How to Conduct a Content Audit

Running a content audit can feel like an overwhelming task, which is why we have split the process into five easy-to-follow steps. In the first step, you will define your goals and metrics; in the fifth, you will design your auditing schedule.

Whether you are following this guide in real time or simply trying to learn more about the process, here are the five stages of conducting a content audit:

Step One: Define Your Goals & Metrics

The first stage of running a content audit involves defining your metrics and setting your goals. A content audit can be a long and resource-intensive process, so having clearly defined objectives and parameters will help you stay on track, prioritise your content and measure your success.

When setting your goals, we recommend reflecting on your wider business objectives. For example, are you aiming to grow a new product line? Build brand loyalty? Or increase sales? Your content and audit-related goals should blend seamlessly with your overarching objectives, supporting and driving business growth.

After outlining your goals, you need to select corresponding metrics. These are the data sets that you will use to measure the success of your current content and track the progress of any changes you implement.

Generally speaking, metrics can be separated into five categories:

• SEO metrics: organic traffic, keyword rankings, backlinks, domain authority, etc.
• User behaviour metrics: users, pageviews, bounce rate, average time on site, pages per session, etc.
• Brand awareness metrics: referral traffic, impressions, branded search volume, etc.
• Engagement metrics: likes, comments, shares, mentions, etc.
• Lead generation/sales metrics: click-through rates, conversion rates, etc.

To help you get started, here are some examples of measurable content audit goals and their relevant metrics.

Example One: Improving SEO Rankings & Results

A content audit can be a cost-effective way of improving your SEO performance. It’s a particularly good means of spotting quick wins. After all, it’s easier to boost ranking for a page that is already showing in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

To assess your content assets, you could use the following metrics:

• Organic traffic
• Keyword rankings
• Click-through rate
• Backlinks
• Bounce rate
• Time on page

These metrics can be useful in determining the quality of your content. For example, high-quality content is likely to be engaging and will therefore have a lower bounce rate and longer average time on page.

When setting SEO-related goals, remember you should always work towards measurable benchmarks. For example, ‘improving a specific piece of content from position [x] to position [x] within a time frame of [x]’.

To reach your goal, you may need to update or optimise content. This could involve rewriting the piece to ensure it aligns with search intent, correcting outdated information or improving keyword optimisation.

Example Two: Boosting Engagement

Your content is the key to boosting engagement. With the right format, information and messaging, you can encourage your audience to browse, spend longer on your website and share pages or products.

To analyse your current engagement levels, consider these metrics:

• Page views
• Time on page
• Bounce rate
• Scroll depth
• Social shares
• Comments, mentions and interactions

Like the previous example, it’s important to set a timed and quantifiable goal. E.g., ‘reduce bounce rate by [x]% over a period of [x]’ or ‘increase scroll depth by [x]% over [x] months’.

When assessing levels of engagement, the engagement report in Google Analytics can be a good place to start. This report can help you identify your most popular pieces, see which formats generate the most interactions and spot trends.

For example, you find that the scroll depth has decreased on a popular guide. It might be time to rewrite your introduction or improve above-the-fold copy, enhance the structure and readability with a table of contents, or enhance its visual appeal with images.

Example Three: Driving Conversions

Thirdly, a content audit can reveal how well your content is converting. By tracking the right metrics, you can find out if your content is helping to move readers through the sales funnel and turning leads into buyers.

Here are the metrics that can highlight conversion rates:

• Conversion rates
• Goal completions
• Click-through rate
• Conversion funnel analysis
• Attribution analysis

When you have found and compiled this data, it’s time to take a critical look at your content. Analysing content from your audience’s perspective is key. To do this, ask yourself:

• Does your content offer valuable information, expertise or entertainment?
• Does it answer your reader’s questions and align with their intent?
• Does it include a CTA or outline their next steps?

These questions will allow you to find patterns and set goals. For example, boosting internal links in order to ‘increase click-through rate by [x]% over [x] months’ or adding new CTAs to help ‘improve goal completions by [x] date’.

Step Two: Identify Content Assets & Create Categories

With your goals and metrics defined, you are ready to conduct your stocktake. This step involves cataloguing your content inventory. First, you need to select the types of content you want to audit. Next, you need to categorise your URLs.

Select & Identify Your Content Types

The number and type of assets you choose will depend upon the depth of the audit you intend to conduct. For example, are you running a comprehensive audit that covers every piece of content on your website? Are you focusing on written content? Or do you want to track content that has recently been updated, rewritten or repurposed?

Here are the types of content that your audit could include:

• Blog posts and articles
• Guides
• Landing pages
• Product descriptions
• Case studies and testimonials
• Infographics
• Videos
• Whitepapers
• Ebooks
• Interactive content such as quizzes

Collect & Categorise Your URLs

When you have decided on the scope of your audit, it’s time to compile all of your URLs into a spreadsheet. This will make it easier for you to categorise your content, spot patterns and plan changes to meet your goals.

If you are choosing one format or have a smaller website, you could do this manually by finding and copying your URLs. However, to speed up the process, we recommend using Screaming Frog.

After discovering all of your URLs, use your spreadsheet to categorise your content. We recommend including the following details and criteria:

• URL
• Page title
• Metadata (title, meta description, h1, etc.)
• Topic/purpose
• Author
• Word count
• Date it was published/last modified
• Content type/format (e.g., blog post, landing page, video etc.)
• Funnel stage (e.g., awareness, consideration, decision)
• Focus keyword(s)
• Average rank of your target keyword(s)

Depending on the goals you set in step one, you can also create columns for additional metrics. For example, page views, average time on page, backlinks, bounce rate, click-through rate, conversion rate and shares.

Step Three: Track Metrics & Analyse Data

With all of your URLs in your spreadsheet, it’s time to progress to the next stage of the content audit process: tracking your metrics and analysing your data. Here we detail how to locate your chosen metrics and interpret the data.

This step is likely to be the longest and most complex part of your audit. So, open your spreadsheet, grab a cup of tea and get ready to dive in.

Types of Metrics & What They Mean

First off, you need to know what metrics you can track, what they mean and what they can tell you. Here’s a quick breakdown of some common metrics that are analysed during content audits:

• Average time on site: Shows how long, on average, visitors spend on your site. A higher time suggests that visitors find your content valuable and engaging.
• Backlinks: Measures the quantity and quality of links pointing to your content, indicating its authority and relevance to search.
• Bounce rate: Displays the percentage of visitors who leave your site after viewing one page, highlighting potential issues with content relevance or quality.
• Click-through rate: Reflects the percentage of users who click on your content via search engine results or other channels, indicating its appeal to users.
• Conversion rates: Tracks the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action, such as signing up for your newsletter or making a purchase. This metric shows how effective your content is at driving conversions.
• Impressions: Reveals how many times your content appears in the search engine results. Resultantly, it provides information about the visibility and the size of your audience.
• Keyword rankings: Monitors the position of your content in search engine results for target keywords, highlighting its visibility and relevance to search queries.
• New users: Shows how many visitors are new to your site, providing information on the acquisition of new users and how they interact with your content.
• Organic traffic: Measures the number of visitors who find your content through organic search, indicating its visibility within the search results.
• Pages per session: Tracks the number of pages a user views in a single session. Higher numbers suggest strong interlinking and user-friendly navigation.
• Page views: Counts the total number of times your content has been viewed, reflecting its popularity and reach.
• Returning users: Shows how many users have previously visited your site, providing information about audience loyalty and engagement.
• Scroll depth: Gauges how far users scroll down your pages, offering insights on engagement and user intent.
• Social shares: Tracks how many times your content has been shared on social media platforms, reflecting its popularity among users.
• Time on page: Tallies the average duration users spend on your content, indicating relevance, value and engagement.
• Unique visitors: Counts the number of individuals who visit your content, showing its reach and audience size.

Locating & Tracking Your Metrics

The easiest way to locate and track your metrics is to use some of the tools outlined above – you can revisit these in ‘Tools That Can Help You Conduct a Content Audit’. This includes Google Analytics, Google Search Console and Semrush.

Google Analytics Reports

With a world of data at your fingertips, Google Analytics is a must-have tool for content audits. You can find some of the most valuable insights under ‘Reports’ > ‘Engagement’. This includes the ‘landing page report’ and the ‘pages and screens report’.

The landing page report details the first pages a visitor lands on; the pages and screens report displays the pages and screens users visited via your website and your app. Both reports feature metrics such as sessions, new users and average engagement time.

Google Search Console Reports

Google Search Console offers a number of useful reports. This includes the performance report, which shows how your website is performing within Google Search. If your goals include improving SEO performance then the metrics here will be useful. This includes click-through rate, average position and impressions.

Semrush Reports

If Semrush is your tool of choice, then visit the position tracking feature. This allows you to track your website’s visibility and ranking positions for target keywords in organic search results. It monitors changes over time, helping you to spot opportunities to update and improve your content.

Interpreting & Analysing Your Data

After tracking down your metrics and transferring the data to your spreadsheet, the next step is to interpret and analyse the results. This data set contains everything you need to know about the current state and performance of your content. It’s a case of digging through it, connecting the dots and noticing patterns.

Unsure where to begin? Here are some questions to consider:

• What are the top-performing pages or pieces of content and what characteristics do they share?
  Which pages have the highest bounce rates and what factors might be contributing to this behaviour?
  Are there any trends or patterns in user engagement, such as time on page or scroll depth?
• How do different traffic sources impact performance and which channels drive the most engagement?
  Are there any pages where engagement or traffic has been declining?
• Which keywords are driving traffic to our content? And are there any opportunities to further optimise for relevant keywords?
• What are the key conversion pathways for our content? Are there any issues or barriers preventing users from completing the desired actions?
• Are there any technical issues identified that may be impacting content performance, such as broken links or crawl errors?

By answering these questions, you may notice that patterns begin to emerge. For example, high traffic pages with a high bounce rate, or low traffic pages with a high conversion rate. For the former, the content may need updating or rewriting to provide more value or match search intent; the latter may lack optimisation or they could be orphan pages.

For each pattern, note the issues that are present and where the content sits within the conversion funnel.

Step Four: Create a Prioritised Action Plan

Step four is where you put all of your findings into a prioritised action plan. You know which pieces of content are soaring and which pages are falling short. Now it’s time to set out how you will improve your content and meet your goals.

To start, add three new columns to your spreadsheet: status, priority and action.

Set the Status

The status column outlines what type of work each piece of content requires. It could be that some content requires no or minimal work, while others need more extensive updates.

Generally speaking, you can split status into six categories:

• Keep: Use this action for any content that does not require any updating.
• Refresh/optimise: Select this category for low-performing pages that contain outdated statistics or have little optimisation – this content is likely to have low traffic or high bounce rates.
• Rewrite: Have you found content that is failing to convert? It may need rewriting to improve relevance and propel action.
• Redirect: Has the audit highlighted issues with keyword cannibalisation? If it’s harming your keyword ranking, it might be time to redirect.
• Delete: This final category should only be chosen when outdated content is harming your performance and cannot be updated. For example, a blog post that relates to products you no longer stock or content that covers an old event.
• Repurpose/reuse: Reformatting is a cost-effective way to reuse and extend the life of your best performing pages. E.g., turning a blog post into a video.

Decide the Priority

The priority column organises the content in order of importance, i.e. the order in which you will take the actions outlined above. This should be decided in line with the goals you created in step one.

For example, if you are looking for quick SEO wins, you may prioritise the content that needs to be refreshed or optimised. If you want to expand your engagement, you could choose to repurpose your top performing content for use on your social media platforms. For driving conversion rates, you might prioritise the content aimed at the decision stage of the funnel.

When deciding priority, ask yourself: ‘which pieces will give me the best results with the least effort?’ It’s important to assess your resources and budget against the time required and the potential impact.

Assign the Action

Your findings in step three will have revealed issues with your content. This is the column where you can explain these issues alongside the steps that need to be taken. This information will instruct the work, so make sure that each piece of advice is self explanatory and actionable.

For example:

• Update statistics, facts or research
• Alter content to make it more evergreen
• Expand content to answer more questions
• Change the CTA and add internal links
• Optimise for the focus keyword(s)
• Restructure and enhance formatting to enhance readability
• Add or improve visuals
• Refresh metadata
• Add 301 redirects
• Implement structured data markup

Step Five: Create an Auditing Schedule

A content audit is more than a one-off task, it’s a process that should be performed at regular intervals. Like getting a service on your car, an audit ensures that your content is still performing as it should and reveals any issues that need to be fixed.

Regular content audits are essential for maintaining the quality, relevance and effectiveness of your content strategy. But how often you should run a content audit depends on a variety of factors, from the size of your website to how many pieces you have and how often you publish new content.

It’s a subject that is widely debated amongst marketers, with some believing an annual audit is adequate and others stating that quarterly audits are optimal. However, biannual appears to be the common consensus.

According to a recent report, 60% of marketers conduct biannual content audits. It seems this figure could significantly boost performance, with 50% of marketers reporting that their resulting improvements led to increased traffic and engagement.

To set an effective auditing schedule, you need to determine the frequency and scope of your content audit based on a. the size of your inventory, b. the pace of your content creation and c. your business goals. For smaller websites, an annual audit might be more than adequate; for larger sites, quarterly audits might be more appropriate.

Remember, the Google algorithm regularly changes. So, what is effective today may not be effective tomorrow.