Even the most experienced bloggers and content managers are not fully aware of the importance and strategies of performing the content audit for the existing content. It seems like a painful process to conduct a content audit in the organization. Let us first see what is this monster called the “content audit”; a content audit is performed annually by the digital marketers to deliver big insights to your website or blog. Often, marketers post content that goes out of date after a specific period of time and become completely irrelevant. When was the last time you performed the content audit? You probably don’t remember; but you not the only one in this boat.

The Search Engine Journal SEJ reveals that most content developers are completely focused on creating new content always and often ignore the auditing of their existing content. There are important reasons why you need the content audit for your organization.  

Now that you know the major reasons why content audit speaks for itself and why you should perform it regularly in the organization. Now let us breakdown the audit into pieces and see how the process can be performed step by step.

The first step is to understand the basics of your content creation and publishing in the organization such as that created a specific content piece in the organization, how the content was created, when it was created, and what is the basic publishing details of the content. You will need to track a lot of things for each piece of published content in a spreadsheet created specifically for the content audit. For example, in the spreadsheet, you must mention the details related to URL, author, total time, title, date, and content type, the goal of the content, word count, and comments.

Now comes the most exciting and vital part of your overall content auditing process. The content data portion of your audit needs to come with its own handy spreadsheet created. You need to track all the previously produced content first and know that what type of content has been published before. You need that what type of content has been produced and what is coming for the future posts in addition to what should not be posted or created again.

This phase of content audit is going to be the most detailed and time-consuming in the start; you will need to know how far you need to go before you can begin your content audit. The Search Engine Journal SEJ post in 2017 states that you should at least go back one year in the past and pull out all the data related to posted content to see how it performed in one year. That involves collecting all the URLs of your content and it does not have to be a manual process. There are fortunately many tools for the content managers and analytics to help with that including Google Analytics and Serums topping the list.

Once you have pulled out the relevant data and content from the past year into your content audit spreadsheet, you will need to repeat this content audit activity for the new content on a daily basis. Since content audit is going to be a repeat activity, it will be much easier to keep track of your content   and audit it regularly; add the relevant information in your spreadsheet document and update all the statistics on a weekly basis. You can see many drastic changes made in the note; the evergreen content can take many weeks before it can really make an impact on the audience.

Organic traffic is indispensible to track because it is the most important metric for content audit. The content receives a lot of organic traffic. There is no need to invest many thousands of dollars in advertising, people would come across organically and love your content to engage with it. If you are not getting a lot of organic traffic, then it could be a sign of danger for your organization. Maybe there is something you need to rethink including your content strategy, how you are distributing your content, the type content you are posting etc. Organic traffic metrics should be evaluated regularly in the audit so you can know how to improve your weaknesses.

Bounce rate is another important metric for content audit because it is a sign that users are not taking genuine interest in your blog page content or website. A big bounce rate is a sign of bad content on your website; your content quality serves as a gateway for the users to become customers on your website. When the content fails to inform or entertain the visitors, then there is something wrong with the content and it is more likely to have a heavy bounce rate.

Another important metric to measure the effectiveness of content is the quality of back links. Truly effective back links can give you a lot of boost and credibility. You need to create a good strategy to track your back links and modify the existing content accordingly to improve your back link strategy. Your back links are not permanent and can change over time; moreover, not all the back links are good for your digital marketing success. If you have 300 back links, then it may sound like a good figure but if 200 of them are potentially dangerous for your blog, then they can lead to spam. Therefore, you need to remove those 200 back links immediately to boost your content performance.

We hope these content audit tips and tricks can help you understand the vitality of this process and provide you a way to constantly perform a content audit.