Creating content is considered as a vital marketing strategy today. From a business perspective, you need to make content and distribute it to the web accordingly. Content marketing tactics stay on every business model’s list. The demand is high so making content is extremelyon the higher side.
So, there is a rush can be seenin creating content among the web.And most of the time it happens thatcreators make contents, distribute it, and then they become done with it. That is where business owners are making a big mistake. The online market is changing rapidly every day and you need to update your content accordingly too.
That is the major reason why you need to do a content audit. A content audit is basically updating your contenton a daily basis so that it gets suitable according to the latest market. Statistics say that 37% of the content marketers don’t update the contents. As a result, this leads to an unsuccessful implementation of a content marketing strategy.
If you are running a company and dream of becoming a top digital marketing companythen you must do content audit regularly. In this article, you will get to know the 5 steps to perform a successful content audit. You can follow the steps as a guide. This will definitely enhance the output of your business content marketing.
1. Making the content listed properly
This is the starting step of making a proper content audit. At first, you need to make a list of every content stock available on your website. You need to compile all of the content and then put it together in a spreadsheet via a URL.
In case, you are having a small website then the listing can be done manually. But if you are having a big website with a large number of contents then you may need to take the help of a software. Some applications offer a free version to a certain limit. If you take content marketing seriously, then opting for the software is totally worth the investment.
When you will take all of the stocks in a single spreadsheet then the URL will play an important role. Create the URL in HTML format so that it becomes easy to audit on the website. The results will be exported easily.
URL implementation may be tough to some extent and if you feel like missing it then check the internal linking. It is possible that your website has a weak internal linking. In that case, you need to use some generator tool to fix the issue.
This will lead to a successful content listing of every stock. So, get the content listing done properly with the help of a software.
2. Making it categorized
After the content listing is done, now you have everything of content. You already got a thorough idea of what you have on the table. It’s time to decide how it should perform on the web to have the best content marketing tactics. At first, you need to identify which content is underperforming and why.
For that, you need to collect a few metrics. Here is the list of metrics you need to categorize the content. You have to add the metrics to your column to make a successful content audit.
- Content title – you need to create a content title for each content.
- Title length –take title length and check which one is getting the highest CTR (Click Through Rate) and why. If your content tile stays between or under 55 to 60 characters then it will be able to attract high traffic.
- Category –note down the content topic of every page.
- Major keyword ranking – you need to record the target keyword ranking.
- Major keyword volume –note down the volume of the main keyword. This will reduce the efforts of your SEO strategy in the future. Getting the keyword volume is mandatory for a content audit. You can use any type of tool or Google AdWords to get the keyword volume.
- Average organic traffic per month –Google Analytics will help you to decide this. Go to Behavior,take a page, add Source (Secondary Dimension). Now you can check the organic traffic data of every content and every page.
- Calculate the entire traffic of every month –Google Analytics will show you the path again. You need to go to behavior and then check the traffic of the last few months. Like the traffic of the last 4 months. This way, you will get to see the entire traffic the contents are attracting.
- Meta description –Meta description attracts traffic too and has a great influence on the CTR. If the traffic is coming low for no reason for your contents then you need to see through the meta description matter. Check the meta description and optimize it to catch high traffic.
- Search traffic bounce rate –checking the bounce rate of content should be one of your top prioritized duties. Go to Behavior and check bounce rate stats.
- Time on page average calculation –open Google Analytics and then go to Behavior then check the time on page of average calculation. This will give you an exact result of how much time the audience is spending on every page.
- Backlinks quantity –check how much backlinks are given to each page as well as in each content.
- Quantity of root domains linking –it is one of the vital parts of every content audit. After you have the number of backlinks, then the linked root domains number should be calculated also. The statistics will give you a fair idea if the number of backlinks is inflated or not.
- URL ranking –thequality of the links should be justified and it will help you to do some further content editing too. Check the quality and ranking of the URL and analyze why the webpage or content is lacking way behind. You can check the page authority by URL checking.
- Social shares –calculating the social shares of webpages is important. There are several tools available via which you can check how much gross social share your entire website is having.
These are the metrics you must add to your content. This will help you to receive the metrics of contents and webpages. Then you can categorize it accordingly too. You can add some further metrics too if you think it’s necessary.
You need the help to have a software or a programmer to take the metrics and make it categorize properly because making the audits manually will be troublesome.
3. Making audience profile
Target audience is everything for any content team. And you may need to evaluate the target audience on a regular basis because the online market today is very fluctuating. It’s necessary to know your audience and make a customer profile where the in-depth analysis will be given.
Here are the steps of how to do that.
- At first, you need to identify your target readers. Get to know what the audience exactly wants. Then provide the contents according to the demand.Research deeply about who your readeris and what they want. You may use the help of social media to reach to the audience.
Targeting readers is not at all an easy thing and you need to follow proper guidelines and platforms. Once you will know about who are your readers, only then you will further proceed to the next step.
- It is the thing that is already stated in the first point. After knowing who your audiences are, the next thing you need to know is all about the demand. Get to know what type of content your readers want and start making content on it. You need to provide content according to market demand.
But keep in mind that the online market changes very frequently. So, the content demand today may not be so demandable after 3 days or a week. You need to update content in proper interval. Psychographics and Demographics play a key role. Knowing the gender, age come under the Demographics and the belief of the audience come under Psychographics.
Above all of that, you need to spend high-amount of time doing proper research.
- After knowing the audience and what they want, it’s time you should generate keywords and topics related to that. Or you can update the contents according to the latest keywords.
You can also have a record of the recent topics and keywords separately in a spreadsheet. You may make content according to it and update it on your website.
Creating the audience profile will provide the right purpose to the content audit.
4. Making gap analysis
After performing the previous 3 steps, now you should have two spreadsheets – one where all of your present content is available with the metrics and another one where the content ideas or the latest contents will be available.
Now it’s time to check both of the spreadsheets thoroughly and compare it with each other.
- At first, check which contents are missing. There is no doubt that you will find many common contents between the two spreadsheets but your main responsibility is to check the one which is missing.
Unfortunately, there is no software available with which you can compare the two spreadsheets. So, you have to do it manually and it will take a lot of time.
After comparing the contents with both of the spreadsheets, you need to note down which content is missing. This is called the content gap. You need to fill the gap by updating the latest contents.
- Again, you need to check which content is underperforming. That means the contents that are not generating high-traffic or expected traffic, must be identified. There are no specific formulae exist.
You have to check that by yourself and it will take some time. Check the rankings and the amount of traffic every content is catching per month. This will give you a thorough idea about the underperforming contents. Then start analyzing why it is not getting enough searches in a month.
5. Making new content strategy
This is the last and final step of auditing content on the website. Nowyou got all the gaps, mistakes, common errors, underperforming contents. It’s time you see the matter seriously because it will be done manually and you need to consider filling the gaps. The process is time-consuming.
You need to make another spreadsheet where several columns will be created.
You can make the following points –
Leave – you need to leave the contents that are catching high traffic.
Create – you need to create new content of the latest idea and according to the new keywords.
Merge – you will get to know if the contents need to merge or not. You will see that some parts are required from one content and some part is required from another content. For the situations, you need to merge one content to another content to make the audit successful.
Improve – if you think that your content is underperforming but there is a chance of improvement then you need to improve the content accordingly and update it as well.
Now you need to prioritize the contents. The contents that have the high potential will stay on top and the contents that have the low potential will stay on the bottom. So, you will decorate your website according to these. The contents that have the capability to attract a lot of traffic will stay on top and the order will be done according to high to low.
Create an action list, put all the contents there and start your marketing plans.
Now you get to know the 5 steps of performing a successful content audit to provide the top digital marketing services in India. Follow the steps and have the most updated content on your website to the latest trends of the market. It is not a very quick process and it requires time as well as manpower too.
You will need the help of software in many steps and the manual performance in multiple steps. These are the best 5 steps to guide your business to have the best content audit.
Best of luck!
Archana Singh is a Professional Blogger and Content writer. She is working with Ethane Web Technologies. In her professional life she has written many useful articles about WordPress, social media, SEO and almost all about Digital Marketing.