Why You Should Explore A Content Audit For Your Brand
Content auditing is crucial to SEO, ROI tracking, and content marketing. Content audits can help optimize websites for search engine rankings, reader engagement, and overall website performance. In this blog post, we will explore the process of performing a content audit, the goals and categories for optimization, and the tools and video platforms for business engagement. By the end of this post, we will better understand content auditing and how to use it to our advantage.
A content audit requires optimization of several factors, including meta descriptions, images, internal & external links, page speed, etc., for improving rank.
Content Audits: A Must-Have Resource For Marketers
Anyone looking to improve their website's SEO (search engine optimization) should consider performing a content audit. Content audits are a planning resource that can help you organize your analytics, create a roadmap for future content creation, and identify trends that will help you determine which content you should prioritize writing.
Performing regular content audits has several benefits, including optimizing your website for search engine ranking, finding new opportunities to boost traffic to your site, improving web page comprehension from readers by updating outdated information or fixing broken links, and more.
As a content marketer, you know that generating quality content is key to success. However, generating high-quality content can be challenging – especially if you're not creating content on a regular basis. And because you may not have access to your audience to understand what they value most, you can end up creating content in a vacuum if you’re not careful. That's where a content audit comes in. A content audit is simply analyzing your website's content and ensuring it is working to its fullest potential. By doing this, you can ensure that your website provides valuable information to your audience and promotes your brand in the best way possible.
Several resources are available for conducting a Content Audit, including HubSpot's SEO Audit kit. This kit contains information about a variety of topics, including page types, canonical tags, sequencing code, page titles, focus keywords, and headline/title tags. By utilizing a tool like this, you’ll be able to better monitor your rankings and optimize your content over time. Ensure that your website's content is optimized for search engines and leads directly to success for your business.
Content Audit: Establish Goals And Categories For Optimization
Before you begin your content audit, having your goals in mind is vital. Content audits can be used to increase brand awareness, optimize pages for SEO, drive traffic and clicks, and many other objectives. However, the audit will be easier and more manageable with a clear understanding of your goals. Have that figurative North star to guide you in your efforts and once you have your goal, work back from there.
To begin the audit, you’ll likely want to gather a backlog of all relevant content and create an inventory using spreadsheets or an online tool like SEMrush. Doing so will help you track metrics for different pieces of content, which you can use to measure success. Once you have your list of content and you can identify them by category or topic, use this spreadsheet to evaluate the effectiveness of each piece of content toward your overall objectives.
A spreadsheet should be created to analyze the data into relevant categories that meet specific goals at the beginning of the audit process. For example, you can analyze blog posts by topic or category, analyze blog posts for engagement (e.g., likes, shares), or analyze blog posts for SEO purposes (e.g., keywords used). When analyzing results, it is important to scan for patterns, trends, and connections which may indicate happy accidents impacting performance (i.e., "a correlation isn't necessarily causation"). Finally, creating action items – such as deleting, updating, or rewriting blog posts by ranking them according to priority or timeline considerations previously established during the audit process is always a good idea.
For example, if one goal of your content audit is to increase brand awareness, then key metrics you’d want to look at could include page views, keyword density, social media shares, likes, and comments. Suppose another goal of yours is to improve SEO rankings. In that case, things you would want to evaluate could include keyword strategy, time spent on page, page descriptions and on-page optimization, such as link building.
A tool like SEMrush makes it easy for marketers to complete a comprehensive audit in three steps by simply entering the desired domain & connecting an analytics account like Google Analytics to see more information about sitemaps & engaging posts from audience-related data, which all help inform strategic decisions.
In Summary
A content audit can be a powerful tool not only in your content marketing efforts, but also for SEO, and tracking ROI. It can help you optimize your website for search engine rankings, identify what blog posts of yours are garnering the most engagement, and your website’s overall performance. To perform a content audit correctly, you must understand the process of conducting an audit, the goals and categories for optimization, and how to analyze the data gathered from a content audit to create actionable items to ensure success in your content marketing efforts. Now that you have learned about a little bit about putting together a content audit, you can take the next steps in conducting your own.
