For a maximum of the brands, the method and way of content marketing turn out to be quite complicated and difficult. If you are seeing to start on the way of content marketing, you will most possibly have a similar experience. To make sure that the mission becomes successful for your business, you must start carrying out a website content audit.

The process of a content audit will need you to have a look at the current content on your site. You will need to ensure that the content is precise, engaging, and related to your brand.

A content auditor should search for the efficacy of the content on the site and fill the gaps. Moreover, by this auditing, you will get to know which part of the content is outdated or no more useful to targeted visitors.

You can enhance the efficiency of your brand’s content marketing strategies as per the outcome of the audit.

Auditing content is an endless process. You need to assess your content’s value frequently if you want to reach your content marketing goals.

Fundamental Facts Regarding Content Audit

In this step, you need to obtain a few basic information regarding the content. Preferably, at this point, you need to collect the following data for every piece of content your website contains.

• URL
• Total Time
• Author
• The teams and individuals included in the content creation process (SEO team, content team, etc)
• Title
• Date
• Word Count
• Content Goal ( the reason for making the content)
• Type of content (Infographic, blog post, case study, and so on)
• Comments
• Shares

Audit Your Past Content

Prior to auditing your existing data, you should audit your past content. Acknowledging the performance of previous content will make it simpler for you to grasp what kind of content your website needs. Moreover, you will know the kind of content you should add to the website.

You have to determine how old data is and accordingly, you need to audit and find out how good or poor the content performed at that time.

This step would need you to collect the URLs of all the content utilized on your site in the last year. However, you will not need to do this job manually. There are various tools available in the market that can gather all the URLs for a given period.

Endless Content Audits

On completion of auditing your past content, you will need to do the same for new content as well. This will be endless process and the audits should take place regularly (for instance: each week ).

Weekly audits are suggested because they will make the auditing task quite simpler for you. As you will be assessing the content each week, you can do the essential changes right away. This will restrict the formation of backlogs and the website will remain up to date.

Also Read: 5 Google Ranking Signals Content Marketers Need to Know

Few Metrics You Must Track For a Successful Content Audit

Organic Traffic: Websites that contain high-quality content will automatically obtain organic traffic. This signifies that your end-audience or targeted audience will come across your content organically. You won’t require spending any extra amount on advertising.

In case you are unable to generate any organic or unpaid search traffic, there must be few complications with your content. The most general ones are:

• Wrong method of content distribution
• Wrong strategy for content creation
• Low-quality content
• Inappropriate type of content

Backlinks: Backlinks that do not add reliability to your content will do more harm to your website than doing any good. You should track each and every backlink your content creates regularly.

As time passes, the backlinks tend to change. For instance, while you publish your first article, there may be around 3 to 4 backlinks. After seven days, there may be over 10 backlinks. After a year, you may see over 500 backlinks to your content.

But, you should understand that out of 500 backlinks, over 450 could be possibly dangerous for your site. Hence, you must get rid of those 450 links as soon as possible.

Weekly content audits will help you to eliminate the harmful links before they begin to negatively impact your search engine rankings.

Time Spent On Page: Let’s suppose that you have published around 2500 words article on your site. If you observe that the visitors on that 2500 words content page are spending only 20 seconds on an average then consider it as a warning. This displays that your end- audience or target audience doesn’t like the content.

Unique Visitors: In order to raise the number of views, you must obtain unique visitors. The more number of views that your content gets, the higher will be your ROI (Return of Investment) via backlinks, engagement, conversions, and shares.

Pages Visited Per Session: If your readers are not reading a few pages on your website, then you should rethink doing changes to the contents of those pages.

Traffic Sources: In order to get results from your content marketing strategies, you will have to search out the sources from where your content is receiving traffic.

For example, if you notice that a huge part of the traffic is originating from Facebook, then you should begin posting furthermore content on your brand’s Facebook page. If you observe that your email newsletters are unable to build adequate traffic, it’s possibly the right time to revamp the emails.

Conversions: If your anticipating a freshly published content to generate 100 conversions in the coming months, then you should closely observe the content’s performance frequently.

Preferably, you should make a note of the number of conversions it is making each week.

While in the first week, the number of conversions may not be more than two. But its too early to edit or discard your content. Keep on auditing the content every week. If you observe that number of weekly conversions isn’t going past 10 or 15, then you should rethink doing changes to the content.

Also Read: Few Exceptional Ways to Protect Your Content From Plagiarism

Analyze The Gathered Data and Gaps

On successful tracking of the above metrics, you need to begin analyzing the gathered data and the discovered gaps.

While checking for the data, ensure that you can discover the trends. For example, find out if all the high performing blog posts on your website belongs to a specific niche. Or are the articles of a particular length performing better than the others?

Moreover, check for the data to discover gaps in the content. You may observe that there is nothing much you can do with your content at present. Or you may also observe the need to write on furthermore subjects. Regardless of what your finding might be, you should make new content based on those subjects.

On realizing the good and the bad of your content, you will have to plan on how you should progress.

The outcome of the audit will most possibly tell you that some content is not doing well and it should not be there on your website. It’s quite normal, you shouldn’t get rejected if you observe that services/products pages are not ranking for a specific set of keywords. Additionally, you shouldn’t panic if you see that your blog posts are not getting any views.

The best part of the content audit is that it gives you the opportunity of identifying what’s wrong with your content. This, as a result, will help you to plan your next moves more cautiously.

For example, you can utilize the data fetched from the audit to reoptimize your blog posts and web content for a new set of keywords. If you think that your web content is outdated or obsolete, you can modify it completely.

In short, each and every page on your website will encounter any of the below remedies:

• Stay as it is
• Will Undergo Enhancement
• Get Eliminated

Content Auditing is a time-consuming process. But, you should still use it as the sole method to measure the performance of the website precisely. You can break the whole process to make it easier. Take your own time to accomplish each step. This will assure that the audit will not hinder any other business operations you are associated with.

A content audit is an endless process. Hence, even if you are not ready to do each week, you will have to do it at least every month. If you are not keen on doing the job yourself, you can hire a professional to do it on your behalf. However, having content audits will help your site in all aspects and it is a vital process to be executed to sustain the authenticity of the website and your published content.

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