What You Should Know About Content Audits
What is a content audit?
A content audit is a process of systematically reviewing all the content you have on your site. This process allows you to look closely at your optimization efforts to see how well you are meeting your business objectives. When done correctly, you will be able to find any gaps in your content so that you can adjust your process to better serve your intended audience. This will allow you to mature your content and digital strategy so that your organization can more effectively and efficiently provide the material that audiences need.
How do you perform a content audit?
A successful audit should follow these steps:
- Create a thorough list of all your content available. This list should also give you important information about your content, such as its level of optimization and its quality.
- Research how successful your various pieces of content have been, including your page and keyword statistics from the BrightEdge platform. For an even more complete picture, look at how well different groups of material, such as your early-funnel-stage content, impacts site conversions and revenue to better understand your success at each stage.
- Map your available content to your different ideal customers and their buyer journeys so that you better understand how your content is serving the customers and guiding them towards conversions.
- See how well your content aligns with different business functions, including PR, customer services, social media, and SEO, to name a few. A digitally mature organization will use their content to stretch across different specialties to create a strong online user experience.
- See how well your site is organized. Search engines and users want to see sites that are easy to navigate so that they can find the information they want quickly and easily.
- Determine what content is missing. At the end of your audit, you should be able to carefully determine where your weaknesses lie and what you should be doing to boost your overall performance.
What is the main purpose of a content audit?
Once you have completed your content audit, you likely have a wealth of information in front of you about how well your material aligns with the buyer’s journey and the impact it is having on the growth of your business. You will then be able to use this information to inform the future of your marketing strategy. You want to examine three main types of insights:
- How well is your content aligning with what your customers need? Is your content providing a firm buyer’s journey from the initial introduction through conversion or are there gaps that need to be filled?
- How well is your content attracting the right people? Sometimes brands find that they have great traffic rates and even good read-through rates, but low conversion rates. This can happen, for example, if the content the brand is producing provides value, but is not properly targeted to the ideal customers and is instead bringing in interested readers who are not likely to convert.
- Is the content engaging from the title? Even if your content is fantastic, you still need to be able to draw people into the material and convince them to read through to the end. Content that has been written with an engaging opening will be much more successful.
A content audit is a valuable tool to help site owners better understand the material they have on their site and how to improve their efforts to match the modern customer. Brands interested in moving forward in their content development strategy should focus on using an audit like this to see where they can best move forward.
