How to do a Content Audit :The Ultimate Checklist 2022

Do you remember the last time you conducted a content audit? It’s completely fine to focus on generating new blog posts regularly. After all, the more content you create, the more opportunities you have to rank higher on Google. But is that all you need to boost your search engine ranking? We all have heard that content is the king. 

However, posting new blogs does not guarantee a good search engine ranking. You are supposed to focus on the content quality of your previously published posts to ensure that all your posts offer value to your readers. People get so focused on generating new content that they forget about auditing what they have already published. Here’s the content audit checklist for 2022.

Why is Content Audit Important in 2022?

Is your content helping you achieve your goals? How is the content performing in the search engine? Does it attract the right audience? All these factors play a key role in helping you decide if you should go ahead with your existing content marketing strategy. Content auditing is important as it gives insights into what’s working and what’s not. 

Based on this information, you can tweak your content to ensure that it is in accordance with your audiences’ needs. In other words, content audits help you track the performance of your content. If you don’t run an audit, you will never know which post performs well and what type of content your audience likes the most. 

Another important reason why you need regular content audit is the staleness. Your content might get outdated over time. What seemed relevant and trending a few years ago might be the outdated information. By running regular audits, you can learn about content no longer relevant to your niche. An audit will help you update your content to make it relevant to your industry and up-to-date with the latest information. This leads us to an important question, how do you run a content audit. In this post, we are going to walk you through the detailed content audit strategy 

Understand Your Goals

It may seem a no-brainer, but it’s very important. You need to know why you are running a content audit and what you plan to achieve. Ideally, people run a content audit to boost their conversion rates and help people find the information they are looking for. The most common objectives that people want to achieve from regular audits are:

• SEO-optimized content for improved ranking
• Identifying content that’s performing the best 
• Deleting content with outdated information that can’t be modified or repurposed in any way.
• Increased ROI

It is important to understand your goals before you go ahead with content auditing. This will make it easier for you to plan your audits according to your goals and make changes to your content to ensure that it fits your audiences’ preferences and is in line with your brand. 

Know Where to Start

Which type of content should you audit? The first question people ask when running a content audit is where do I begin. Should I start with the blog posts or focus on the product banners and ad copies? 

Always create a spreadsheet where you can list all forms of content that you plan on auditing. List them in order, so you know where you are supposed to start and in which order you need to check them. This is really important if you are auditing your content manually. A detailed list of the items you need to audit will give you a clear picture of the content you must prioritize. Create five tabs -the type of content, author, published date, format, and metadata.

Identify the Problems

Once you know where to begin, the next step is identifying the problems. Here are some key metrics to consider when performing a content audit.

• Website Traffic: Website traffic speaks volumes about your content performance. You know your content is performing well if it receives good traffic. Also, check the type of traffic your page is receiving. Who visits your website the most? Is it the same set of customers, or are you generating new customers? 
• Bounce Rate: The main purpose of a content marketing strategy is to bring your target audience to your website and create engaging content that keeps them hooked to their screens. Once they read a blog post on your website, they must feel encouraged to visit other pages on your site. A high bounce rate does not represent quality. It shows that your audience is not interested in the type of content you are sharing, and they are abandoning your website. The lower the bounce rate, the better. Ideally, you should aim to keep it somewhere between 24 and 45 percent, but it’s okay if it goes up to 55. Just make sure you track the bounce rate regularly to identify which blogs have a high bounce rate and need to be updated.
• Increased Conversions: check which content drives more visits to your landing page or which article sends most of your readers to your social profiles and eCommerce stores where they can purchase. Remember, your end goal is to increase the conversion. This can be achieved by following a content marketing strategy that aligns well with your customers’ needs.
• Engagement: Engagement metrics give you a clear picture of which type of content gets attention from your target audience. This includes the number of views, likes, and comments on each blog. When running a content audit, you need to check the engagement metrics to get insights into your content performance.

Read Also :- How Does Duplicate Content Hurt Your Website

Track Your Organic Traffic

If you have been running a blog page for years, you must get tons of organic traffic. Your website pages, articles, and informal blog posts must receive a lot of views from your local and international audiences. Organic traffic refers to the set of people who find your content when searching for a specific query. If your website is not generating as much organic traffic as your competitors or it isn’t performing well in the search engine, there must be something wrong with your content marketing strategy. Maybe, you are not distributing your content to the right audience, or you have selected the wrong distribution channels. The type of content and the content itself need to be in line with your audiences’ preferences and your brand.

Backlinks

Backlinks are healthy for your search engine ranking, but only the good ones. Ideally, you should focus on getting backlinks from high-authority websites and credible sources. 

How do you know if the website is perceived as a high-authority website? Simple. Search for the domain authority. Websites with a high domain authority are considered reliable. You should collect backlinks from these sites, as there is a good chance that Google will rank your website higher if you have many backlinks from credible sources. Now, an important question is why do you need to add a backlink audit in your content auditing strategy? Initially, you may have only a couple of backlinks, but as you run an audit a few months later, you will notice a bunch of backlinks appearing on nearly all blog posts. 

If you have high domain authority, you might collect as many as 500 backlinks per piece of content in a year. This happens when your content is shared across different channels. The problem with these backlinks is that they might not be good. Suppose you have 500 backlinks. 450 of these links are from random websites with poor domain authority ranking. Instead of pushing your website up in the search results, these links will hurt your SERP ranking and affect your domain authority in the long run. A backlink audit will help you identify the sources of your backlinks. Based on this data, you can take steps to remove links that might hurt your ranking.

Measure Results

You may have planned your content marketing strategy much before you started posting content. Now that you are starting auditing, it is important to measure results along the way. Check whether you are able to achieve your desired goal and if the content auditing strategy is working for you. 

We have mentioned which metrics are important and how they can help you track the performance of your blog posts, articles, ad banners, and other forms of content. Tracking these metrics will give you detailed insights into whether you are performing well. For all posts that are doing well, note the date you published them, the author of this piece, length, the keywords you used, visual content, and other metrics. Follow the same strategy for your future content.

There is no point in posting lengthy blog posts every few days if you don’t perform a content audit. Regular content auditing will not only help boost your traffic, but it ensures that your content gets the attention of your target audience and you receive organic traffic -people who are actually interested in your products and services, and not just random buyers who visit your website from ads.