The digital world is littered with mysteries: missing and broken links, outdated information, and other SEO faux pas that can tank your content marketing strategy before it really gets off the ground. However, using a bit of detective skills and a few handy tools, they are mysteries that can be solved with something called a content audit.
Just the way a detective might meticulously scrutinize every bit of evidence found at a murder scene, you must scrutinize your content to discover what’s working and what isn’t. Ready to see how a content audit can help you crack the case? Keep reading, friends.
Wait. What’s a Content Audit, Again?
Glad you asked, dear reader. Think of a content audit like wielding your Sherlock Holmes magnifying glass across your many content marketing channels, looking for clues to help you improve your content’s effectiveness. A content audit involves examining your website, blog, social media channels like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and the like, and even your existing marketing automation emails to thoroughly assess their performance.
By analyzing each piece of the content marketing puzzle you use, you can suss out fresh ways to enhance your current strategies and outline a roadmap to follow so you can continue to produce high-value content that does its job. You might call it gathering evidence so that you can build an airtight case to ramp up your brand’s digital presence.
Unmasking Your Offenders: When Should You Audit?
It’s a good idea to do a content audit periodically, but particularly during instances where you:
- See a decline in traffic, as in organic traffic. This is a red flag, which means that you need to investigate, stat.
- Have old content that hasn’t been updated in a long time. Old content is like a cold case. If you update it occasionally, you can help keep it relevant.
- Know you have content gaps. A content audit is a great way to help you identify them and come up with fresh ways to fill them.
- Have new additions to your products or services. You can use a content audit to help you determine ways to seamlessly integrate them into your current offerings.
- Are migrating your site? Think of this a bit like transferring evidence. Everything’s gotta be cataloged correctly, or you won’t get any justice for the crime!
- Need a competitive edge and are changing the tone and voice of your brand? When you do that, content must be updated to reflect it to ensure uniformity and cohesion across all brand assets.
Let the Investigation Begin: Your Content Audit Toolkit
Before you can conduct a successful investigation, you’ve got to start with a great set of tools and strategies. The same goes for your content audit. However, this doesn’t have to be something to fear. Follow the suggestions we’ve outlined below, and we promise it won’t be nearly as painful as it sounds.
Create Clear Goals
No detective worth their salt can do their job well if the mission isn’t clear. So, lay out your goals and prioritize the ones that will have the most impact on your results. Maybe that’s improving SEO, maybe it’s increasing engagement with your audience, or maybe it’s boosting conversions. Start with one and then address the others once you’re making headway.
Catalog the Evidence
This entails deciding what content you want to edit, whether it’s your social media content, your blog, your newsletter, or all of the above. Once you’ve decided on the content you intend to analyze, you can catalog it in a simple and consistent format so it’s ready to be analyzed and used for future comparisons.
Examine the Clues
You can use helpful tools like Google Analytics, Screaming Frog, or SEMrush to help you gather the data you need and help you automate some of the process. The second two are paid tools, but Google Analytics is free and can be extremely valuable in your investigation.
Look for content that might need to be rewritten, updated, or even expanded upon based on how well it performed in the past. Perhaps you will find pieces of content that are short and brief that offer room for expansion or content that’s missing a few relevant subheads to keep it current. All of these things are opportunities to improve your content marketing game.
Devise Your Strategy
After you’ve investigated and gathered all the clues you can, you need to take the next step, which is taking action on what you find. You can prioritize the actions you take first based on how relevant they are and how easy they are to implement. For instance, adding a CTA, optimizing your metadata, or adding images to something are easy fixes. Updating and rewriting an entire article is less so and will require a bigger time investment. Create action points for each piece of content you intend to update.
Plan for Future Cases
Remember that your content audit isn’t just investigating the crime scene today… it’s collecting the clues and using the information to prevent crimes in the future. Or, put in digital marketing terms, it’s intel you can use to help shape your content strategy moving forward. By committing to a regular content audit, you can continually refine your strategies and ensure you’re always on the right track.
Solving the Mystery and Connecting the Dots
Let’s be real.
Brands that regularly invest in things like content edits gain a strategic edge. You might say it’s the difference between real strategy and throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. One approach is haphazard; one approach is planned and meticulous.
Why waste your time building up a portfolio of killer content if you have no intention of optimizing and refining it as time goes on? Engaging in a content audit on a regular basis ensures your valuable assets don’t just run off into the proverbial digital night with their pants on fire but remain a dominant force to be reckoned with in the digital realms.
Remember, a content audit isn’t merely a tool. In the broader narrative of digital marketing, it’s like a detective story where you play both roles, the investigator and the hero who examines content, gathers evidence and makes data-informed decisions for your brand’s content strategy moving forward. It’s a roadmap to help enhance your content, amplify your brand, and avoid becoming irrelevant to your audience.
So, slap on your detective hat, pick up that spyglass, and get started on your content audit, Sherlock! Do your best to ensure every piece of content you put out strives for digital excellence and slay the competition. And, of course, if you need help, we’re always here, ready to hold your hand. Or your spyglass, as it were.
