If you consult a seasoned content or growth manager, they suggest conducting a content audit every 3-6 months. Regular upgradation of content should be monitored weekly or monthly, depending on the company’s policy. However, if you want to create a substantial and attractive platform, you must emphasize the need for content audits. Websites and platforms that are constantly updating their libraries and written content must get the audit done monthly. Though content auditing is a robust activity, it greatly benefits the developer and content managers.
A robust content audit can provide short-term benefits such as improved user experience (UX), better project management, and increased SEO rankings. By analyzing your current content, you can identify gaps, weaknesses, and opportunities for improvement. Additionally, an audit can help you better understand how users interact with your content, allowing you to optimize it for the best possible engagement. Furthermore, an audit can help you determine which content should be kept, archived, or deleted, providing an effective way to manage your site’s content.
The long-term gains from the audit can have long-term benefits like improved website performance, better user experience, and more efficient content production. Content audits can help to ensure that content is produced promptly and kept up to date. Content audits can provide long-term benefits by improving website performance, user experience, and content production. It’s best to take third-party content editors on board before initiating the audit process.
Most content uploading is minimized during the audit process, and the published content is analyzed and rectified in every direction. If you haven’t tested and audited your content, it’s an ideal time for making amends and reaping better website performance and ROI simultaneously.
What Is Content Auditing?
If you have thoroughly evaluated, checked, and verified published content, you have conducted a content audit. A content audit has endless benefits if you have experienced its potential outcomes. Whether educational, marketing, informative, geographical, or any content online, it needs to be regularly evaluated to understand parameters associated with SEO and other content-driven parameters. Marketers involved in content marketing are held responsible when a piece of content causes malfunction to a website and disturbs its overall processing.
If you want to keep your website among the top Google searches, you must implement optimization strategies regularly. While conducting an audit, the auditor or the content manager keeps business goals and deliverables aligned with the outcomes or ROI. When auditing, individuals tend to carry out a pre and post-trend analysis to understand the topic’s compatibility. If you talk about robust search engines like Google, you will know that Google’s algorithm complies with the trends and what people are searching for.
Steps for Conducting a Content Audit
Like financial audits and reviews, the content audit is also a detailed and time-absorbing process. Therefore, you must select an ideal time according to your feasibility and capacity. If you are looking to get a third-party audit done, you get assistance from content auditors working on a freelance basis. Mentioned below are steps for conducting an in-depth audit.
Gather Existing Content
Start by collecting all of the existing content you plan to evaluate. This may include anything from webpages to brochures, blog posts, videos, and more. However, you will have to set priorities and benchmarks, as you can’t apply everything in a single go. Secondly, it’s best to synchronize your content with a timeline, giving you a rough idea about your posting schedule.
Establish a General Rubric and Criteria for Evaluation
Set criteria for evaluation so that you can consistently measure the effectiveness of your content. Examples of criteria include relevancy, accuracy, value, and engagement. However, you can define more parameters depending on your content type, diversity, and audience. If you are using multiple linked platforms, you can set up different evaluation rubrics.
Analyze the Content
Analyzing the content you have gathered is the most critical element of your audit. To determine which pieces meet your criteria for evaluation, you will need to go through every piece of literature. If you have uploaded visual, graphical, and written content, you must accept that not every content type will get ranked on Google. However, if you are passionate that your blogs, articles, FAQs, and videos get ranked on Google’s first page, you must prepare distinct content for every aspect.
Create an Inventory
Creating an inventory of all the evaluated content will help you keep track of your work. Moreover, writing short and long notes about the content’s performance is advised. Make sure that you revise your inventory once the audit is completed and you’re able to highlight specific content which isn’t performing well or has fewer impressions.
Secondly, if you run a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign, you can align the performance indicators and click ratio with the specific content.
Review and Update Content
Reviewing the content in your inventory and updating it is considered the essential process of the entire audit. Hence, you must take your consultants, content managers, and the loop before initiating this process. Updating content might sound easy, but one should do in-depth research about trending keywords and trends before optimizing and uploading the content. For upcoming pages, you can use the same in your blogs, videos, and meta descriptions.
Track performance
Performance tracking can be done by using updated dashboards available online and through custom-made templates. Track the performance of your content over time to gain insights into what is working and what needs to be improved. This will help you make more informed decisions about future content.
Benefits of Content Audit
- Content audit helps identify and bridge gaps in content to ensure that all content is up-to-date and optimized.
- A content audit can uncover issues such as duplicate content, which can help improve SEO rankings and increase website traffic.
- It helps identify opportunities for content expansion, such as adding new pages, elements, or topics to cover.
- It can also help improve content effectiveness, which can lead to increased conversions and a higher return on investment (ROI).
Conclusion
If you are planning your website or digital platform budget, you must allocate some amount for an audit. A content audit might sound wage to individuals confident about their content’s overall quality, but a content audit opens doors to opportunities.