How to carry out a content audit
A content audit, not be confused with a content inventory, which is simply a detailed list of all the content that you have, is an in depth assessment and evaluation of all your website content to determine its relative strength and weakness in relation your content marketing strategy.
An audit will help you identify
- Ways to improve organic search performance.
- Which content pieces perform well and which do not.
- Content gaps.
- Opportunities to repurpose existing content.
- New ideas for future content pieces.
- Content that is no longer congruent with your business.
- Ways to improve the information structure, i.e. content accessibility.
To help you conduct a content audit, we have outlined a few essential steps.
Step 1 – Create a content inventory
You first need to know what content you have before you can decide what to do with it. Start by creating a spreadsheet where you can build out a complete picture for each piece of content. Details that you might want to consider capturing for each content piece include:
- URL
- Page Title
- Target Keyword
- Audience (who was this content intended for)
- Meta Description
- Page Headings
- Links
- Image ALT Tags
- Date Last Updated
- Page Visits (based on a 3 month average)
- Page Bounce Rate
- Average Time on Page
- Word Count
- Type of Content (article, blog post, informational page, landing page, infographic, etc)
- Content state (current, out-of-date, Evergreen)
- Content Owner
- Call to Action
- Conversion Data
Step 2 – Analyse and identify what actions are needed
Armed with this wealth of data you now need to evaluate and agree what actions are required for each piece of content. When evaluating your content look at it from the following perspective:
- Is the content attracting the right people?
- Is the content supporting the desired outcome?
- Is the content engaging?
Having evaluated your content against the above, the next step is to decide what actions are required. Typically this would be:
- Keep best performing content.
- Edit content that performs well(ish) but could do with a refresh.
- Delete content that does not serve your goal or your user community.
- Consolidate content that on its own is weak, but consolidated will produce a much stronger piece.
- Reorganise content to a place that makes it more accessible.
- Create new content required based on the content gaps identified.
Step 3 - Create a plan
Next, assign owners, determine priorities and set deadlines so that the actions that you have identified above are carried out in a timely fashion. Deadlines need to be realistic and it is always a good practise that when assigning priorities you look for the quick wins first.
A content audit is a valuable tool to help businesses better understand what content they have on their website, the value that this content is currently adding and what needs to change to better serve the organisational objectives and user community.
Testing is an essential part of the development lifecycle and needs to be undertaken at multiple points to ensure a high quality end product. In this post we take a look at all the different types of testing that you could consider for your project.
Many projects fail, that's a reality. In this post we will have a look at the common reasons why projects fail and what you can do to reduce the risk.
The pandemic has proven that many companies can work remotely, which makes virtual organisations a lot more viable and attractive to do business with.