The Content Audit is a fundamental step to start marketing or in a strategy update phase. Before working on your content strategy, let's find out what it is, how to do it, and why it would be crazy not to do it.
By content audit, we mean a systematic process of verification and evaluation of the contents present on the whole or a specific part of a website, a Facebook page, or even on the numbers of a paper publication. It serves to give you the complete map of your content.
It is also a careful look at the content already present on the company channels that will assist you in making sure that you are doing precisely what you want to do: increase traffic flow, optimize SEO, enhance conversions, have quality, and always current content, etc.
No matter what you want to analyze, the fundamental parts of the content audit process remain unchanged: collect all the URLs (or the reference to access them) of the content and provide for each one of the data and valuable "actions." It seems easy, but it is not if you don't have an exact plan or method.
Content audit: why it is good to do it
First and foremost, before you start, you need to be perfectly clear on the reason / s why you want to conduct a content audit. Indeed, if you do not plan to take the measures that will result from the data obtained, you might as well not start this work!
All of the following are potential content verification objectives. You may very well have others that would not be on this list, just as you may have several in mind to complete your audit.
Why content audit is essential is easy: the content is a real asset. The scope defines a website, blog, or Facebook page for your audience.
This is why carrying out a content audit is essential.
A systematic content check can help you in an assortment of distinct methods.
The content audit helps determine:
- What content needs copywriting / editing / SEO review;
- What content needs to be updated with more current versions;
- If there are contents that are repeated and perhaps overlap;
- If there are contents to be deleted;
- Which contents are the most visited, which generate the most conversions, etc.;
- What are the most important and most appreciated contents by the public? How to develop a strategy to make the most of them.
The content audit also helps a lot when starting a new working relationship with a customer as thanks to it; it is possible to understand in-depth the content heritage contained in a site thanks to the creation of an inventory of the goods ordered at the time of the "start "of the works.
Time: for the most part, 4 to 8 hours, yet it relies upon how much substance to be planned.
Tools: Spreadsheet and analytics source (e.g., Google Analytics).
Personal: if it's not a massive amount of content, one person is enough.
Technical skill level: medium-low.
Level of written and analytical skills: medium-high.
To witness how it all plays out in real life, we're going to work from a fictitious case.
Benjamin has a model shop and he also passionately runs the club's website in his town. He has invested in content marketing over the past year but it is not at all certain that the time invested in blogging, creating videos and creating infographics has paid off satisfactorily. As a result, he chooses to execute a content audit to see how those content items are performing and based on that first result; see what to do in his situation.
As Benjamin works alone and has a tight budget, he decides to take charge of the entire process of checking the content of his website. As a result, he chooses to have his audit focus only on the content he created over the past year and to follow only a few variables to verify the relevance (or not) and the success of this content.
Content audit: let's get to work. How do you do it?
It begins!
Until you are practical, keep some guidelines helpful in defining the content audit and never lose sight of them. It will be your starting point.
What you will need to do next is organize a spreadsheet, preferably on Google Docs, so that it can be shared quickly and allows multiple people to compile and modify it simultaneously.
Kito Infocom recommends using a shared spreadsheet to:
- Allow you to come back and work on the review at any time;
- Provide a readily accessible document for navigation to the pages you wish to check;
- Allow collaboration with other users: it is possible to provide shared access and the possibility of editing to the other members of your team so that they can help with the review;
- The shared spreadsheet is also cloud-based and therefore updated in real-time. There ought to like this be no cross-over in work.
Now set up your spreadsheet according to these parameters:
1. URL / REFERENCES: copy and paste the URLs or unique references of the contents in this section. In the case of websites, you can help yourself by taking the complete list of contents on Google Analytics (path: behavior> site contents> all pages).
Warning: if you have a site with thousands of pages, this may take some time.
2. TITLE: copy and paste in this section the titles of the contents examined. Make sure it contains the following features:
- No more than 65 characters
- Unique
- Containing the keywords
3. CONTENTS: In short, what is the article about?
4. ACTION: it will be possible to select only one of the three KIL actions in this column
- Leave as it is (keep)
- Improve
- Cancel (leave)
5. TYPE OF CONTENT: Are we talking about product content? Of an infographic?
6. ANALYTICS: For this item, help yourself with an analysis tool. It will help you understand which content "pushes" the most, for example, by reporting the visits received from the web page in the last 30 days or the number of likes and shares of a post on Facebook.
7. CONTENT LEVEL: in this section, it is possible to indicate a level of content in terms of production, for example, if it is standard content (e.g., post on a blog) or premium (e.g., a video).
8. PROPOSED STRATEGY OR EDITING: strictly connected to the "action" column. In this segment, you will choose "what to do" with the content present on the website. For example, you can decide to improve articles that have the following characteristics: poor grammar, written mainly for search engines (keyword stuffing), with irrelevant or not in-depth content, duplicate content, and so on.
However, the content strategy must end with guidelines on the following steps.
9. SEO: All the SEO techniques suggested for the content under analysis are included in this column. So let's talk about implementation H1, H2, the title of the images, etc., bold and italic.
Conclusion: once finished, it starts again!
Once you have concluded all the previous steps and developed your content strategy on them, we recommend repeating the operation once every 3-6 months.
Content audits can help you continuously improve your channels' rankings, inbound traffic, and content quality. Sure it takes some time, but we guarantee you that the struggle will be awarded!
