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One of the most important facets today in digital marketing is content marketing. If you wish to achieve your business goals, it’s not just enough to post any content at random. You need to be more strategic about it by ensuring that the content you publish is of good quality all the time. Today, ‘quality’ means being compliant with Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
The problem with regularly posting content, however, is that many websites might think it ends there. This means not going any further to study the performance of these content. If they’re aged content, then these also get buried in the archive of files, without revisiting it or re-pushing it. This is where content audit comes in.
In this process, your team analyzes and goes through every single content, periodically, to be aware of the strengths and weaknesses in your content strategy. The strengths, which you can use to carry on with posting good content regularly, while the weaknesses you can use as a guide on what to avoid next time.
If you haven’t tried going through a content audit yet, there’s always room to learn. These tips give you some of the best insights on how you can successfully perform a content audit of your website:
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Evaluate the Competition
First on this list is evaluating the competition. Note that the tip says evaluate, not imitate. So, it’s not for you to copy what your competition is already posting about. It’s for you to evaluate and assess their strategy, so you can make your own ascertainment on what their possible strengths are. This enables you to better understand the type of content they have, and what you can do to present a different view of what’s already out there.
Evaluating the competition means going through the following:
- Surveys sent by your competitors;
- Articles posted;
- Videos, images, and infographics of your competition.
If you’ve got a dedicated team for content audit purposes, then you can do things manually. Take the time to go through their website and study each of their posts. If you like to be more efficient with your time, there are also tools online that you can use for this purpose.
Whether you do it manually or with the help of a keyword cannibalization tool and other SEO-related tools, take note of the following information:
The main theme of your competitor’s content that ties these all together;
The content that’s most popular on their website;
The way your competitors switch things up: whether it’s all just text, or there’s also video and graphics to break up the text.
Define Your Metrics and Goals
Just like any audit that you’ll perform on your business, you can’t determine whether or not you’ve achieved your goals if you don’t even name your goals and your metrics in the first place. You need to have parameters that’ll serve as your guidelines as to what’s good and what isn’t.
This is very important, given that content audit can be a difficult and time-consuming process. So, it’s necessary to start with clear objectives otherwise, you may not be able to make it into a success.
To guide you in this process, here are some of the common examples of goals that you must have, for going through a content audit:
Improve your SEO results. To achieve this, you should check all your internal links and look for web pages that are consistently making it in the top search ranking results.
Improve conversion rate. This can be attained by identifying the pages on your website that consistently ranked well in terms of offering the best user experience to visitors and identifying the different content types that can help with each stage of the buyer’s journey.
Assess How the Content is Performing
There are certain metrics you can use to give you well-defined insights on how certain content is performing. Going through each of the metrics gives you a more stable understanding of how the content performs on the World Wide Web.
Here are some of these important metrics:
Backlinks. When you study the backlinks of your previous content and even that of your competitors, you’ll have information on the high authority sites that are linking to your competitors. This will give you an idea of what high authority sites to reach out to so that eventually, they’ll link back to yours as well.
Search rankings. Your website analytics will give you information on the search rankings, so you can evaluate how each of your pages or content ranked on search engines. If there’s any content that has a low ranking, you can tweak and re-publish this old content, so that hopefully, they can rank better. Your aim should be to have consistently high-ranking web pages all over your site.
Catalog Your Content
If you’re using an online tool or SEO and content auditing software, there are features that can help you to catalog your content. Your strategy here should include sorting your content by different criteria:
- Author, if you’ve got guest writers or multiple writers onboard as your content marketing team;
- Buyer’s journey stage, such as awareness of your existence, final purchase, and consideration of a purchase;
- Date of last modification, so you can check if now’s the right time to re-publish certain posts, or if you’ve got to wait for it to age a little bit more;
- Content-type, whether it’s a manual, informative, blog post, or product description.
Analyze Your Data
Lastly, after you’ve categorized, it’s now time to analyze the data that’s right in front of you. Look at this critically, so you can make a fact-based decision on the performance of your content.
As you assess your data, take note of the following information:
The content that performed so well, also known as home-run content;
The content that’s missing, which means that your audience is interested to get to know more about it, but you haven’t posted about it;
The content that’s outdated, so you can update it, to keep up with SEO.
Conclusion
With this knowledge you now have on performing a content audit, you can now have a more robust content marketing strategy. When you want to do well in content marketing, you have to look at your content from the greater picture, don’t just saturate yourself with posting regularly. When you do a content audit through the tips above, you’re better able to discover any gaps and gray areas with your content. In doing so, you can close that gap, and ace your content marketing strategy.
