How to effectively run a Content Audit in 5 steps

You have definitely heard variations of quotes stemming from the “Content is King” declaration. In some ways, content is not just king, but almost the entire kingdom now. A robust and clear content marketing plan for your brand is now the backbone of most long-term marketing strategies. Content creation has become increasingly easy. You can use a host of tools to create an eye-catching video, ideate long-form written content for blogs, or even get high-quality visuals with Canva. But the success of any content strategy isn’t just posting and engaging. You have to continuously assess performance, learn and adapt. This helps you succeed in your content marketing efforts. That’s what a content audit does!

Before we dig in, let’s identify what a content audit even is:

What is a content audit?

A content audit is a continuous process of organizing and analyzing your content. You measure the performance of all your content against predefined metrics. You have to do this for any or all marketing channels that you are using and may include different content types or formats as well.

A content audit answers some of the most important questions about your content strategy:

• What content works best in alignment with your business goals?
  
• Who is responsible for the content preparation and publishing process?
  
• Which content needs to be updated or repurposed, maybe even archived?
  
• Do you need to optimize your content for SEO or readability, or accessibility?

Now that you understand what a content audit is, let’s look at a few applications of the content audit and its results. These will benefit you and your brand as you optimize your content strategy and maximize return-on-investment (ROI) for your content marketing efforts.

Applications

You can evaluate the performance of any content you create for your brand. Here are some ways that you can apply the learnings

• Judge what topics or subtopics of content you are missing or posting too less of
   
• You get a chance to update or review old content that needs to be repurposed
  
• Capitalize on the successes of your top performing content to serve your audience
  
• Learn from missteps and sub-par output from the non-performing content
  
• Adjust timelines for your content calendar

Now, it’s time to dig into the actual content audit process itself.

The 5 Step Content Audit Process

1. Set your goals

In order for you to gain any actionable insight from your content during the audit, you have to set clear goals. Preferably, these will be SMARTER goals, that will guide why and how you perform the content audit itself. Your content audit goals must be tied to larger business goals and functional objectives. This is how you can ensure any evaluation of your past content gives you actionable insights that will help you make data-supported decisions for future content planning.

Let me explain with an example.

I sell custom homemade jewelry through my Instagram shop. I have over 100 posts already showing varying degrees of reach, engagement, and clicks on different types of posts. 

It’s unfair for me to judge my non-product posts alongside product posts. I have a collection of images and videos showing how-to, tips & tricks and behind the scenes along with actual product posts. To differentiate and evaluate them fairly I set a goal for this audit as:

Assessing the engagement of Instagram product posts by the number of clicks, in August 2021 through a monthly audit.

Following the SMARTER goal-setting framework can clarify exactly what you are trying to achieve. You can view how to set similar SMARTER goals in this EM blog post

2. Choose your metrics and KPIs

With so many dashboards and metrics automatically available on any digital platform, it is tempting to involve them all in a content audit. However, after setting your goal, you must be clear on which metrics are key performance indicators (KPIs) for you. You only need to use the essential ones. So you don’t have an information overload. These same metrics may overlap when trying to determine which channels most meet your goal as well.

Choosing your metrics is a rather short but critical step because it will lay the foundation for how you measure success with content as well. With the example above, you want to measure the engagement of product posts. So the most important metrics are:

• No. of clicks
  
• Shares
  
• Comment
  
• Likes

However, if you were trying to increase traffic to your blog, then you need to assess the SEO of your blog posts through a content audit. Here, you may consider different metrics altogether, such as:

• Pageviews
  
• Users
  
• New Users
  
• Social Shares

3. Collect and organize your data

Just as an environmental analysis sets the pace for overall marketing strategy, your goals and metrics set the direction and measurement of your content efforts. So now that you know where you’re headed and how to gauge your success, it’s time to dig in and collect your data. Organizing that data can easily be done on Google Docs or another spreadsheet template. For the same example we’ve used for with jewelry business, your spreadsheet could look like this:

Instagram post	No. of clicks	Likes	Comments	Shares
Bead necklace 1	583	9368	1332	72
Wire bracelet 4	254	5196	1487	108
Rhinestone ankle bracelet 3	145	5780	980	32
Bead necklace 6	56	3891	840	5

Another quick example is outlined below:

Now, if you were also running a blog on the website, talking about the world of hand-made jewelry and the intricate methods by which it is created. You could run another audit trying to determine which kind of blog posts work best, and what level of response it garners. Here, I will be able to get most of the information from Google Analytics.

Goal: To evaluate the awareness of weekly blog posts of 2021 on the website 

Metrics: Pageviews, Total users, New users, Shares

Website Blogs	Page Views	Users	New Users	Shares
Blog 6	9823	4721	1377	472
Blog 18	2627	1016	240	198
Blog 7	1917	982	258	72
Blog 24	785	600	420	145

Speaking of blog posts, if you are looking to start writing blogs for your website, it could be a daunting task. Here’s a beginner’s guide by Hell Good Content that can help you with that!

4. Analyze and Action 

Assessing the data and metrics you have recorded and organized doesn’t require special skills or advanced spreadsheet knowledge. You know what you are looking for first: a big spike or outliers. These could be anything from viral social media posts to blogs that got incredible traffic. Your analysis needs to determine why!

It is commonly said that insight is what you get when you ask the question “Why?” at least 7 times. In reality, you might not be able to run that deep. But you don’t have to either. Just keep trying to uncover how your best performing (and worst) posts got the results they did. You want to replicate success and avoid failures and this analysis will provide you with the information that you need.

Creating an action plan can be something as simple as plugging in the insights into a SWOT analysis to determine which tactics and actions you can take first to leverage strengths and offset weaknesses.

5. Consistently review and repeat

Once the exercise is complete for your primary goals and uses your most active channels for measurement. We can discuss where additional insight can be questioned and/or tested to polish a content diamond hidden in your audit rough.

A recurring audit of your content can also help ensure that any efforts you plan on putting in for a given time are measured and assessed, helping you make plans for the future. So set an evaluation period always – it could be monthly or quarterly depending on the time and resources at your disposal.

This 5 step process is a simple way for you to conduct an effective audit that helps you draw up an action plan. Implementing the plan and continuously taking input of successive audits can help you create a successful content audit. However there are other great resources, we recommend:

• HubSpot has a great example with a website content + SEO audit
  
• SEMRush also follows a similar 5-step process like the one we outlined
  
• WordStream has 6 templates covering SEO, website, blog, landing page, guide & overall audits

Conclusion

Conducting an audit may not be the most interesting or exciting part of content marketing. It is definitely not where creativity is required. However, the process is designed to ensure that you put your best foot forward as a brand with content. The 5 step process simplifies how you plan and conduct the audit based on your goals. The measurement of performance is done by pre-determined metrics. This makes it easier to analyze the data at hand and maximize the impact of the audit itself! The most important part, as with all audits, is the recurring nature of it. Periodic repetition will optimize your content strategy and create actionable tactics to improve how you build authority and generate awareness with content.