Content Audit: How to Run a Content Audit to Enhance Business Growth

The first step to reaching your audience is creating relevant and high-quality content to attract your audience.

After creating, publishing, and promoting the content, what comes next?

Of course, one answer will be to track the effectiveness of our content and get the required feedback from the audience. Achieving your business goals via content creation and distribution requires that you keep track of your content effectiveness. Most times, as content creators, we neglect existing content because we are eager to publish new content.

Content Audit

What is Content Audit?

A content audit is a process of categorizing and analyzing the current performance of a piece of content. A content audit is a systematic process of analyzing your content according to a selected set of criteria.

The processes of content audit can be applied to the following content platforms:

1. Websites
2. Landing pages
3. Email marketing
4. Social media posts
5. Blog posts.
6. Interactive content
7. Videos.

At this point, it is pertinent to note that as your first time creating a content audit, you can find it daunting and tasking.

Carry out the content audit as often to keep your content fresh and relevant.

Benefits of Content Audit

Benefits of Content Audit

Change is constant, even for content.

Every minute of the day, content is published on the internet. Your content might not be relevant in a few weeks if you do not make the necessary changes.

The many benefits of a content audit include,

1. Identifying the areas in your content that need improvement.
2. Identifying the likes of the audience.
3. To maintain and manage content to meet up with the search algorithm.
4. To pinpoint the areas of content that perform best so you can leverage them in your marketing strategies.
5. To give insights into the data that will drive a uniform decision on marketing.
6. To identify the efforts and results of your current advertising.
7. Improving your future content creation process.

Steps to running a content audit

Now that you have understood the benefits of content audit, I will walk you through the steps of conducting a content audit for your business or brand.

Step 1: Define your goals and metrics

The first step in content audit is to determine if your content is achieving your business or brand goals. To determine that, you need to understand the goals of your business or brand. There are several metrics to consider, and your outlined goals will help streamline the metrics to avoid confusion.

For example, your business or brand goal may be to improve your audience engagement. To meet this goal, you might have to identify the engaging content type and format your audience might have been interested in the past. You can also determine what kind of content that generates conversation online.

Your content goal may also be to increase your brand awareness. To do this, you might audit your content to contain better keywords.

Once you have identified your content or business goals, you can match them with relevant metrics. You can categorize your metrics into the following:

1. Engagement metrics: Comments, likes, shares, etc.
2. SEO metrics: Keyword rankings, keyword volume, organic traffic, backlinks, internal links, etc.
3. Sales metrics: Conversion rates, leads, ROI, etc.
4. User behavior metrics: Bounce rates, click-through rates, open rates, page views, session duration, etc.

Content Inventory

Step 2: Create an inventory of your content

To create an inventory, your best bet will be to gather your content into a spreadsheet. This can pass as your content inventory. Organizing your content this way will make it easier to track your content.

For websites, you should collect the URLs of the web pages you want to audit. The details you should collect will include the following:

1. Page Headlines.
2. Content format (text, image, video, animation, etc.).
3. Date last modified or date of publication.
4. Content type (blog post, landing page, product description, etc.).
5. Word Content
6. Keywords.

For social media posts, you should collect the following:

1. Captions.
2. Likes.
3. Shares.
4. Mentions.

As you gather the needed content, you can categorize the collected content into columns in the spreadsheet. You can then use the goals and metrics identified in step one to do an audit. Ensure you keep the categories simple. The process of categorizing in a spreadsheet will fast-track the auditing process.

Step 3: Analyze your data

This step requires that you analyze the collected data critically. After adding the data to the spreadsheet, you can manually analyze the data. However, to save time, you can use content audit tools such as:

1. Determ (for social media)
2. Website Auditor (for SEO content)
3. SE Ranking (SEO Ranking)
4. Grammarly (Content Grammer and Plagrism)
5. Google Analytics
6. Analisa (Instagram and Tiktok analytics)
7. Buffer (Social media auditor)
8. Raven (Website Auditor)
9. Planoly (Social media auditor)

The use of the above-outlined tools can help fasten the process of your content audit.

Step 4: Draw up a plan based on your analysis.

After analyzing the collected data, you must draw an actionable plan for a new strategy. Your outlined plan should match your goals and metrics.

For example, if your audit shows that you do not have adequate keywords to make your website rank in the top 10. You should introduce branded keywords to your content. It also could be that your social media engagement is low. Your plan could be to research and include conversations that could spark the audience engagement that you need.

If you have blog posts that are low performing, your solution might be to rewrite or restructure the content. You can also add eye-catching images and engaging videos.

Content Marketing Strategy for Content Audit

Step 5: Adjust your overall content marketing strategy

After drawing an action plan for content, the next step should be to adjust your content marketing strategy to suit your goals. Reviewing your content marketing strategy is paramount to implementing your action plan. The revised action plan would determine if the content plan works or if it needs to be adjusted. Observe the changes, successes, and failures of your content plan. You can also restrategize ahead of your next audit.

This may be the end of this article, but it is not the end of your content audit process. You are to ensure you follow up with your audit as often as you. The content audit process may be grueling and tedious. However, you must perform the content audit to align with the goals of your business or brand.

Good luck with your auditing.