When you hear the word audit, you likely have a negative visceral reaction. This is especially true if you are a business owner who navigates the confusing tax code and pays quarterly estimated taxes. Consequently, for many, the word audit likely brings to mind nothing but hassle and trouble, all instigated by the IRS. In other words, it’s no fun. Conversely, a content audit can actually be extremely beneficial, especially as it relates to your current marketing strategy. Read on to learn more about the benefits of a content audit and why it needs to become a regular part of your evolving content marketing strategy:
Understand Your Need to Look Back
When you talk “content strategy,” you likely mean “future” plans for your marketing campaign or strategy. However, what many professionals fail to recognize is the benefit that exists in simply looking back. A wise content marketing strategy will include a content audit that examines past pieces, makes adjustments, and reissues content to improve past posts and give them new life.
Define a Content Audit
What are the real life steps involved in a content audit? No fear, we have you covered. To perform a content audit on your past articles/pieces, you simply organize them, evaluate them and then improve or delete them (we’ll break it down below). In much the same way a gardener prunes a bush or plant to promote growth, you prune your ineffective strategies or content and revitalize your effective pieces, encouraging a more robust content marketing strategy.
How to Categorize/Evaluate Your Content During Your Audit
The following is some information on how to properly categorize your content. In other words, this is how you know which content needs to go (pruning) and which is worth revitalizing:
The following is true of healthy or good content that is worth revamping:
- Content that was liked many times.
- It encouraged and garnered a high rate of conversion.
- It generated a lot of site traffic.
- It was shared by many.
To determine what content needs to go, consider the following elements that are true of ineffective content:
- It didn’t generate any of the results listed above or generated below average results.
- It failed to produce a ROI.
How to Perform a Content Audit in Four Steps
Follow the steps listed below for practical ways to begin your content audit:
1.) Define What You Want From Your Content: An content audit is a great chance to redefine the purpose of your content, setting a new purpose. However, any content should include the following elements as it relates to marketing:
- Social shares.
- Backlinks.
- Traffic.
- Conversions.
Evaluate your past content’s performance within these categories to determine if it’s worth a revamp.
2.) Organize Your Content: Find all the pages that exist for you website. An easy way to do this is looking at your sitemap. Once you have all the pages in hand, organize by the following:
- Page type, is it a blog, landing page, etc.?
- Page Title
- URL
- Metrics: The all-important evaluation metrics mentioned above, including conversions, shares, backlinks, etc.
3.) Break it Down: Next, use a tool like Google Analytics to help you determine the traffic of each URL. Enter all the metrics for each article, page, etc. You can easily find a metric average using Excel once you have all these numbers.
4.) Improve The Worthy Content: If through your in depth content audit you find there is some content that is worth revamping, now’s the time to improve said pages. If the content is scoring well, you can simply update non-evergreen information and rerelease. If it’s not scoring great, you can decide if it’s worth fixing. If it just needs a little boost, you can link to it from more healthy pages (better performing), or add some keywords or outbound links to try to beef it up a bit. If content simply didn’t’ perform well at all the first time or you think it might actually hurt your brand to reuse this specific content, delete (prune) these pieces for good.
Lather, Rinse, Repeat
It is wise for any business to perform a content audit on a yearly basis. The first time you perform this audit will be the most arduous. After going through the audit process once, you will have a formula to follow for next time, making it much easier.
Admittedly this topic veered a bit from the typical “time to evolve” content. However, it is the wise marketing professional who utilizes already created content and learns from their own experience. A content audit is one way to do just that. Once you perform this task, you are ready to move on to creating new content. Let the professionals at Writer Access help you with this whole process. Contact us today to learn more.
Brandie P. understands the importance of high-quality copywriting. She presents her clients in the best of light and is committed to communicating both factual and informative content. Her clients appreciate her attention to detail and her propensity to double check stats and make sure what she is writing is in fact absolutely true. As a result, clients can rest assured that the content Brandie creates is both beneficial to her clients and serves their purposes perfectly.
