Content marketing is a practice that’s grown quickly over recent years. A survey of 500 US businesses found that 53% are actively using content in their overall marketing strategy.
It doesn’t feel too long ago that the phrase “content is king” was so widely spoken from the mouth of many a marketer, it almost became a cliche. How is your content faring after all this time? Is it still king? The best way to find out is to conduct a content audit.
A content audit is a huge opportunity to improve your content marketing process. It’s an opportunity to look under the hood of your website for weaknesses and improvements and give yourself a plan to take actionable steps to improve your content return on investment (ROI). Sounds pretty neat, right?
What is content ROI?
One of the main things to consider when you start out thinking about the success of your content is whether you’re seeing a positive ROI from it. After all, is there much point spending your marketing budget on killer content if it doesn’t actually yield a tidy return?
This is something you won’t know until you measure and track the success (or failure) of the content that you’ve produced thus far.
One way of attributing ROI from your content is to create specific goals in Google Analytics. For example, a goal that tracks a user from your blog post to the pricing page or the services page. This will show that they’re interested in your product, therefore becoming a qualified lead.
Another way of measuring ROI is to look for an increase in traffic. Ultimately, more of the right traffic will lead to more sales. This is a simple, straight forward metric that’s also measurable in Google Analytics.
Check out your engagement metrics. If consumers are happily landing on your page, spending time on page, and navigating to other web pages via internal linking, this is indicative that your content is working. It’s bringing people to your website and keeping them there. On the flip side, if your bounce rate is huge and time on page is low, this means that your content isn’t attracting the right type of leads or they’re not finding the information they’re looking for.
The Benefits of a Content Audit
Improve traffic, conversion rates, and leads.
Any business worth their salt will want to see positive advances in organic search rankings, conversion rates, and lead generation from their blog content. Otherwise, what’s the whole point of even meticulously researching and writing a blog?
Conduct a detailed content audit to uncover the pages that need to be optimized to acquire more traffic; which pages are already your gold star, high performing customer converters; and which of those that are bringing you in sweet, sweet leads and generating revenue.
The latter two points highlight your success. How can you emulate this across all of your posts for further profit? A content audit will show you.
Underperforming content, be gone!
On the flip side, you’ll also be able to uncover content that isn’t serving your business. For example, content that doesn’t rank in the SERPs, has poor traffic acquisition, and doesn’t convert or produce leads can all be removed from your website. Not only does it serve no purpose, but Google will also spend your crawl budget on this content when it could be looking at more important pages.
Increase overall site quality
Having the ability to weed out deadwood content, optimize content, and install redirects from underperforming content will increase your website’s quality. And having a higher quality website and pages not only improves the overall user experience but helps to establish authority and trust with Google.
Find, uncover, identify…
Look at your content as an inventory of your website. This will enable you to uncover gaps in topics or keywords. For example, you have a tonne of content on one topic but are actively under-serving another, or you’re missing the opportunity to target some easy, low-hanging-fruit-style keywords in your marketing.
Celebrate your wins
A content audit isn’t just about getting rid of what doesn’t work; it’s equally about seeing what does work. When you’re taking a birds-eye-view of your content, you’ll be able to see which pages are performing well, driving conversions, and providing your business with a positive ROI on your content marketing strategy.
Refresh and update outdated content
Some of your content may relate to a particular time period or will need to be modernized and updated with new information. Ideas and best practices also change over time, so your blog content will need to reflect this. Remember that not all your content will be evergreen. A content audit is the best way to examine your content and see where edits and updates need to be made.
Consolidating your content
Similarly, a content audit is the perfect opportunity to consolidate your content. For example, you’ve got a bunch of blog posts on a very similar topic that are performing okay but nothing amazing. Why not consolidate these into a brand-spanking new guide that’s downloadable for lead generation?
Look out for our next blog post on exactly how to conduct an SEO content audit — coming very soon! In the meantime, do you need help with conducting a content audit for your business? Get in touch with Method and Metric.
