Content Audit Success: A Step-by-Step Guide [Videos]

0 Shares

In this article, we will be going over everything you need to know about how to perform a content audit, as well as useful tools for content auditing.

Content auditing is the process of systematically reviewing and organizing all the content on your website.

We’ll be breaking down how to create a content audit checklist, along with explaining how to categorize your content.

Table of contents

What is a Content Audit?

As briefly mentioned above, content auditing includes analyzing, cataloging, and organizing the contents of your website.

It’s very important if you want to optimize your content marketing strategy. Do it by analyzing all of the opportunities, strengths, and weaknesses.

Content audits are important because they allow you to create an inventory of your site. You get insights into what is the best content to create, update or re-write.

Some benefits of content auditing include:

Helping you make data-driven decisions based on facts
Identifying areas that need to be repurposed
Highlighting pieces of content that perform best
Understanding your audience’s likes and dislikes

Effectiveness of Content Auditing

In the SEMrush State of Content Marketing 2023 Global Report,

53% say engagement went up and 49% say rankings or traffic increased

33% audit their content twice a year, 24% once a year, and just over 20% do it more than three times a year

According to a study by Curata, 75% of B2B marketers reported that they saw an increase in website traffic after conducting a content audit.

Content Audit Tools

Studies suggest that content audit is a critical tool for effective lead management.

And businesses that prioritize it are likely to see better results in terms of lead acquisition and conversion.

However, you need the right tools to do a comprehensive and successful content audit.

Below is a list of software that is not only useful for content auditing but also has other great features of SEO.

We’ll be giving explanations of which features exactly will help with content auditing your site.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs has a great feature called Top Pages. With it you can look at all the organic traffic a page has.

For each page, you can see the rankings of keywords and how many backlinks each has.

Ahrefs has the ability to check links for all the other pages in the SERPs.

You can also export all the keywords from your website’s sitemap and check them in bulk by using the batch analysis tool.

Ahrefs SEO plugin

You can download and install the Ahrefs SEO plugin and use it to perform a content audit as well.

And, it can be connected to things like WordPress as well. With the plugin, you can perform a full content audit that optimizes your site for organic traffic.

The plugin will give you an overview of your site’s status. It indicates whether the article is good, whether it ranks highly, or needs to be rewritten.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console has some neat features for content auditing. There are multiple ways to perform a content audit.

You can check whether your sitemaps are working properly by adding your sitemap’s URL in the sitemaps tab on the side.

If you are having indexing issues, you can click on the “Coverage” tab and it will display valid, excluded, and problematic pages.

In the “Search Results” section under the performance tab, you have numerous options to check stats like click-through rates and impressions.

You can also check:

Traffic for individual pages
Average use of keywords,
Impressions

And you can also analyze why your content doesn’t rank highly in the SERPs.

SemRush

Similarly to Ahrefs, SemRush has a feature that gives you a customized report that details areas in which your website can be improved including content and link-building.

You get a very thorough audit through three simple steps. You can also connect to Google Analytics or other similar analytics tool accounts.

You discover important information and data in regard to your sitemap, posts that generate the most traffic, etc.

It’s useful for developing a strategy to improve your site’s SEO.

SemRush also has a tool where you can directly paste the URL of your pages and it can analyze and give you recommendations on how to improve them.

Google Analytics

When using Google Analytics, instead of getting a comprehensive content audit like you would with Ahrefs, the site instead provides you with the data necessary to create your own audit, along with an overview of visitor behavior.

Something to keep in mind is that Google Analytics as you know it will stop recording data July 1, 2023.

(Universal Analytics) is being sunsetted by Google. Your existing data will be deleted by December 31, 2023 unless you pay to store it somewhere else.

See Google Analytics, as You Know It, Is Dead! Are You Ready for GA4? for what to do.

G4 is the latest version of this tool and it’s able to give you a thorough breakdown of your buyer’s journey.

It can predict user behavior through the data and information it’s collected.

Something to keep in mind is that the reports created by Google Analytics are based on samples of your data, not precise data.

So the numbers you see here might be a bit different compared to the other content auditing tools you’re using.

Some additional features include how much time viewers spend on individual pages, how many pages in total have been visited and what the bounce rate is.

Google spreadsheet

Google spreadsheet doesn’t have any actual auditing tools. Rather, it’s more about helping you create spreadsheets with useful data.

Manually add your information gathered from other apps you’ve used to create content audits for your site.

You can also use Google spreadsheet to analyze the data you’ve accumulated from platforms like Ahrefs, Google Search Console/Analytics, and SEMrush.

How to Do a Content Audit That Makes an Impact

Now that we’ve gone over some of the useful tools and software that are available for content auditing, we’re going to look at how to create a really effective content audit for your website.

We are going to break it down step by step.

Step 1 Define And Understand Your Goals

The first and most important is to clearly define your objectives in order for the content audit to be impactful.

What are your business goals?
How do you hope to benefit and achieve those goals with the content audit?

You need to take all of these things into consideration in order to achieve the results you want.

Step 2 Take a look at your content

It’s first important to decide what content you specifically want to review before you begin creating your inventory.

Once you decide on the scope of your content audit, start by collecting your URLs.

SEMrush (and the other software tools we’ve mentioned) have a tool that can audit your content and create a list of all your URLs using your domain’s sitemap.

Then you can catalog all your URLs using a spreadsheet. It’s up to you to ultimately decide what kind of categories you want to create for your content.

Also, this process is beneficial in helping businesses identify pieces that are outdated, irrelevant, or no longer align with their brand message.

Furthermore, a successful content audit can streamline the process of identifying subscribers who have not engaged with your content or who have become disinterested in the brand’s website.

Armed with this information, marketing teams can scrub their email lists clean of uninterested subscribers, and improve email deliverability rates and open rates.

Step 3: Collect and Analyze the Data

Data collection can be quite a long and laborious process. Thankfully, audit tools like SEMrush can audit your site and provide you with useful information and data.

Some examples include social shares from social media like Twitter and Facebook, metadata, content authors, backlinks, and content length for every individual URL.

Google Analytics and Google Search Console give you additional metrics for every URL:

Sessions
Average session duration
Pageviews
Average time on page
Bounce rate
Search queries

Collecting and understanding all this information can help you formulate a strategy on how to improve your site.

Content Audit Checklist

It’s important to do a content audit checklist to make sure you’ve covered all your bases.

Does your content get enough organic search traffic? If not, then you need to look into how you can optimize your site to increase traffic.
What sources send your site traffic? You need to identify those sources and what exactly it’s doing right to help you understand how to improve.
Are you happy with the number of conversions? If not, you have to come up with ways to encourage visitors to complete different types of site conversions e.g. filling in a form or making a purchase.
Is your page better than the competition/does it cover the topic well? It’s always good to research what your competitors are doing with their websites and apply those qualities to your site to improve it.
Is your page optimized well for on-page SEO? Then there are multiple SEO plugins like the ones mentioned above that are specifically designed to help improve your page’s SEO.
Is the article internally linked where relevant? You need to make sure the internal links in your article make sense in the context of the subject matter being discussed in the text.

Create an Action Plan for Each URL

It’s crucial that you create an action plan for each individual URL. Organize and categorize your site’s content in a way to make it more content friendly.

Determine where each URL and page is lacking and form a strategy on how to improve it.

In this section, we’ll be looking at ways to optimize the content of your site.

Categorize Your Content

Here are some tips on how to optimize and order your content so that it generates more traffic and clicks:

Reuse old content. It’s a good idea to combine or reinvent old pieces of your site’s content. Publish them in a different format e.g. infographic, statistic presentation slides, videos, etc.
Rewrite old content. If there are articles or posts that are under-performing or have outdated information in them, you should probably rewrite them to higher quality, with more accurate information.
Expand your previous content. Longer content generates more traffic for your pages. Consider expanding and adding more detail to your old articles.
Structure your content properly. Make sure the titles, headings and subheadings have the appropriate H2 and H3 tags. This guarantees that bots better interpret your content.

Adjust Your Content Marketing Strategy

You need to always adjust and evolve your long-term content marketing strategy.

Observe your failures and successes and rethink your strategy accordingly based on them. Restructure your content in a way that appeals to your target audience.

Reorganize your assets so that you improve your site’s conversion rates and have higher organic reach.

At the very least, you need to conduct an annual review of your content marketing strategy to see what works and what doesn’t.

And if you operate in a very fast-paced and volatile industry, those reviews will probably need to be more frequent in order to keep up with the changes, i.e.. monthly, weekly, etc.

Content Audit Case Study:

Here we will discuss a case study where a content audit helped improve our site. At Brosix, we had two articles that were targeting our best keywords.

One was for content related to instant messaging and the other in regard to the best Instant messaging tools.

The initial idea for the first article was to target informational queries related to instant messaging, instant messengers, what is instant messaging, and what is instant messenger.

The second article was about all the other best instant messenger apps, the best instant messaging tools, and the best business instant messaging apps.

The problem was that these articles were cannibalizing keywords which were negatively impacting their ranking in the SERPs.

We reviewed the SERP for the main keyword and articles that outranked us and decided to merge them.

It was a hard decision because there was a genuine risk that it could negatively impact our ranking. However, the results were incredible.

Here are some screenshots:

“Best instant messaging tools” before merging the articles

“What is instant messaging” before merging articles

The results after merging them were almost doubled our traffic and we returned to the top positions for all keywords:

Final Words

Hopefully, by now, this article has helped you gain a thorough understanding of the ins and outs on how to perform a content audit.

Act now and apply these strategies to your own site.

Optimizing your content is essential in increasing traffic to your website. You should make it a habit to do it regularly. Otherwise, your website could end up looking outdated very quickly.

Additional Resource: Webinar Replay and Slides from Andy Crestodina: How to Audit Your Content Using GA4: A Data-Driven Approach to SEO and Lead Generation