Companies have seen a massive uptick in digital marketing as consumers flock to online platforms like Instagram and YouTube in the last few years. However, brands find it difficult to measure return on investment when so many people shift their loyalty away from traditional media outlets. Marketing professionals need an effective way to track how their efforts work across these different channels. A step is a solution they’ve been waiting for! With this tool, brands can easily monitor what’s working and what needs improvement by measuring user engagement metrics in real-time. Is your content a complete disaster?
It may or may not be high quality, but that does not imply a well-organized one. It also doesn’t mean that you’re creating all the appropriate material for your audience. Unfortunately, the fabric of most internet firms that utilize content marketing has flaws. Either the material isn’t doing as well as it should, or there isn’t any content on specific themes or keywords. Of course, this applies to successful and terrible firms, so don’t feel guilty if you don’t believe your content marketing is up to par. Instead, use this as a chance to strengthen your content marketing operations even more. So, where do you look for these flaws? As you may have guessed, a content audit is how you locate them.
A content audit aids in evaluating existing content and the development of future content strategies. In this piece, I’ll walk you through a five-step content audit that you may use (although there are many other effective content audit processes). Do you want more visitors to your website? Improve your traffic, leads, and income with the aid of a professional. Get started now.
Steps to content audit:
Step 1: Make a list of everything you’ve written.
The first thing you should do is assess your current situation. Next, you should make a list of URLs and save them in a spreadsheet. You may do this manually if you have a tiny site, but I recommend using tools like Screaming Frog to build a list. The free version will crawl up to 500 links on a site, so you should be good if your site isn’t too large. Otherwise, the premium edition, which is well worth the money for any serious marketer, is required. Then, in the text field at the top of the tool, enter a beginning URL and hit Start:
You can’t change the parameters inaccessible mode, but the defaults should suffice. Set the filter to HTML and export the results after it’s finished.
All URLs having a status code of “200” should be kept from this list. You can utilize a sitemap generator if you notice that you’re missing a lot of URLs, which is possible if your internal linking isn’t perfect. Enter your beginning URL again in the program I just linked you, and it will crawl up to 500 pages:
The findings may then be copied and pasted into a spreadsheet. It may be necessary to tidy them up a little, but it will work.
Step 2: Collect data and sort material into categories.
Now that you know what you have, it’s time to find out how it works. Although you wrote a post on “SEO for cats,” which was a subject you intended to cover, it doesn’t imply it’s receiving any traffic or doing anything with it. So the first major flaw that we’ll find is content that isn’t performing well.
A list of metrics that you may wish to gather is provided below. Make a column for each one in your spreadsheet. In addition, please feel free to add any more people or organizations that you care about:
- Content title – Take a page from Screaming Frog’s book.
- The length of the title is also available from Screaming Frog. Use it to check for titles that are too lengthy quickly. Remember that it has to be under 55-60 characters long to be seen entirely on Google. This may have an impact on your click-through rate (CTR).
- Write down the subject of each page in a category.
- Ranking for primary keyword (if available) — Note your current order for it if you’re targeting a keyword.
- A measure that will help you focus your SEO efforts in the future is search volume for the core term. It’s available via Google AdWords or any other keyword research tool.
- Monthly organic search traffic average — This information comes from Google Analytics. Choose a page under “Behavior.” Then, alongside Google, add a secondary ” source ” dimension and search for traffic data.
- Get the average monthly traffic from Google Analytics once again. Go to “Behavior” and choose a page to record the overall traffic number. Calculate an average for at least three months, if practicable.
- Meta description – Your meta description may significantly impact your click-through rate. For example, if your traffic is meager than the average monthly search volume, you may increase clicks by optimizing your meta description. This is also available through Screaming Frog.
- The bounce rate of organic search traffic – Go back to “Behavior,” choose a page, and add a secondary source dimension. Take note of the bounce rate data next to the Google row.
- Organic search traffic average time on page – Run the same report as before, but this time receive the average time on page.
- Several backlinks – Backlinks are an essential aspect of achieving good rankings. To determine the number of backlinks to each page, use a link database tool like Majestic or Ahrefs (which can be done in bulk).
- The number of root domains that connect – When calculating the number of backlinks, you should be able to collect this information. It notifies you whether the number of backlinks is overstated (i.e., 10,000 backlinks from one domain).
- URL rank – Different programs use different metrics to assess the overall quality of links (e.g., MozRank for OSE, URL rating for Ahrefs). Gain one to get an approximate notion of the authority of your page.
- Total social shares – this may be broken down further per network. Again, a tool like Sharetally may help you acquire this information.
It would be insane to accomplish all of this manually if you intend on completing many content audits or if you’re working on an extensive site. Like collecting numbers from Screaming Frog, some of it is simple to perform all at once. However, with a bit of technological know-how, all other tasks can be done in bulk (and automatically). Hire a programmer to create a simple tool that gets all of this information from several APIs, and you’ll save hours.
Step 3: Develop a detailed reader/customer profile.
We’ll move away from your content for this section and concentrate on your target audience. There are two elements to this phase.
- Part 1: Identify your audience: It’s a simple guideline of marketing: develop content that your target audience will like. It relates to social media marketing, content marketing, SEO, and other forms of digital marketing. However, it would be best if you first established who your reader is to do so. If you need assistance, look at this area of one of my ultimate manuals.
- Part 2: Find out what they’re passionate about: You may now begin to learn about and comprehend their interests. You may find out by looking at demographics (such as age, gender, and so on) and psychographics (what they believe in). Here’s a helpful primer that walks you through the most significant demographics and psychographics. After that, you should have a fully fleshed-out reader avatar.
- Part 3: Identify subjects and keywords based on your interests: It’s time to transform your target audience into content after you’ve got a decent idea of who they are (be as detailed as possible). Using essential keyword research tools is a brilliant place to start.
Then, to locate even more keywords and subject ideas, employ these advanced keyword research tools. You should keep track of these keyword and subject suggestions in a separate spreadsheet and any search traffic statistics. Please keep in mind that you are not restricted to these themes for content. You may be able to tell that the reader is interested in something that can’t be found based on your understanding of them. These subjects may still be included in the list; you’ll need to generate traffic from sources other than search engines.
Step 4: Perform a “gap” analysis.
We now have two spreadsheets to work with:
- One that contains all of your current staff (and metrics)
- One includes all of the material (or content concepts) that your intended reader is interested in.
It’s time to have a look at them all at once.
- Area 1: Determine what stuff you’re missing completely: This will have to be done manually and take a long time. Begin by combining your keyword and content ideas with existing material. You’re just duplicating the entire row from the first sheet and placing it precisely next to the term it matches. Here’s an example of what it may look like:
Most often, you’ll discover towards the end that you don’t have any matching material for any of the content/keyword suggestions. So you have a gap, which is a glaring concern. You’ll need to fill in the blanks, but that’ll come later.
- Area 2: Determine whatever material isn’t operating as expected: I barely discussed this earlier. If your present content isn’t bringing in any traffic, it’s almost as good as if it didn’t exist. That’s insufficient. The task at hand is to locate this underperforming material. I’m afraid I won’t be able to provide you with a particular formula. It all boils down to personal preference. For some sites, 200 monthly visits to a piece of content are terrible, while for others, it’s fantastic.
In addition to the total quantity of traffic your material receives, there are two additional important aspects to consider:
- Its search engine results
- Its search traffic potential
If a page ranks in the fourth to tenth spots, it isn’t receiving much traffic. You might quickly type in the top three with a little more effort and get more visitors. But you must also decide if the action is worthwhile. It’s more likely if the term receives a few thousand searches each month. What if it gets 20 votes? Most likely not. At this stage, all you want to do is point out whatever material isn’t receiving a lot of attention. After that, we’ll put everything together.
Step 5: Come up with a new content plan.
The last stage is to develop a content plan that addresses all of the flaws discovered so far. It also requires a significant amount of physical labor and cautious thinking.
- Step 1: Create an action column: It’s time to expand your spreadsheet with a new column. I recommend putting it right at the start. You’ll add a final label to this column that reflects the action you wish to take on it.
Again, you may use whatever labels you like, but here are some suggestions:
- “Leave” – No adjustments are required since the post is functioning well.
- “Create” — A default label for any unfilled content idea.
- “Merge” – You may have many pieces of material for a single subject (it happens if your content is not well organized). It’s typically preferable to combine them into a single best version.
- “Enhance” – You’ll want to improve your content if it’s underperforming.
To achieve this, you’ll need to go through each notion.
- Step 2: Create a priority column: You still have one more column to fill out. It should be placed immediately next to the action column. Some of the chasms are wider than others. It makes sense to start with the more significant gaps and work your way down to the smaller ones. You’ll give a priority from 1 to 10 to each action (excluding “leave”) (10 being the highest). It would help if you considered the factors we discussed, such as the possibility of SEO traffic. If a piece of content has the potential to bring in a lot of new visitors, it should be given top priority and modified or developed as quickly as feasible. Finally, make a to-do list: Arrange all activities into priority order after completing your sheet. Then, in order of importance, establish your content marketing objectives, activities, and resources to fill these holes.
Conclusion
There can never be a “full” collection of material; there will always be some gaps. So, regularly, do a content audit to uncover your significant flaws. It’s a lot of effort, leading to even more work (acting on your findings), but it’s a very effective strategy to increase your content marketing outcomes.
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