels.

Examples on what to keep, upgrade and delete:

Keep: Evergreen content, testimonials, FAQs and general business information that’s still relevant.

Upgrade: Content with outdated information and posts with statistics. This can also include low conversion and low traffic content as well!

Toss: Old campaigns, old product content, duplicate content or any content that is associated with a particular point in time.

Step 5: Create Your Plan of Action

Prioritize your updates based on your marketing plan’s goals and results from your content audit. To start the action plan, make an extra column that rates each piece by priority then create an action plan for those with the highest priority followed by medium and low priority. Coordinate with your marketing team on who can execute rewrites, refreshes and expansions of your content. Other tips to consider with your team are options to reuse content by turning it into an ebook, updating call-to-actions, adding videos to posts, implementing redirects and optimizing the metadata.

After completing your first content audit, make sure to keep the process going regularly. We recommend every quarter! That way you’re logging content in earlier spurts rather than yearly and getting the most up to date analytics. This enables your team to be able to pivot strategies to meet your marketing goals. 

Want help doing the heavy lifting of creating and executing a content audit for your company?

Content Creative provides a place for clients to receive a quality experience with one full-service team to help execute marketing in alignment with your brand and message. We understand as a business or marketing team sometimes you don’t have all of the resources that you need to create a successful content program. Reach out to us here. 

Melissa MeredithComment