What Is Content Marketing Audit?

Content marketing audit is the process of analyzing the content inventory of a website to identify under-performing and top-performing content pieces. This helps you find pages to update, remove, or merge for better SEO performance.

It is also helpful in measuring the content marketing and SEO effort of a website. An important point to consider while doing an audit is to align the business goals with the auditing.

For example, if the goal of a business is to generate leads, then it is important to find what type of content is driving the most and least number of leads monthly. It also provides useful insights on what are the traffic sources delivering the highest and lowest conversion rates.

This kind of data is helpful in content marketing to double down on what’s working and eliminate content strategies that are not.

What Is The Purpose Of A Content Marketing Audit?

The purpose of a content marketing audit is to identify what’s working and what’s not in terms of achieving business goals such as generating traffic, leads, and sales. Having a content audit program is also important to closely look at the performance of different content formats, channels, and categories.

What Should A Content Audit Include?

Content audit isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. Every business has different goals and content marketing strategies. So, the auditing process will vary from one website to another.

However, there are some key elements that a content marketer cannot ignore.

Your content audit should highlight the following elements:

• Finding content gap opportunities by knowing keywords ranked by the competitors, but not by your site
• Categorizing content inventory by the number of traffic, leads, and business value.
• Finding content assets that lack freshness and relevance
• Finding the list of keywords ranking on the first page
• Identifying pages that are gaining and losing traffic
• Categorizing pages with high authority in terms of backlinks and mentions
• Checking whether the website has enough content for each of the buyer’s stages
• Knowing which pages to remove or merge for SEO performance and user-experience
• Finding pages that drive the most site engagement in terms of average time spent on the website, page views, etc.
• Top traffic channels for the website
• Content pages that need improvement on core web vitals
• Measuring the performance of topic clusters and pillar pages (if any) by looking at the number of ranking keywords, traffic growth, and organic link acquisition.

Which Tool Is The Best Fit For Doing A Content Audit?

Google Analytics is one of the best tools for content audit that is great at building a plan for content improvements and free to use.

Also, by integrating the Google search console with Google analytics, you can easily analyze the performance of all the pages and blog posts. Recently, Google launched the ‘search console insights’ to help content creators and site owners understand the content performance.

The search console insights will give you data on:

• Best performing content assets
• Performance of newly published pages
• How people are discovering your content across the web
• Top search terms used by the readers before they come to your website
• Top referring pages that drive the most traffic

Here are some of the useful tools that you can use to run a content audit:

• Ahrefs’s content audit
• Website grader by HubSpot
• Sistrix
• ScreamingFrog
• Serpstat
• MarketMuse
• Content audit SEO tool by Semrush
• Thruuu