What is a content audit?
Content Audit
A content audit is a complete inventory and assessment of all the indexable content on your website, including lead gen landing pages, blog posts, articles, white papers, ebooks, checklists, FAQs, videos, presentations, infographics, tools and more.
The content audit process includes taking inventory of a website’s content and allows you to analyze the breadth of content you have on your site. An audit provides insight into actions that should be taken to address existing content. That is, what content should be updated and strengthened, merged, deleted altogether, or left “as is.”
A thorough content audit will provide you with a full understanding of your content assets, and a fresh awareness of how they fit into your digital marketing strategy. Your analysis will then help you understand which types of new content you should focus on going forward.
Why Does My Website Need a Content Audit?
If your goals are related to technical SEO, and making sure that the technical details of your content are helping your website be more visible, then check out this page about how to optimize your website. This article details how to conduct a technical, SEO-driven content audit, that can support your content marketing goals overall.
As you are deciding whether you need a content audit right now, and what your goals will be in the process, you may want to research a couple of tools that can help you along the way. These can save you some time and manual effort so you can get to the results faster and start implementing those next steps right away.
Ubersuggest
Especially if you are looking to improve your SEO, Ubersuggest can help you see how well your website is performing overall. Just enter your URL, click “Search,” and click “Site Audit” on the left. Think of this as a quick, free overall look at how your website is doing.
Google Analytics
Broken Link Checkers
Content Inventory
You could manually pull each content link associated with your website, but that could take far too long and you could risk overlooking some things. Instead, you may want to try a content inventory link such as Blaze, DynoMapper, or ContentWRX Audit.
You’ve run your content audit. Now, take action.
Get rid of stuff
Circulate the content you’ve marked as ROT to the people who own it. Make it clear to them how the evidence from the audit backs up your decision. Tell them it’ll be removed by a certain date if they can’t tell you why it needs to stay. Make sure senior leaders will back you up.
Content improvement
Even if you’re lucky enough to remove the ROT, you’ll still be left with lots of content that needs improving. Your content audit will show you where to focus your efforts.
For instance, you can prioritise pages that get high volumes of traffic but that scored low for usability. Or pages with high bounce rates that scored low for actionability. You’ve got the data now to make informed decisions.
There’s a bit of work to do before you start editing content. You’ll need an idea of exemplary content to model your improvements on. Your content audit can show you the good stuff as well as the bad. Use this to create your recommendations for style, structure, and tone of voice.
Allocate resources
Your audit can help show you who’s doing what on your website: who’s publishing, who is editing and who is making strategic decisions. It can show the content that’s not being managed or maintained by anyone.
You’ll need to make sure that every piece of content has an owner – someone responsible for looking after it, and that every owner is the right person for the job, not just someone who’s acquired content by default.
Source:
https://terakeet.com/blog/content-audit/
https://neilpatel.com/blog/content-audit/
https://gathercontent.com/blog/run-perfect-content-audit
How to Do a Content Audit (5-Step Guide Template)
What is a content audit?
Content Audit
A content audit is a complete inventory and assessment of all the indexable content on your website, including lead gen landing pages, blog posts, articles, white papers, ebooks, checklists, FAQs, videos, presentations, infographics, tools and more.
The content audit process includes taking inventory of a website’s content and allows you to analyze the breadth of content you have on your site. An audit provides insight into actions that should be taken to address existing content. That is, what content should be updated and strengthened, merged, deleted altogether, or left “as is.”
A thorough content audit will provide you with a full understanding of your content assets, and a fresh awareness of how they fit into your digital marketing strategy. Your analysis will then help you understand which types of new content you should focus on going forward.
Step 1: Create a List of Your Content Assets
The first step is to organize a list of all of your website’s content. While you could put in the elbow grease to do this manually, I highly recommend that you save time and energy by using a free tool like Screaming Frog. This extractor tool will analyze your website to find all of its content, metrics, and data. You can download it here. Begin by entering a URL into the search bar and hitting the “Analyze” button. Give this a few minutes. Next, filter by “HTML” and click the export button beside the dropdown menu to download the results as a CSV. We want to audit pages and not other information that will cause clutter. Upload the file to Google drive and it will look like this: I know it looks confusing, but I’ll clarify everything later.
If you do not have it already, sign up for a free account and connect a website. You will need to verify the domain afterward. Then, select the “Performance” tab and ensure that “Average CTR” and “Average position” are both enabled. Click the export button on the top of the page and choose the CSV option.
Resource:
https://terakeet.com/blog/content-audit/
https://coschedule.com/blog/content-audit-template