What is a Content Audit?
A content audit is a technique developed to assess your content marketing to see if it’s contributing to your overall goals. The content audit process involves data collection, analysis, a thorough human review and recommendations for future campaigns.
We don’t use a website content audit checklist, as we believe every analysis is different. What matters is what drives audience engagement and supports your overall marketing efforts. In most cases, content auditing will reveal the following:
There are different types of content audits. You can complete an audit of all website content, or focus on specific areas. A blog post audit is popular, as it helps businesses to understand how their blog is driving value and how it can be more effective for search engines and website visitors.
What is an SEO Content Audit?
An SEO content audit focuses on organic search metrics, and how these can be improved. Decisions about which content to optimise, remove or combine are made from an SEO perspective. The overall goal is to improve organic traffic quality and quantity.
The Benefits of Content Audits
There are multiple benefits of a content strategy audit. Ultimately, reviewing your content ensures you are creating online content that’s useful, helpful and provides relevant information. The main advantages include:
With the rollout of Google’s helpful content update, it’s never been more important to audit your content. You need to be sure that you’re sharing really useful pieces and that all the content on your website serves a valid purpose for your users.
It’s easy to forget about past content and assume it isn’t a problem. But if your site has a high portion of content that’s deemed unhelpful, Google clearly states that it’s less likely to perform well in search. It’s only through assessing your content data as a whole that you can make decisions to improve. A content audit service will help you to make sense of the inventory you have and create a clear action plan for improvement.
Our Content Audit Services
Gathering the Content Inventory
We’ll use specialist content audit tools to collect data and create an inventory of all your relevant content. We’ll compile a content audit spreadsheet by combining data from Google Analytics, Majestic, uClassify and metrics like status codes, readability, and word count. We’ll also assess on-page SEO factors like title tags and meta descriptions.
Reviewing the Data
Our content audit experts will review the data, and take the time to read through the content to make strategic decisions. We’ll consider how your content performs to create a clear picture of what’s working and what isn’t. We may also carry out competitor analysis to explore your industry further. A website content audit’s benefits come from creating a holistic view, so this takes time and effort to complete.
Reports and Recommendations
Every digital content audit reveals something different. Whilst we’re likely to suggest content that can be combined, removed or improved, what this looks like will vary. We’ll create a bespoke, detailed content audit report to summarise the key findings and provide actionable insight to refine your content strategy moving forward.
Content Strategy
After a thorough evaluation, your content strategy usually becomes much clearer. Whether you identify a topic area or content format that is really effective, or realise that something you’ve been spending a lot of time doing isn’t effective, the results can be really surprising.
These powerful findings may feed into your overall digital marketing strategy, helping you to make better content to drive the results you have been looking for.
Content Audit FAQs
What Does a Content Audit Do?
A content audit helps you to improve your content quality. It helps to identify the content types, themes and topics that provide the most benefit and those that aren’t working well.
What Should be Included in a Content Audit?
Content audits should include all the data points that are relevant to your goals. These may be SEO metrics, engagement metrics and basic information about the content piece like page title, author, word count and format.
Which Tool is Best for Doing a Content Audit?
Choosing the right content audit tool is vital for success. Google Analytics is a great free option, but isn’t always enough – you won’t get the whole picture because you can’t see the content that’s getting no visits at all.
Choosing the right tool can be a complex decision because SEO content audits require data from a multitude of different sources. Here at Boom, we have a variety of specialised tools that we use to conduct content audits. These allow us to collate all the relevant data accurately, quickly and efficiently.
How Long Does a Content Audit Take?
The time it takes to conduct a content audit depends on the size of your website and the amount of content to be assessed. A large news site that’s been established for years will take much longer than a new eCommerce site that needs to review its blog strategy.
Here at Boom, we schedule work on a monthly basis so if you booked a content audit as a standalone service at the start of a month, we’d aim to have it completed by the end of that month. For a particularly large project, we may have to discuss alternative timescales but will always aim to complete the work as efficiently as possible.
How Much Does a Content Audit Cost?
Just as time estimates for content audits vary, so do costs. Assessing vast amounts of content takes more time and expertise, which increases the cost. However, we pride ourselves on sensible, affordable pricing. So, if you’d like to audit your content and improve your performance, what not give us a call so we can talk about your business and your needs.
