Creating and publishing content is the first step in marketing. When you launch a website then your instinct is to create and create the content. However, with time the old content starts to get buried and rarely generates traffic. To avoid such a problem, the content audit comes into action. With time you do not only need new content but consciously work on your old content too to generate more audience.

Now the question arises, what is content auditing? It is the basic SEO technique used by everyone to make their content better. Let’s look at it in detail.

What is Seo Content Auditing?

The SEO content audit is a practice of reviewing and evaluating the existing content of the website. It can be of all the content or only partial. In technical terms, it is the accounting of the published content of the website that a content manager monitors for possible improvements.  The aim of content auditing is to perform a qualitative analysis of the contents and strengthen the content strategy.

Content Auditing Types

There are different types of content auditing depending on the goal. It is important to set a goal before start auditing and you can do four kinds of content auditing, such as:

Full content audit: Just like the name suggests, it is a complete and comprehensive content audit of the whole website.

Partial content audit: It focuses on the partial content of the website, mainly subcategory or the main content of the website.

Rolling content audit: It means to monitor and maintain the content. A content manager doing the content audit at a set interval such as weekly, fortnight, monthly, or quarterly to scan for the changes and improvements, is known as rolling content audit.

Content sampling: It involves only examining the samples of the content.

Why Content Audit Important For Your Website

Content auditing helps your website accomplish a number of things and is proven beneficial in the long run. The following reasons are because the content audit is important for your website.

• When you perform a content audit, it helps you identify the best content strategy. The first step is to experiment with the plans and publish content. Later when you perform the audit on different strategies, you get to know which is performing better and then invest the resource on that strategy for the future.
• Content audit helps you identify the contents that are useless or doing great. In every content marketing plan, there will surely be a pile of content that is just sitting there without gaining traffic. The audit helps you clean out the clutter from your website so you can fill it with appealing content.
• Many companies focus on generating new content from scratch which is great. However, they can reuse their old content too. Content audit brings light to the old content that can be reused by fitting them in a new format, adding more useful information, discarding the outdated, and giving it a new look. It helps save time and resources.
• A content audit is a way of cleaning and organizing your website. It helps identify the most visited and less-visited pages and states the reasons behind them. In this way, you can get rid of unnecessary pages or improve their layout and make them accessible to viewers.

Content audit on the website is quite helpful for your future successful work and saves you time and resources.

How To Do A Content Audit?

Now, how a content audit is done. Here we will share with you a step by step guideline with a simple explanation on running a content audit.

1. Set up a goal
2. Identify and gather the content for auditing
3. Review and evaluate
4. Create an action plan
5. Makeup content marketing strategy

Set Up A Goal

When you’re running a content audit what is the first thing you need to do?

The first step of running a content audit is to set up your goals. Think about what is the purpose and what do you want to accomplish with this. Your goal can be multiple depending on the need. It can be improving SEO, ranking, traffic, click rate or bring more engagements. Whatever your priorities are, take time to map out all of that in order. It will help you audit the content easily and you will be able to achieve desired results.

Identify The Content And Gather Data

The next step is to gather the content that needs to be audited. You can audit all of the content or selectively. It can include every post published, any on-going issue, multimedia, or anything related that has been created for content marketing. The content audit is not limited to written content but everything that makes up the page and is live on the website. That includes:

• The goal of each content
• Analytical data of each content
• Content format
• Topics covered
• Keywords
• Target audience
• Backlinks
• Comments or engagements
• CTA included or not

If you have a smaller website then you can manually gather the data and put it in the spreadsheet for easy working. Otherwise, there are tools available online that can do the work for you such as HubSpot, SEMrush, or more.

Review And Evaluate

After you have all the data related to your content. It is time to review and evaluate to see how the page is doing according to set standards. For this purpose, you can use Content Auditing Tools such as Google Analytics, DYNO Mapper, Screaming Frog, or provided by any other company online. When using the tool, you set your goals in the beginning and upload your content. It will show you the analysis of your content and you will be able to see your mistakes and room for improvements. The content auditing tool helps you identify the content that is doing well, bad but can be improved, and contents that are not generating results.

Create An Action Plan

After you have all the data in front of you about your content, it is time to devise an action plan to improve your content marketing. The contents that are doing great should not be left like that, instead, brainstorm the ideas and add new information and format in it to enhance it more.

The bad pieces can have potential and it will be your job to make up a plan to improve them. First, detect the mistakes through different tools, analyze and correct the mistakes bit by bit. Get rid of outdated information, do some SEO, target the right audience with the help of keywords, bring in the new trendy features, or rewrite if needed.

Lastly, the content that is not gaining attention due to unnecessary information simply removes from the website. You do not need all of your old content. It is good to remove the clutter from the website in order to make space for more.

Makeup Content Marketing Strategy

Lastly, after all the evaluation it is time to create a content marketing strategy based on new findings. You cannot just use the same old strategy to improve. Changes are needed with time and changing algorithms. Throughout the audit period, track your success and failures to see what strategy steers your content in what direction.

Take notes of what is working well on your content and opt for a similar marketing strategy. Reviewing and analyzing needs to be done regularly at specific times to make sure things are going in the right direction or the strategy needs changing.

Bottom Line

In this blog, we have tried to give you a basic understanding of content audits with a simpler explanation. It is simply reviewing, analyzing, and improving the existing content which is important for every website. The same content or strategy doesn’t work every time and just like any other thing, it needs changing. With the basic understanding, you can expand your knowledge of it more and learn the skill or use content audit tools to improve your content.