How To Run A Content Audit?
Published on January 6, 2025 by Anisha Patel
If your website is packed with content but you’re not getting traffic or conversions, I think its time to run a content audit. It will help you find our what is working, what is not working and what can be optimised for better results.
If you never did any content audit and what to learn how to effectively do one, this blog is for you. I will help you understand what a content audit is, what are its benefits and how to run a content audit.
At Provocn, we’ve tackled this challenge for our clients and transformed their underperforming content into high-impact assets. Let’s get into it.
What Is Content Audit?
Content audit is the process of evaluating and analyzing all the content on your website or any other digital platform. It is done to check the performance, quality and relevance of the content produced.
The main goal is to identify content that is outdated, underperforming, no longer useful or missing. It helps in identifying opportunities for optimizing or repurposing content.
A content audit typically involves reviewing elements such as text, images, SEO performance, engagement metrics, and alignment with business goals.
By regularly auditing your content you can streamline your content strategy with your business goals, improve user experience and enhance overall website performance.
You can include these in your content audit process:
- Blogs
- Landing pages
- Product/service pages
Benefits of Content Audit
A content audit offers several key benefits that can significantly improve your content strategy. Some of them are:
- Improved SEO: By identifying underperforming content and optimizing it for better keywords, meta descriptions, and internal links, you can enhance search engine rankings and organic traffic.
- Enhanced User Experience: Auditing content will help you identify outdated and irrelevant which you can improve and provide a more engaging, informative experience for your visitors.
- Better Content Strategy: A content audit highlights gaps in content, helping you create more targeted and relevant content that aligns with customer needs and business goals.
- Higher Conversion Rates: By optimizing content you improve conversion opportunities, turning more visitors into leads or customers.
- Consistency Across Channels: Content audit can help you keep consistent messaging, tone, and branding across all channels.
How To Do A Content Audit?
- Step 1: Set clear goals
- Step 2: Analyse your existing content
- Step 3: Evaluate content performance
- Step 4: Identify content gaps
- Step 5: Access content alignment with goals
- Step 6: Categorise content
- Step 7: Develop an action plan
- Step 8: Implement changes and monitor
- Step 9: Regular audits
A content audit helps evaluate the performance and effectiveness of your existing content to identify areas for improvement, opportunities for repurposing, and gaps in your strategy. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to conduct a content audit:
Step 1: Set Clear Goals
First thing first, setting clear goals. Determine why you’re conducting the content audit. Do you want to improve SEO or update outdated content or analyze content performance or improve user engagement.
Some most common goals for content audit can be:
- Increasing traffic
- Enhancing user engagement
- Boosting conversions
- Aligning content with business objectives
Having well-defined clear goals will guide your entire content audit process and make sure you focus on the areas that matter the most to your business.
Step 2: Analyze Your Existing Content
With complete clarity about goals, lets take our step step. Make a list of your entire existing content across your website, blog, social media, email campaigns, and any other platforms.
Use tools like Google Analytics, Screaming Frog, or content management systems (CMS) such as WordPress to help with this process.
Segregate them into different formats such as blog posts, videos, case studies, whitepapers, infographics, podcasts, and more.
Now, organize the data using a spreadsheet or content audit tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, or Excel, and include details such as content titles, URLs, content types, publish dates, authors, and key performance indicators (KPIs) like page views, social shares, or leads.
You can use this Excel template to audit your content:
/IMAGE
Step 3: Evaluate Content Performance
Next, you need to do the evaluation. Measure the performance of your content by examining key metrics. Start with broader metrics such as traffic.
1. Measure Traffic Metrics:
- Total Traffic: It tells you about the overall traffic to your website or individual content pieces. This includes looking at total visitors over a specific time period (monthly, quarterly).
- Traffic Sources: It tells you where the traffic is coming from. Whether it’s organic search, paid ads, social media, direct visits or referrals from other websites. This can help identify which marketing channels are driving the most traffic to your content.
- Top-Performing Pages: It tells you about the pages that receive the most traffic. It can indicate which content is liked by your audience. If a page is unexpectedly drives high traffic, you can analyze and replicate it.
2. Align Traffic with Business Goals:
- Relevance to Business Goals: Once you’ve identified which pages are attracting the most traffic, find out if those pages align with your business goals. For example:
- If your goal is to increase sales, check if the pages with highest traffic are linked to your sales pages or calls-to-action (CTAs).
- If your goal is brand awareness, check if the content generating traffic focuses on topics that position your brand effectively in the market.
- Conversion Metrics: Getting high traffic is good. But its not enough. You also need to analyze whether the traffic is converting (signing up for a newsletter, making a purchase, downloading a resource). For pages with high traffic but low conversion rates, you can need to adjust CTAs or optimize the user experience.
3. Analyze Engagement Metrics:
- Bounce Rate: The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave a page without interacting with it or navigating to other pages on the site. A high bounce rate indicates that the content isn’t engaging enough or that users aren’t finding what they expected. However, a high bounce rate on specific types of content (like blog posts or landing pages) may not always be a bad sign. In those cases, it’s important to know whether the content is still serving its purpose or not.
- Time on Page: A longer time on page usually indicates that the content is engaging and users are reading it thoroughly. If users spend very little time on a page, it could be a sign that the content is either too difficult to digest or not offering the value the visitors expected.
- Pages per Session: This metric shows how many pages visitors view in a single session. If a visitor views multiple pages, it indicates that the content is exciting them to explore further. If visitors aren’t clicking through to more pages, it could mean that the content or navigation isn’t encouraging them for further engagement.
- Scroll Depth: This tells you how far down the page users are scrolling. A low scroll depth may suggest that the content isn’t holding their attention long enough, or they’re not finding what they’re looking for as they scroll.
4. Engagement Actions (Social Shares, Comments):
- Social Shares: Look at how often your content is shared on social media platforms. This can indicate that people find your content valuable or interesting enough to share with others, which is a strong sign of engagement and content relevance.
- Comments & Interactions: Check for any user comments, reviews, or interactions on your content. High levels of engagement in these areas can signal that the content resonates with your audience and encourages interaction.
5. Conversion Rate Analysis:
- Leads or Sales Generated: It tells how your content contributes to generating leads, sales, or other conversion actions (form submissions, downloads). If traffic is high but conversions are low, there may be a disconnect between the content and the target audience’s intent.
- CTA Performance: It tells how well your calls-to-action (CTAs) are performing. Are they leading users to the next step in the conversion funnel (sign-ups, downloads, purchases)? If not, you may need to adjust your CTAs or content structure to make them more compelling.
By properly evaluating these performance metrics, you can understand how well your content is supporting your business goals, which pieces are performing best, and where improvements are needed.
4. Identify Content Gaps
You first set clear goals, then analyzed and evaluated your existing content. It’s time to identify content gaps. The best way to find gap is through your audience. Analyze their needs.
Are there topics your target audience is interested in that are missing from your content library?
You can use keyword research or gather feedback from your audience to pinpoint areas where content is lacking. You can also look at your competitors.
Additionally, find opportunities to repurpose or consolidate existing content.
For example, you may combine two related blog posts into a comprehensive guide or update old articles with fresh information to cover new aspects of a topic.
Filling these gaps can help you better serve your audience and strengthen your content strategy.
5. Assess Content Alignment with Goals
At this stage, analyze how well your content aligns with your business goals. You can create content marketing funnel to ensure that your content strategy supports your overall marketing and ultimately business goals.
Also, check for brand consistency. Ensure that your content follows your brand guidelines and maintains a consistent tone of voice across all platforms.
This is an extra step which will make your content resonates with your audience and supports your business goals.
6. Categorize Content
Now categorize the entire content into four groups: Keep, Update, Repurpose and Remove. This step will give you a clear picture of what needs to be done next.
- Keep: The content that remains relevant, performs well, and aligns with your goals. Continue to update and optimize this content regularly.
- Update: The content that is outdated, underperforming or could benefit from improvements. Refresh it with new data, restructure it for better readability, or republish it with SEO enhancements.
- Repurpose: The content that can be transformed into different formats, such as turning a blog post into a video, infographic, or podcast, to reach a broader audience.
- Remove: The content that is irrelevant, outdated, or no longer serves your objectives. For such content, consider removing it entirely or redirecting the pages using 301 redirects if they are still generating traffic.
7. Develop an Action Plan
Based on your findings, develop an action plan that focuses on improving your content strategy.
- # Step 1: Start updating and optimizing high-performing content to improve its SEO, ensuring it continues to attract traffic.
- #Step 2: Repurpose older content into new formats, such as turning blog posts into videos, infographics or podcasts to expand your reach.
- #Step 3: Create new content to fill any identified gaps or target high-potential keywords that align with your audience’s needs.
- #Step 4: Establish a content publishing schedule for regular updates and the introduction of fresh content to keep your strategy dynamic.
- #Step 5: Lastly, distribute your content through appropriate channels like social media, email newsletters and other platforms to maximize visibility and engagement.
Step 8: Implement Changes and Monitor
Create a schedule with deadline and implement the changes to improve the overall website performance. You can also update meta tags, add internal links to improve navigation, optimise headlines and improve CTAs.
Once changes are made, track results using your analytics tools. Keep monitoring the key metrics over time to find out how well the updated or new content is performing in terms of traffic, engagement, and conversions.
Step 9: Regular Audits
Every 6-12 months conduct regular audits. This practice will ensure that your content stays relevant, up-to-date, and most importantly aligned with your business goals.
Regular content audit will help you identify new opportunities for optimisation, discover emerging trends and evolve with your audience’s needs and preferences.
Final Words
No matter what you are looking for boost SEO, engage users, or increase conversions content audit is must for you as it can tell you what’s working, what’s not and where improvements are needed.
Regular content audit can transform your website from a normal website into a high-performing, results-driven website.
Whether you’re just starting or conducting audits on a regular basis, remember that the process is ongoing. Keep refining your content, repurpose where possible and always stay aligned with your goals.
If you follow this step by step process you’ll surely keep your content fresh, relevant, and impactful.
