Originally published April 18, 2023 , updated on April 5, 2023

In today’s saturated digital age, ensuring your content stands out and resonates with your audience is more critical than ever. It’s also essential that your marketing is top-notch and aligned with your business goals. But before you can create and publish new materials, it’s crucial to take a step back and assess what you already have. Here’s where content audit services come into play. 

Digital content audits are unquestionably a critical component of any marketing strategy. They’re a comprehensive review of all the marketing materials a company has published. It helps identify what’s working, what needs improvement, and where to focus marketing efforts in the future.

Businesses benefit greatly from understanding what a content audit is and how to conduct one. So, we’ve put together a step-by-step guide to completing one to optimise your content and achieve greater success. We’ll also look into why you should hire a professional content audit services company.

What Is a Content Audit?

A content audit analyses a company’s current content to identify what’s working, what isn’t, and also what needs improving. The audit provides insights into how your content performs and what changes can maximise its effectiveness.

A big part of the process is collecting and analysing data through various metrics such as page views, social media shares, etc. This tells us how your target audience engages with the brand and what areas you should focus on in the future.

Why Do Companies Need Content Audit Services?

Content audits are a necessary first step to better customer engagement and marketing strategy development. Thorough audits also show how your content compares to competitors and how to differentiate your brand from theirs. 

Here are some more reasons why companies need content audits: 

1. Create Better Websites 

A content audit can improve your website structure and organise and categorise your content. A more logical structure makes it easier for users to find what they want. An audit can also identify areas where images, videos, or other media files are slowing down your website’s performance. Optimising these improves page load speed and general user experience.

2. Gain Better User Engagement 

Content audits test the quality and relevance of existing marketing materials. Finding outdated content is surely a chance to add material that will better resonate with your audience. This can create a better user experience, increasing engagement and time spent on the site.

3. Increase Search Engine Visibility and Ranking 

Search engines prioritise websites with high-quality, relevant content. When an audit improves the web page content, it helps increase its visibility and ranking in search results.

4. Plan a Winning Content Strategy  

A digital content audit provides a comprehensive overview of existing marketing materials. This informs future planning and strategy by identifying content gaps and areas for improvement. It also identifies outdated or irrelevant copy for removal or revision. An audit can also find ways to repurpose or reuse existing content, maximising its value and increasing its impact.

5. Allocate Resources Better

An audit helps explicitly differentiate between high-performing and low-performing content. This can help allocate resources more effectively to maximise the impact of content creation efforts.

A Step-by-Step Guide to Content Auditing

Without further ado, let’s dive into the six steps you need to follow to perform a content audit for your company.

1. Define Your Goals and Metrics

Defining your goals and metrics is crucial in ensuring that the audit is focused, relevant, and actionable. The objectives of a content audit can vary. Some popular goals are improving user experience and increasing search engine visibility.  When defining your objectives, consider the business’ broader goals and how your content can help to support those goals.

Once you’ve defined your goals, the next step is to determine the metrics you’ll use to measure the success of your audit. Standard metrics for an audit include page views, time on page, bounce rate, and conversions. Engagement metrics such as comments, shares, and likes are other common metrics. 

The metrics you choose should be directly related to your goals. For instance, if your goal is better social media engagement, the number of shares is a good metric. It’s important to choose relevant, measurable, and actionable metrics. The metrics should be easy to track over time to see if the changes made due to the audit are having the desired impact.

2. Take Inventory and Categorise the Content

Inventory includes all pages, blog posts, images, videos, and likewise other media that make up your website. An accurate inventory needs to be as comprehensive as possible and also to use a tool that makes it easy to categorise and organise your content. Some standard inventory tools include content management systems and website crawling tools.

Once you’ve taken an inventory, the next step is categorisation. Categorisation helps to make it easier to analyse, evaluate, and make recommendations. Some common ways to organise marketing materials include by topic, format, audience, and stage in the customer journey. 

Choosing a categorisation method that makes sense for your website and your goals is undoubtedly essential. Accurate categorisation ensures that the results of your audit are accurate and actionable.

3. Evaluate Content Quality

Evaluating content quality helps identify improvement areas. It offers recommendations for updating and enhancing your marketing materials. Relevance, accuracy, readability, and usability are markedly a few factors that determine quality.

You can use several methods for evaluating content quality. They include manual review, using scoring systems or checklists, and likewise using analytics data. In a manual review, a team member reads each piece of content and assesses it based on predetermined criteria. Scoring systems and checklists provide a more objective way of evaluating. It allows you to assign a score or likewise check off items for each piece. 

Analytics and data provide the most accurate insights. Gauging page views, bounce rate, etc., provides valuable insights into how users interact with your brand. Combining these methods can eventually help you comprehensively understand your content’s quality.

4. Find Content Gaps

Content gaps are areas in your website’s copy where there needs to be more information or coverage on a particular topic or theme. These gaps can impact your website’s search engine visibility and user experience. It also affects the overall effectiveness in achieving your goals. So, finding these gaps is an essential step in a digital content audit. It can identify opportunities for creating new and better material to improve the brand’s performance.

Keyword research, competitor analysis, and user feedback are a few methods that can surely identify content gaps. Keyword research can help identify terms most relevant to your audience that you haven’t currently covered in your marketing copy. 

Competitor analysis can particularly identify areas where your competitors outperform you. This can provide inspiration for new content topics. User feedback includes comments, survey responses, and customer support interactions. These obviously provide valuable insights into where your users seek more information or face difficulties. 

5. Collect Data and Run Analyses

Data analysis looks into patterns, trends, and insights surrounding your content. There are several methods for analysing data, including:

• Analytics data:  Analyse your website’s analytics data to understand how users interact with your content altogether. You can look at metrics such as page views, time on page, bounce rate, and conversion rates.

• User feedback:  Analyse user feedback, such as comments, survey responses, and also customer support interactions. This can help you understand how your users perceive your brand and identify areas for improvement.

• Keyword analysis: Analyse your website’s keyword performance to understand how well the pages rank in search results.

• Competitor analysis: Analyse your competitors’ websites to basically understand their marketing strategies, strengths, and weaknesses. 

When analysing data in an audit, it’s essential to look for patterns, trends, and insights that can inform future changes. For example, if a particular page has a high bounce rate, this may indicate that the content isn’t relevant or engaging to your target audience. It’s a solid sign that the page may need updating or replacing.

The goal of data analysis is to understand how your content performs. Using data to validate assumptions and hypotheses about your content is useful. It also helps you make decisions based on hard data. 

6. Draw Up an Action Plan

Drawing up an action plan after a content audit is indeed important in ensuring that the company benefits from the results. The audit findings inform the action plan. The plan can outline the specific actions you’ll take to improve your content’s quality, relevance, and effectiveness.

It’s important to prioritise the recommendations you identified during the audit. Recommendations can include updating existing content, creating new material to fill gaps, optimising your website’s structure and navigation, or making other changes to improve the user experience.

It’s also important to allocate resources, set timelines for each action item, and establish metrics to measure the impact of your changes. A well-defined action plan will help you stay focused, organised, and on track as you improve your website’s content.

Why Work With a Professional Content Audit Services Company?

There are several reasons it may be beneficial to work with a professional content audit services company:

1. Expertise and experience: Content audit services companies have the knowledge and experience to conduct comprehensive audits. They can identify improvement areas and make data-driven recommendations.

2. Objectivity: An external company provides an objective perspective. They are free from internal biases or assumptions. This can undoubtedly be crucial in identifying areas for improvement and making necessary changes.

3. Efficiency: A content audit services company has the tools and resources to complete audits quickly and efficiently. They can reduce the time and resources required to complete the audit in-house.

4. Increased accuracy: Content audit services companies can ensure that the audit is accurate and complete. They can reduce the risk of missing important information or making incorrect assumptions.

5. Access to industry best practices: Professional services stay up-to-date on the industry’s best practices and latest trends. They bring a wealth of knowledge and experience to the audit process.

6. Comprehensive recommendations: A content audit services company can provide a comprehensive plan of action with this intention of improving content. This ensures that the audit results are actionable and have a tangible impact on the business.

A  specialised company can provide a comprehensive and efficient marketing assessment.  They can provide valuable insights and actionable tasks to improve the website’s performance accordingly. Ultimately, help you reach your business goals faster.

Connect With Goodman Lantern for Content Audit Services

Goodman Lantern is a leading SEO content audit agency. Our team of experienced auditors can provide detailed insights into how your content is performing. We devise practical changes to help maximise the effectiveness of your marketing campaign. We also adjust your content marketing strategy and find ways to better measure success. 

Contact us today to learn more about our content audit services.

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