How to Perform a Content Audit for Your 2022 Content Strategy

Every year, at the start of the year, many people go through a review process. They look back on what happened the past 12 months and reflect on what could have gone better, what they could improve on, and what they could do to prepare for the future.

This is true not just for our personal lives. It can also apply to business–more specifically, to one’s website content.

A content audit is similar to a review in the sense that one goes through all the content that’s been published in the past in order to review what worked, what didn’t, and what can be improved upon.

A good content audit also help you clarify what it is your goals are for your business, and how to better achieve those goals by focusing on the themes, topics, and ideas that matter both to your audience and your business.

So, how exactly do you perform a content audit on your website?

 

Step 1: Define your goals

Begin with the end in mind. Start asking yourself some important questions, questions related to both your customers and your business.

• What are your goals for your business this year?
• What does your audience care the most about?
• What problems do you want to solve for your customers?
• What frequently-asked-questions do you want to answer for your audience?

Starting with your goals and objectives in mind will help bring focus to your audit, as it will guide you into figuring out what it is exactly you want to be working towards.

 

Step 2: Review your existing content

There are several tools and software that can help you perform a content audit, namely Google Analytics, Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Screaming Frog to name a few. Some of these tools, however, can get pretty technical and overwhelming. If that happens, just remember that the main action steps that you need to focus on are the following:

 

1. Make a list of all your posts and pages

The most important thing you need to do is make a list of all the content pages and posts on your website. The tools above will allow you to export a spreadsheet of all your posts and pages so that you don’t miss out on anything. If not, you can use a sitemap or a sitemap generator tool to help you populate that list.

 

2. Categorise your content 

Once you’ve got that list, start categorising your content according to any or all of the following:

• Stage in customer journey – consider the stage that each post falls in your customer journey: for raising awareness, consideration, or decision?
• Content types – is it a blog post, a landing page, a product description, etc.
• Statistics – make sure you’ve also gotten down important data points such as pageviews, impressions, publication dates, number of keywords, social shares, etc.

 

Step 3: Start analysing

This is the part where you gather, collect, and analyse all the data surrounding your content. The process of gathering all that, however, can be lengthy and complex as it requires you to have to collect the data from various sources and manually add it to your spreadsheet.

This is where tools like those mentioned above come in handy. SEMrush Content Audit Tool, for example, is able to pull in all data from your social shares, backlinks, metadata, and length of content.

Whereas Google Analytics will give you other valuable information on your website such as your pageviews, bounce rate, average session duration, and average time on page.

Once you’ve got all this data down on your spreadsheet, it’s time to identify which content pieces are getting you the most traffic, which ones are a dead end, and which ones have the potential to drive you more traffic if you decided to improve upon them.

Take note of content clusters as well, or content that’s grouped around a certain topic. Are these pages linked internally? Are they getting clicks. Are they evergreen, or always relevant? Content clusters can serve as pillar content that will help your overall SEO and content strategy. So think about how you can improve and expand on these.

 

Step 4: Take action!

Now that you’ve analysed all the data points surrounding your content, you should have a pretty clear picture of what needs to be worked on, what can be improved, and what can be removed. That said, it’s time to create a defined action plan to work through and start making improvements

As you go through each piece of content, consider the following steps you can take and which one best fits your goals and objectives for your content audit.

 

1. Reuse

A lot of your website and blog content can often be reused and repurposed for other platforms or mediums. Detailed blog posts, for example, can be repurposed as social media content or infographics.

Better yet, if you have several articles surrounding a particular topic, you can consolidate all that content and turn it into an e-book or lead magnet that you can serve to your audience.

 

2. Rewrite

Some content can be out of date. The technical terms and labels might have changed over time. Companies, apps, or software might have gone through a rebrand. If you believe the article is still worth saving, then a couple of updates and rewrites might be all you need to keep the content updated.

Other articles might work better if expanded. Most SEO experts agree, after all, that to maximise SEO opportunities, a blog post should be somewhere between 1,000 to 1,500 words. It’s also noted that articles less than 3,000 words are ranked 3rd as business-to-business (B2B) content assets that generate the most results.

So if you’ve got a bunch of very short articles, 500 words or less, it might be a good idea to expand those articles so that they can better-fit today’s SEO standards.

 

3. Remove

Sometimes certain articles and pieces of content no longer fit your overall content strategy. Sometimes they just bloat up and take up space. In cases like these, it’s okay to remove pieces of content that are no longer relevant, especially if all they do is hurt your SEO.

Whenever you do remove content, however, make sure to also remove any internal links that point to these articles. There are several tools that come in handy for double-checking for internal links, such as Screaming Frog.

Of course, doing a content audit is no easy feat to accomplish, nor is it something that can be done overnight. It could take a while to go through each piece of content and review whether or not you should reuse, rewrite, or remove them.

But that’s where marketing agencies can help. Our SEO specialists can help you perform the necessary audits to make sure that your website remains relevant and up-to-date with current trends and changes. If you’re feeling overwhelmed at all about the amount of work that goes into a content audit, simply give our agents a call and we’ll get back to you with a solid plan on how we can jumpstart your SEO and content strategy for 2022.

According to HubSpot’s State of Marketing Report, a website is the #2 marketing channel used, just behind social media, and search engines are the starting point of 68% of online experiences.

A lot is riding on your website and your content marketing strategy. That’s why the best place to start is with a good and thorough content audit.

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