What Is a Content Audit and Why Does It Matter?

What is a content audit and why does it matter? We explain how a content audit can benefit your website along with tips on how to start one.

Content is king in the digital marketing and advertising world. Businesses of all sizes have shifted spending from paid advertising to content marketing for a reason. It’s better at engaging and resonating with audiences.

That said, the content has matured over the last few years. If you’ve published blogs or articles on your website, when did you last take a look at it? Is it still performing as well as it once did?

If you’ve never done that, it’s time for a content audit. Here, you can learn what an audit is, how to do it, and why it matters.

What Is a Content Audit?

A website content audit involves taking a look at all existing content with the goal of improving it. If you’ve published a significant amount of content on your site, this will be a massive undertaking. However, the results are worth it.

You can conduct a content audit for website pages, articles, or even landing pages. By doing so, you can get a better picture of how your content performs across the board. You can identify what resonates with your audience the best.

With this information, you can make decisions about old content with low engagement. You may find it’s not worth keeping an old article active because it’s out of date now. You might discover an old piece of content still pulls in major views, but it’s not as robust as you’d like, so you can update it.

In short, a content audit can help you refine your website and improve the quality of content that exists on it.

How to Do a Content Audit

If you run a small website, you can conduct an audit on your own. To do so, create a spreadsheet and list every piece of content on your site. Once it’s laid out, take a look at the analytics of each content item.

If the content is old, outdated, and low on engagement, mark it for deletion. If it’s old but still pulls in view, review the content, and decide if it could benefit from extension or updating to be more current. Go through each item in your list and narrow it down.

From there, you can begin to map out your content and pair it with your audience’s content journey. Can you move content to more appropriate categories? Can you link related pieces together somehow?

Figuring all this out will help you create a more cohesive and engaging site for visitors. In turn, you should see higher engagement from customers and bring in more leads.

If it sounds like you need a content audit, get one done now. You can outsource the job to an agency, and they’ll take all the necessary steps to get started. However, you should make sure the agency understands your goal.

You should treat working with an agency like building a new partnership. Provide them with feedback and review their work at intervals to make sure the audit is achieving what you set out to do. If not, don’t hesitate to adjust or pivot your approach to the audit.

The Next Step After an Audit

Once you’ve completed a content audit, you can start building a plan to tackle your approach to content. Do you need to update content? Do you need to replace or remove old content?

Regardless, a plan will help you tackle each step forward. Build a timeline, get to work, and you’ll start reaping the benefits in the long term.

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