What is a Content Audit?

A content audit is a process of cataloging or analyzing content on a website. It has four potential benefits such as showing you which content needs to be improved; giving you a bird’s eye view of each piece of content, optimizing the content it performs, and improving future content creation. Please follow this article to clarify the information. 

What is a content audit?

A content audit is considered a process of cataloging or analyzing each piece of content on a website, including blogs, products, landing pages or core content marketing. Some different online businesses can publish the content or pursue an ongoing content marketing strategy. This could optimize our benefits by simplifying our strengths, weaknesses or opportunities.

4 benefits of doing a content audit

1. It shows you which content needs improvement 

Besides your content generally working, a content audit can also give concrete direction on each area you can improve. 

For example, you can easily find broken links you aren’t aware of, misunderstanding opportunities, absent databases, or other problems you can easily address to boost your content’s brainstorming or search visibility.

2. It gives you a bird’s eye view of your content as a whole

If you have different content on this website, an audit is a different undertaking. However, examining the content audit is a way to learn about the entire trove of each content and also get an exact understanding of what is serving the business. 

3. It helps you optimize your content so it performs

Even if you own a small enterprise and don’t have lots of content, the content audit is useful. It can optimize this content for you to perform at the highest level. Content is especially powerful.

• It can convince clients that the brand is trustworthy: Approximately 64% of different consumers feel the brand is trustworthy after receiving some educational content from its brand.

• Excellent content has influenced buying decisions: All consumers reach 131% to purchase from each brand with effective content.
• Optimized content is regarded as a lead machine: It can bring in 3x leads of traditional marketing but it costs 62% to maintain. 

4. It will improve your future content creation

Because the audit’s content helps us to understand what to work and what not to work (because you easily see various evidence of both can across the site), you apply to your future content for the best result.

Basic steps of a content audit

How many steps does a content audit have? The basic step comprises of:

Step 1: Set goals

You should go into the content audit with a clear objective, otherwise, you have to know which types of each content to stress. Moreover, figure out what you gain from the content audit.

Step 2: Gather, categorize and organize your content

You have to compare or contrast the content pieces, have an overall view of each data or categorize pieces based on the action you take.

Step 3: Analyze your content

You have to look at this data and then determine which different pieces you have to update, rewrite or delete.

Step 4: Make a plan based on your findings

Make a detailed list of which content information you need immediate attention to, or even make a plan on how you can carry it out for updating or rewriting.

Step 5: Adjust your content strategy

What do you study from the content? You can carry that forward into the future content strategy.

Tools to use for a content audit

Here are some effective tools you can use.

1. A plain old spreadsheet

For checking no-frills content audit or a relatively small site, you should choose a plain spreadsheet. A spreadsheet helps you to lay out the content information and data in a clear way that is easy to analyze.

This is considered the lowest-cost way to take the audit since you don’t own special tools such as Microsoft Excel, or Google sheets.

2. Analytics software

Analytical data is very necessary for the content audit. This can include metrics such as page views, number, backlinks, time on page, average position on Google…

You should concrete the data about different pieces of content so you have to decide what action to take moving forward like update, rewrite or keep it as-is.

If you specialize in a content performance like Google Analytics, you can try some metrics from SEO tools including Ahrefs, SEO Site Checkup, Semrush…

3. Content quality tools

To improve and quantify the content quality, you use some tools to check the content for readability, word usage or grammar.

• Yoast SEO: The tool can analyze different text, and provide scores or suggestions to improve readability.

• Grammarly: While checking the grammar or spelling, the paid version of Grammar can offer performance scoring, it is useful to consist in the content audit.

To sum up, a content audit plays an important role to improve, boost and address content issues. If you want to improve this problem, you should focus on something to optimize the content or build links.

EverRanks has various information about the content audit above. Hopefully, we hope that you can flexibly use different tools that are suitable for a goal you set for your website.