It’s the middle of summer, and if you live locally in the Metro Atlanta area you may be spending a lot of time in the A/C during the hot afternoons. If you’re finding yourself inside a lot right now, why not make the most of your time and audit your website content?
Yes, a content audit may sound overwhelming, but the effort put in will be greatly worth it. You’ll have a clear picture of what kind of content works best for your business, as well as understand which voice and tone resonate the most with your audience. Plus, in today’s digital world full of websites competing for attention, any effort toward stronger content is worth it.
Did we sway you toward a content audit? If you need more convincing, please continue reading.
What Exactly is a Content Audit?
Essentially, a content audit is a deep review of your existing content. All of your content assets will live in a dedicated spreadsheet and have columns of information for your types of content, channels and distribution formats.
In short, there is not a set of information you need to capture during your content audit. The goal of this audit is to compare your existing content with your business goals and discover any trends or noteworthy facts. Take a look at both qualitative and quantitative information and utilize it wherever you see fit.
The When, Why and How Often
If you’re confused about why a content audit is important, take a look at Stellar SEO’s audit guide, learn to spot the when, why and how often of content audits.
When: A content audit needs to take place if:
- You’ve never done one before.
- Your content library has expanded exceptionally since your last audit.
- The content is underperforming or outdated.
- You’re creating a new content strategy.
Why: There’s a lot that can be revealed with an audit, including which areas of your content need the most attention. Poor-performing and outdated pages, invalid SEO and misinformation can be clearly identified, and you can work through ways to improve your content’s quality going forward.
This audit will give your business a way to organize, manage, and curate content that will perform well. This will lead to easier decisions of where your content strategy will go from here on out.
How Often: Typically, once a year will suffice when it comes to a content audit so you can understand your content set.
How to Audit Your Content
As stated, there’s no step-by-step process to do during an audit; you need to align this process with your current business goals. That being said, it’s wise to have a strong grasp on your goals/strategy, your audience personas and your content systems. From there, you can decide what categories you want to compare your content to.
When reviewing, flag any content that is high-performing to repurpose, outdated to revise, or irrelevant to discard. Reviewing your content against the same goals as your business will highlight where your message is inconsistent. Make note of this so that going forward, you and your team can correct and put measures in place on how to avoid these inconsistencies.
If there is anything you can quickly change while reviewing your content to have it align with your objectives, go for it! Anything like misleading facts, duplicate content, unfriendly URLs or missing content will save you a lot of time in the long run.
Some things you may want to access while reviewing each piece of content includes anything that could affect its SEO (meta tags, keywords, headings, titles), calls-to-action, breakpoints, links and load times. While these are just examples, every audit should be tailored to fulfill your business goals.
Once your audit is complete, you will have a fresh deck of stats about your existing content and know how to steer all new content from here on out. While this is a big task to take on, your business will now have content that’s in line with your motives and goals. Do yourself a favor and perform a content audit before summer’s end and see the benefits from it later this year!
To learn more about content audits, contact GreenMellen today!
