What’s a Content Audit and Why Do You Need One?
What is your content strategy and is it working?
If you’re not sure, you need a content audit. Like any other kind of audit, a content audit is an investigation into what is going on. Have your blogs been driving traffic? Are your emails converting? Are your white papers getting attention?
What is a Content Audit?
A content audit is an opportunity to refine your strategy and check-in on how you’re progressing towards your goals. What, exactly, you’ll be doing during a content audit depends on what content you’re focusing on and what your goals are. Therefore, there’s no single answer to how you should perform a content audit. However, we can give you some general advice on what a content audit should include.
What Should a Content Audit Include?
There are three general things your content audit should involve:
- A review of your goals: First, remind yourself of what your goals are and assess if you’ve made ground towards achieving them. Simple metrics like conversions, web traffic and other interactions with your content are good indicators.
- An analysis of each content piece: Ideally, you’ll look at every single piece of content you’ve created and assess how well it is performing based on the metrics that matter to you. This may include which pieces received comments or feedback or which ones had higher hits. It can be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be. The more you dig into the weeds of specific metrics, the better chance that you come away with useful insights. If you don’t have much time, just assessing your best and worst performing pieces in each content type can give you a lot of quick insight.
- Opportunities for growth: Don’t limit your content to thinking about only what you’ve done. To get even better results you need to think about new strategies you can try out. Maybe this is investing in a new type of content, or a new set of topics.
Why Get a Content Audit?
Content marketing is a lot of work. You want to be sure that the time and money you’re investing in your content is paying off. Regular content audits are the best way to check up on your work and separate the effect of your content marketing from the effects of your other marketing efforts.
Taking stock of your content can also help you refine your strategy, so that you get even better results. During your audit you may find that a certain topic just isn’t attracting attention. Perhaps even a whole type of content, from email marketing to producing white papers, just isn’t getting the results you need to justify doing it.
On the other hand, you may find that some topics are doing much better than expected, or that your ROI on blogs is great and you should do even more of them. In this way, a content audit helps you focus on the aspects of content marketing that are working for your business and drop the aspects that aren’t.
While it’s possible to do a content audit yourself, you can get even more out of it if you partner with a professional. A professional can help you understand which metrics are really important for your business. Or, they can help you see the content opportunities you have, based on what has been working for you so far.
If you’re looking for some help with your content audit, contact us today!