Creating high-quality content is the cornerstone of digital marketing success.
But without optimizing existing assets, simply producing more content yields diminishing returns over time.
An insightful content audit identifies opportunities to refresh old content, improve relevance, fill gaps, and align content in digital marketing tightly to business goals for maximum impact.
Here is an in-depth guide marketers can follow to audit their content effectively.
Step 1: Align on Goals for Your Content
Before diving into the audit, clearly define your target goals and objectives for content. Common aims for a content strategy include:
● Generate more qualified leads for sales
● Improve SEO rankings for priority keywords
● Build greater brand awareness and interest
● Engage social media followers and community
● Educate customers at key decision points
Identify which specific goals matter most to your business so your audit stays sharply focused on content that moves the needle for those aims.
Avoid overly broad objectives that lead to vague insights.
Step 2: Take Inventory of All Existing Content
Next, compile a thorough spreadsheet inventory of all current content assets. For each, capture details like:
● Content type (e.g. blog post, ebook, video)
● Topic focus
● Target persona and buyer journey stage
● Date originally published
● Traffic, engagement, and conversion metrics
● SEO performance including rankings
This complete inventory exposes content gaps and enables analysis of your top-performing pieces.
Identify content that drives conversions or customer engagement based on hard metrics.
Step 3: Evaluate Content Relevance
With a full inventory in hand, critically evaluate each piece of content for relevance. Ask honest questions like:
● Is the topic highly relevant for our target personas and their buyer journey?
● Does this align tightly with our current business messaging and goals?
● Is the subject matter still timely for our audience? Or is it outdated?
Be prepared to flag outdated, irrelevant, or underperforming content for potential removal or consolidation.
There is an opportunity cost in promoting content that does not move needles.
Step 4: Assess Content Quality
Your audit should look beyond relevance to critically evaluate true quality:
● How in-depth does this content go? Does it provide rich information?
● Is the writing high quality? Does it engage the reader?
● Are visuals, videos, and formatting appealing and reinforce the content?
● Does this content follow SEO best practices like metadata, headings, etc?
Identify pieces with strong performance metrics but poor quality. These become top candidates for a refresh.
Note other areas where improving quality could boost engagement and conversion.
Step 5: Identify Content Gaps
With a complete picture of existing assets, analyze your audit findings to reveal content gaps.
Look for topics that align with products, inform key customer decisions, or help convert buyers who have little or no current content.
These gaps represent the highest potential opportunities for new content.
Prioritize creating assets that fill these holes to provide unique value.
Step 6: Create an Action Plan
Finally, distill audit insights into a focused action plan. Outline priorities for improving existing assets and developing new content based on relevance, quality, and business impact. Assign owners and a timeline.
A thoughtful, objective content audit forms the foundation for an impactful data-driven strategy.
Follow this step-by-step guide to maximize results from your essential content marketing and SEO investments.
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