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Conducting a Content Audit: What's Working, What's Not

Over time, as you publish more and more content on your website, it's easy to lose track of what you have. Your site can become cluttered with blog posts that are outdated, underperforming, or no longer relevant to your business goals.

A content audit is the process of systematically reviewing and analyzing all of the content on your website. It's like doing a "spring cleaning" for your content.

The goal of an audit is to get a clear and objective picture of your content's performance so you can make strategic decisions about what to keep, what to improve, and what to remove. A regular content audit is a crucial part of any mature content marketing strategy.

Why Should You Conduct a Content Audit?

  • It Improves SEO: By identifying and improving or removing low-quality, "unhelpful" content, you can increase the overall quality score of your website in the eyes of Google.
  • It Reveals What's Working: An audit helps you to identify your top-performing content so you can understand what topics and formats resonate most with your audience and create more of what works.
  • It Identifies Content Gaps: It can help you to see what topics you haven't covered yet that are important to your audience.
  • It Streamlines Your Content Strategy: It provides the data you need to make informed decisions about your future content creation efforts.

How to Conduct a Simple Content Audit

You don't need a complex, 100-hour process. For most small businesses, a simple content audit can be done in a few steps.

Step 1: Create a Content Inventory

The first step is to create a list of all the content on your website (or at least a specific section, like your blog).

  • How to do it: You can use a website crawler tool to crawl your website and export a list of all your URLs into a spreadsheet. You can also get a list of your top landing pages from Google Analytics.
  • Your Spreadsheet: Your spreadsheet should have a column for the URL of each piece of content.

Step 2: Gather Your Key Performance Metrics

For each URL in your spreadsheet, you need to pull in some key data to help you analyze its performance. You should look at a significant time period, like the last 12 months.

  • Key Metrics to Collect:
    • Organic Traffic: How many users did the page get from organic search? (from Google Analytics)
    • Conversions: How many leads or sales did the page generate? (from Google Analytics)
    • Backlinks: How many other websites are linking to this page? (from Google Search Console or another backlink checker tool)
    • Date Published/Updated: When was the content last updated?

Step 3: Analyze the Data and Assign an Action

Now, go through your spreadsheet row by row and analyze each piece of content. Based on its performance, assign one of four possible actions to it.

Action 1: Keep (It's Working Well)

  • What it is: This is your high-performing content. It gets good traffic, has good engagement, and might even be generating conversions or backlinks.
  • Your Action: Leave this content as is. These are your star players. Your goal is to figure out why they are so successful so you can replicate that success.

Action 2: Update / Consolidate (It Has Potential)

  • What it is: This content is on a good topic and might be getting some traffic or ranking for "striking distance" keywords, but it's not performing as well as it could be. It might be outdated, not comprehensive enough, or poorly optimized.
  • Your Action: This is your biggest opportunity. These posts are perfect candidates for a content refresh.
    • Update the information to be current.
    • Expand the content to make it more in-depth.
    • Improve the on-page SEO.
    • If you have multiple, short, similar posts on the same topic, you can consolidate them into one "ultimate guide" and redirect the old URLs to the new one.

Action 3: Remove / Prune (It's Not Working)

  • What it is: This is low-quality, outdated, or irrelevant content that gets little to no traffic and provides no value to your audience.
  • Your Action: In the age of Google's Helpful Content Update, this "unhelpful" content can actually drag down the authority of your entire site. In many cases, the best action is to delete it.
  • Important: When you delete a page, you must 301 redirect its URL to another relevant page on your site (like a related blog post or the main blog page) to avoid creating a broken link.

Action 4: No Action Needed

  • Some pages, like your privacy policy or contact page, don't need to be optimized for traffic. You can simply note that no action is needed for these.

How Often Should You Do a Content Audit?

A full, in-depth content audit is a significant project and should be done at least once a year. This regular check-up will keep your content library healthy, relevant, and performing at its best.

Conclusion

A content audit is a powerful strategic exercise that helps you to make data-driven decisions about your content. It allows you to clear out the clutter, identify your star performers, and find the hidden gems that, with a little bit of work, could become major drivers of traffic and leads for your business. It's the key to turning a simple blog into a high-performing content marketing machine.

Disclaimer

The information provided on this website is for general informational purposes only and may contain inaccuracies or outdated data. While we strive to provide quality content, readers should independently verify any information before relying on it. We are not liable for any loss or damage resulting from the use of this content.

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