Quality marketing content grabs attention, boosts SEO, builds authority, and creates loyal customers who return to your brand time and time again. (Source) But how do we make sure our content is actually high quality? We audit it!
So, what is a content audit? Simply put, it’s a comprehensive review of all your marketing assets, from website pages to lead magnets, to evaluate their performance, relevance, and alignment with your current business goals. Think of it as taking inventory of your digital storefront and giving it a thorough clean and polish.
Smaller businesses and nonprofits often hesitate to conduct content audits, believing they don’t have enough content to bother with all the effort. And it’s true; the content audit process takes time. Still, even with a modest content library, an audit can reveal valuable insights about what’s driving results and identify opportunities for improvement. A content audit also helps you make data-driven decisions about your marketing strategy rather than relying on gut feelings.
In today’s article, I’ll walk through a systematic approach to conducting a content audit, breaking it down into seven manageable steps. Whether you’re a solopreneur or managing a growing team, you’ll learn how to evaluate your content’s effectiveness and create an action plan for optimization! Let’s dig into how to do a content audit.
Step 1: Define Your Goals
Before diving into your content inventory, the first step of your content audit checklist is to establish clear objectives for your project. Are you looking to improve your SEO rankings? Update outdated information? Boost conversion rates? Align your content with new branding?
Common content quality assessment goals include:
- Pinpointing high-performing content so you can create more of what’s working
- Identifying gaps in the buying journey (e.g. what client FAQs aren’t you answering?)
- Ensuring brand consistency across all platforms
- Optimizing content for search engines
- Evaluating lead magnet effectiveness
- Checking for outdated information or statistics
- Verifying the accuracy of product/service information
- Improving conversion rates
- Assessing content frequency and timing
Step 2: Take Inventory of Your Content
Creating a comprehensive content inventory is crucial for an effective audit. Start by listing all of your content assets:
- Website pages
- Blog posts
- Landing pages
- Email campaigns
- Social media accounts
- Downloads and resources
- Videos and multimedia content
If you’re looking to save time, a content audit template would certainly come in handy! I found this free, incredibly detailed template from Wordstream that you could download right now. You don’t even have to enter your email address!
Otherwise, create a spreadsheet to track each piece. Include basic information like:
- Title
- Content type
- URL
- Publication date
- Analytics
Get as detailed as you like! Again, that above template has room for entering a ton of information; you could go very deep with this audit, or keep it pretty basic.
Step 3: Assess Content Performance
You can’t improve what you don’t measure! Numbers tell stories, and your content metrics reveal which marketing assets resonate with your audience.
If you’re wondering how to analyze content performance, you need to go to each platform and use the tools available to you. For your website and blogs, Google Analytics and Search Console are your go-to tools for gathering this data. Social media and email marketing platforms offer their own insights tools for measuring engagement.
Again, go as deep as you’d like. It’s easy to get lost in numbers and reports (trust me, I know it can be very overwhelming!), so if this is your first time conducting a content audit, you can concentrate on just a couple of metrics this time around.
Here are the most important numbers to look at:
Website and Blog Content:
- Page Views: How many people are seeing your content?
- Time on Page: Are they sticking around to read it?
- Bounce Rate: Are they leaving right away or exploring more?
Social Media Posts:
- Engagement Rate: Are people liking, commenting, or sharing?
- Reach: How many people actually see your posts?
- Link Clicks: Are they interested enough to learn more?
Email Marketing:
- Open Rate: Is your subject line doing its job?
- Click Rate: Are people interested in learning more?
- List Growth: Are you gaining or losing subscribers?
Start with these basics and build from there. Remember, you don’t need to be a data scientist to understand your content’s performance!
I want you to look for patterns: Which topics get the most attention? What types of posts get the most engagement? When do your emails get the best open rates?
The goal isn’t to collect every possible metric; it’s to understand what’s working so you can do more of it.
Step 4: Evaluate Content Quality and Relevance
During your digital content audit, you’ll need to assess more than just numbers. As part of the content audit process, examine how well each piece aligns with your brand’s current messaging, your audience’s needs, and your overall organizational goals.
Add a column to your spreadsheet that grades your content quality. Perhaps this is a letter grade, a color code, or a 1-10 rating – you get to choose!
Look for:
- Voice and tone consistency
- Brand messaging alignment
- Content accuracy and timeliness
- Visual presentation and formatting
- Audience receptiveness
- Call-to-action effectiveness
Pro tip: Modern AI tools can streamline this in a big way! You can put in your parameters and ask AI to help you evaluate your content with your specific requirements (such as those bullet points I just listed). However, remember that AI should complement, not replace, human judgment in assessing your content’s emotional impact and relevance.
Step 5: Decide What to Keep, Update, Repurpose, or Remove
Now is the fun part! You’ve tracked, assessed, and graded your content. Following your content audit guide, it’s time to make strategic decisions about your existing content. Your content inventory analysis should categorize each piece using the Keep, Update, Repurpose, Remove framework:
Keep: Content that performs well and remains relevant
Update: Strong pieces that need refreshing or optimization
Repurpose: Valuable content that could work in different formats
Remove: Underperforming or outdated content
For example, a solid blog post might need updated statistics (update), an ebook that converts well could become an engaging video series (repurpose), and a low-performing company X profile should be sunsetted (remove). Let your initial audit goals guide these decisions.
Step 6: Create an Action Plan for Content Gaps
Now that you’ve analyzed your existing content, you’ve probably noticed some holes in your content strategy. There are SEO gaps, buyer journey gaps, and more! Following content audit best practices, it’s time to plan new content that fills these gaps and supports your organizational goals.
Start by creating a content optimization strategy guide for yourself that answers these key questions:
- What topics are missing from your current content library?
- Which customer questions aren’t being answered?
- Which stages of the buyer’s journey need more support?
- Which content formats could you explore?
- Are you missing opportunities to rank on good keywords?
Pro tip: Again, this is where AI can really come in handy. Provide your content audit breakdown to your generative AI tool of choice (I love Magai!) and ask: “Looking at my current content inventory, what gaps or missed opportunities do you notice? What topics, formats, or audience segments am I not addressing that could benefit my business goals?”
Once your content gaps are identified, it’s time for you to get strategic about filling them. Prioritize your audience’s most pressing needs or the content that will have the most significant impact on your business goals, such as what will help you generate new leads in an area of the business you’re trying to grow. Be realistic about your resources and timeline; quality always trumps quantity when it comes to content creation.
Step 7: Maintain a Regular Audit Schedule
How often should you audit content? The answer depends on your business needs and resources, but here’s a general framework:
- Full website: Every six months
- Blogs: Quarterly
- Lead magnets and ebooks: Quarterly
- Online courses: Every 1-2 months
- Email newsletters: Monthly
- Social media channels: Monthly
I also recommend a full content library review on an annual basis, or anytime you’re going through a rebranding process. You can also set up automated monitoring for key metrics, depending on platform capabilities, or assign team members to help you track stats.
Make Your Existing Content Work Harder for You!
A thorough content audit for your small business or nonprofit could be just what you need to inject some fresh energy into your marketing efforts this year! I hope this content audit checklist has inspired you to roll up your sleeves and scrub your marketing assets until they shine.
And remember, once you uncover those content gaps and realize you need a competent writing staff to help you out, you know where to find me!