You may have heard of content audits as a daunting task, but running a content audit is actually a great way to get insights into how your company’s web content is performing, and there are many additional benefits to taking the time to do it.
What is a Content Audit?
A content audit is a way for companies with existing content , including blogs, premium content, case studies, and web pages, to evaluate the effectiveness of each piece in order to pull together recommendations for improving their content marketing strategy. Depending on the amount of content on a company’s website, an individual or small team of employees compiles links to each individual piece of content, and reviews such elements as the URL, keywords, page links, and body content to assess the content’s effectiveness.
Now that you know what a content audit is, check out four major benefits of performing one on your own website, below:
Determine which pieces of content are most successful.
One of the biggest benefits of going through the labor-intensive content auditing process is the ability to assess which of your pieces of content are most successful, and why. By analyzing your content using such metrics as amount of unique visitors, outbound links, conversions, or referrals, you can determine which pieces of content are performing well and create more successful content moving forward using the same best practices. Checking across successful pieces of content for similarities in topic, word count, and structure (such as how-to’s or list posts) will help you identify your audience’s preferences.
Figure out which pieces of content need to be removed or updated
Just as a content audit can show you which pieces of content are performing well on your website, it can also show you which pieces aren’t working. Knowing which content pages your audience doesn’t engage with is just as useful for improving your current content marketing strategy as knowing which pages they love. You can use your knowledge of both to guide which content you should focus on creating for future marketing efforts, and determine which content needs to be updated with new information or consolidated onto one page.
Identify gaps in your content
Content audits can also help you determine the gaps in your existing content that need to be filled. Knowing this information is critical to helping you map out future content to create and topics and keywords to target. Your website should have enough content that is applicable to each stage of the buyer’s journey and each of your buyer personas, and a content audit can show you the areas where your team should be spending more time creating content.
Easily locate a piece of content to combine with new marketing efforts
Lastly, another major benefit of performing a content audit is that at the end of it all, you have a beautifully organized list of all of your live content that can be used in marketing efforts throughout your company. For example, say you have a new piece of premium content and you want to gate it behind a form on a landing page and place a CTA on a relevant blog post hosted on your website. Companies that have performed a content audit can pull up their content list and quickly determine which posts the piece of premium content is relevant to, and place the CTA on the most successful posts from that list. Having an up-to-date list of all of your content is useful beyond just optimizing your website.
Yes, content audits involve a good amount of time and effort, but once the process is over you’ll have an optimized website and hard data on each of your individual pieces of content that you can use to improve your overall content marketing strategy.
{{cta(‘8c2332a7-3985-468d-9d90-eeaf68c6bdae’,’justifycenter’)}}
