Every organisation has to deal with digital content. Whether it’s a website, blog, social media, or ebooks; content is the number one priority for your business. Why? It’s important to understand that digital content has several uses and creating or curating such material is not enough anymore. Rather you must manage your content effectively to promote its visibility and to avoid any overlap.

What is a content audit?

The first step to take is that of conducting a content audit. A content audit can be defined as an extensive examination of your existing digital content, assessing what you have, where it exists, how much there is etc.

From your research, it may be clear that there are areas of thin content. It can help you identify areas that you need to focus on or maybe even delete some things if they’re not necessary for the best marketing efforts!

Reasons you should conduct a content audit:

To understand your website visitor’s journey and map content to that journey – There is a good chance that there might be gaps somewhere in your website. A content audit will help you fill those gaps.

To decide what needs to be created, improved, consolidated or removed from your existing content inventory – which elements of the content need to be updated and how often. A content audit will help you determine the content mix needed for your website or blog, which elements of the site deserve more attention etc.

To understand how much original material is enough and what proportion of the existing pool of content can be repurposed – Content audits can help you cut down on the number of new pages that need to be created and enable a focus on those areas where your business can add most value.

To know how to best manage, organise and share content – Whether it’s working with an agency or consultant, developing a new content management strategy, building a more efficient content production schedule or deciding how to organise your content before distributing it, a content audit will help you with all of these.

To ensure that the most useful and relevant information is found – A Content audit can help you better understand your users’ behaviour on your website, what they are looking for when they visit different parts of the site etc. Which in turn means it’ll be easier for you to shape your content in a way that suits them.

To help with SEO – Performing a content audit will help you find ways to improve the search visibility of your website, which can result into an increase in organic traffic and conversion rates.

In order to be efficient, a content audit should be based on a thorough research of your website that will enable you to evaluate the performance of each piece of content.

What Types of Content to Include in your Audit

There are many different types of content on your website, and it’s important to audit every piece. This will give you an idea what needs improved, or updated with the latest facts & information – anything from blog posts to category & any main landing pages.

How to perform a content audit:

Gather all of your content

Gather all of your content in one place with a tool like Screaming Frog or SEMRush. You don’t have to dive through pages on the website and waste time guessing what’s there! Crawling your site with these tools can be an efficient way to find any content on it, even if you don’t know its there!

Collate & Analyse Results

To make your site more search engine friendly, it is important to start categorising the content on-site. By doing this you can spot recurring themes and get an idea about existing focal points from crawled data such as URLs or meta information pulled through during crawling process which helps in SEO best practice deficiency diagnosis for any page/post individually with ease!

This will also give insight into existing focal points on websites with regards to SEO best practices & the information provided, may offer insights in ways to help improve ranking positions for certain phrases or keywords

Keep Content Fresh & Up-To-Date

Keeping your content audit up-to date is a sure way of ensuring that you are able to produce and publish engaging posts, blog articles or Pillar pages consistently.

This will help you and the rest of the team by saving you time by consistently improving content n an existent basis, which in turn will reduce the need for major work every time you run a new content audit.

Conclusion

You now know everything you need to make a successful content audit and see huge results. We can help transform your digital marketing efforts with simple, effective strategies that will save time while vastly improving site performance!

We all know how hard it is to stay on top of our game in the digital world. We can help you with that! Our team has spent years developing strategies for successful content audits, get in touch today!