How to Perform a Content Audit

If you want your business to succeed in the digital age, optimizing content is critical. While you’re creating, posting, and optimizing content, are you ever checking in to see how content is performing?

Your website is full of content that is read by consumers and crawled and indexed by search engines. By producing great content that keeps your consumers intrigued, they’re likely to keep coming back to your site while educating and nurturing them until they’re ready to make a decision. Content audits are also a great way to check how well the SEO on your site is functioning.

If you’re behind on your content audits or haven’t done one before, don’t worry. The team at Denamico has you covered. If you’re ready to do a content audit, you should think about splitting it into two sections, SEO and content marketing. Here’s our process for both.

How to Perform an SEO Audit

SEO audits help to find out the reasons why your content isn’t performing up to its abilities. These audits like these can uncover areas for improvement, and find weak points in your campaign. Think of it as a system check-up for your site.

What are the five ways to audit your sites SEO?

1. Strategic Objective

Finding your strategic objectives is the very first thing you should do when planning your SEO audit. This stage is your prep stage for everything SEO-related. Make sure you’re figuring out why you’re doing this audit and how you can achieve your goals for your site.

2. Keyword Usage Evaluation

Keyword evaluations come next, and figuring out if you’re using the right keyword is important. You should be checking your keywords quarterly to ensure they are quality. If you have winners, stick with them! If not, it’s time to change things up!

3. Competition Analysis

Any good, comprehensive audit will analyze the competition. It’s important to look at where your opposition is ranking and mainly, where it is not. Check to see if your keywords are too competitive. You can also see what content is performing well for your competitors. Finally, for your analysis, view the possibility of link opportunities. SEMrush and Google Search Console are perfect tools to use when looking for easy wins from the competition.

4. Technical Analysis

Search engines crawl sites like yours, and for your audit, you’ll want to replicate that with a tool like The Screaming Frog SEO Spider. Tools like this will help review your website as a whole to see if SEO is up to par.

5. Page Analysis

Page analysis will ensure your keyword-rich landing pages are optimized to their greatest potential. Run your copy through Copyspace first, then check to ensure your keywords are in the title, meta, and URL, and in the first few sentences! Content and page optimization for SEO are factors you'll want to take into account. Having strong content on your website will then produce an optimized site, which will help to drive traffic to your site.

How often should you be performing these audits? We like to perform SEO audits when we acquire a new client, and quarterly for existing clients.

How to Perform a Content Marketing Audit

Technically, a content marketing audit is a sixth type of SEO audit. But ultimately, you should do this no matter what! You’ll be able to view the strengths and weaknesses of your content, and learn how to evaluate future marketing content for SEO value.

Marketing content audits are crucial to helping your content improve against the competition, and ensure you’re within the realm of where your content should be for SEO!

Why perform a content audit? Content is one of those funny aspects of any site that you tend to post and then forget about it. However, to make the most of your hard work producing content, you’ll want to make sure you’re thinking critically about the content you have, how you can update it, and how you can reuse it in the future. Check out this fantastic content strategy guide by SEMrush to learn more about how you can improve your content with an audit.

So, What Does a Content Audit Involve?

Simply put, it utilizes analysis of your copy and assesses all the work you currently have.

Rather than looking at SEO metrics, for auditing content, you’ll look at information like page length, visitor metrics, social share metrics (how have social shares impacted the audience?), and viewer response to the content you’re producing.

Four Steps to Content Auditing:

1. Define Goals for Your Content

First, define your goals for your content audit. What do you conclusively want to have at the end of the project? Your goals can be improving your SEO, working on increased audience engagement, or improving your conversion rates throughout your content.

2. Take Inventory of Your Content

Second, you’ll want to inventory everything you’ve got. That essentially means you’ll be collecting all the URLs for your content. SEMrush has a remarkable content audit tool that helps compile everything into one spot! From there, catalog your content by categories.

Content Categories might Include:

• Content Types
• Content Format
• Word Count
• Publication Date

3. Assess Your Content

Once you’ve got the information, you’ll want to analyze the data collected. This part can seem daunting, but it’s pretty easy when you break it down into an assessment.

Three Categories to Use to Assess your Content:

• Keep
• Update
• Delete

Look for evergreen, high-performing, new, and fresh content! Our BFF, Google, wants you to write original, comprehensive works for viewers. If you need to update stats or topics, go right ahead, but always avoid duplicate content!

4. Create an Action Plan for Your Content

At this point in your audit, it’s time to create an action plan to use the information and data you’ve collected in your assessment. Then, use that data to create content, and a cohesive marketing strategy, that drives results for you or your client.

Content Marketing as a Strategy

Content marketing can be used strategically to grow your business. By performing content audits, you’ll be able to view successes and failures in one location and be able to improve not only your SEO but the content as a whole. Since social algorithms are constantly changing, you’ll want to adjust your content marketing strategy regularly.

Here at Denamico, we can help your company audit SEO and content to better fit with your brand and company goals. Learn more about how we can help you grow with content, SEO, and Inbound marketing strategies.