Stephanie Donelson

When I hear the word “audit” I immediately think of taxes and being bored to tears by reviewing countless documents, lines of text, and compiling data sets.

But content audits don’t have to be soul sucking! They can be fun and they can be very educational as you map out your content plans and marketing strategy for 2020. 

A content audit is comprised of two major pieces:

• A content inventory: A list or document with all of your content pieces for that year
• A content audit: The actual analysis of your inventory and each piece’s individual performance

A content audit can help you quickly see all the pieces you produced in 2019 and their performance so you can better guide your 2020 strategy by investing in pieces that drove action. 

5 steps to running a content audit

1. Set goals for your content audit

Now, don’t just run an audit just to do it or show that you tracked your inventory. You’ll want to tie actionable goals to your audit process otherwise you’re wasting your time and resources. 

Some content audit goals could include:

• Identifying ways to improve your website’s organic search performance and SEO
• Identifying content that needs more links
• Learning more about your audience and what content they want more of
• Finding gaps in your sales funnel or missing content
• Better organizing of your site’s navigation and content structure
• Evaluate your brand’s messaging
• Identifying high traffic but low conversion pages
• Optimizing low conversion pages or lead gen content
• Developing new content pieces for next year
• Finding old, outdated content that needs to be removed

The benefits of running a content audit generally outweigh the tedious task of the actual audit by showing you:

• What content is performing well and what content needs further optimization, or needs to be retired
• What content your strategy is missing or needs to be built out more
• What content types (blogs, infographics, videos, podcasts, ebooks) work best for your audience
• How users navigate your site to find the content they want

2. Create an inventory of your content

Now it’s time to catalog your content. You can either use a tool like Screaming Frog to pull a report for you, or you can create your own spreadsheet or Word doc with your content catalogued. 

Sort and organize your content and include:

• The content’s URL
• Content title
• Content type (landing page, blog, ebook, FAQs)
• Content summary
• Date published
• Author
• Buyer’s journey stage/buyer persona
• CTA (did you push a specific action like a newsletter subscription, contact us form, or to download or trial something?)
• Metadata (page title, meta description, H1-H5s, targeted keyword terms)
• Pageviews for the year
• Bounce rate
• Time spent on page
• Conversion rate
• Page value
• Social metrics (likes, comments, shares)

3. Rate your content

If it helps, you could assign a letter grade to your content that is drawing in a lot of traffic, gets  high engagement, and has a high conversion rate. That way you can quickly see what content is performing well by sorting content by A, B, C, D, or F grades.

You’ll need to pick the right mix of metrics for your brand to assign a grade or just based on instinct from what you know your audience engages with and what drives conversions.

4. Analyze

Now it’s time to analyze and pull key takeaways from your data sets. Are there any patterns or trends to what content performs well? Can you set benchmarks for next year’s measurement? Take a deep dive into your data to understand where your marketing efforts are excelling and where they need some serious TLC. 

5. Action items

Finally, it’s time to take your lessons learned and work them into next year’s content marketing strategy. 

Ask yourself:

• What successful content can we repurpose next year?
• What content needs optimization?
• What new content can we create?
• Do we need to change our buyer personas or provide more content for one step of the buyer’s journey? 

These questions will help make sure you’ve got a full editorial calendar for the year, are providing quality content pieces, and know how to drive conversions. 

A content audit is designed to show you how this past year went, set benchmarks for success, and identify areas of opportunity for the year ahead. It’s an important part of your overall strategy and can uncover some truths about your audience and your content so you can do better next year. 

Any tips you’d share for running a content audit? Tell me in the comments below or over on Twitter!