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A well-conducted content audit, performed by a digital marketing agency, can improve your content marketing branding and overall performance of your marketing strategy. In this report, all of your website pages are analyzed and sorted into three categories: pages to keep, pages to update, and pages to delete. Knowing this information helps us see which content is working for your business, where easy opportunities for improvement lie, and which areas are hindering your marketing efforts. Our marketing agency performs a thorough audit for our clients a minimum of once per year. It’s a time-consuming process but when done properly it yields great insights.
This is how we do it.
Before Beginning Your Content Audit
The first step is understanding what you want out of the content audit. Clear goals are necessary in order to determine appropriate action afterward. Some possible content audit goals are as follows:
We will then need to determine the scope of the audit, and review content from a minimum of one year prior or back until the last audit was performed. If completed on an annual basis, you will only need to analyze the previous year’s content.
Beginning Your Content Audit
Our marketing agency will audit your internal content, such as blog posts, news, educational materials, product descriptions, landing pages and even external publications. We can also assess other types of content such as videos, PDFs or interactive content (quizzes, tests, games, etc).
We plug all of the relevant information into a template similar to this content audit template. We can also add or remove certain metrics depending on your goals.
Collecting URLs
As a digital marketing agency, we have access to and experience using valuable tools like SEMrush’s Content Analyzer. This allows us to select URLs to be analyzed. The data can be exported into an Excel file as well. We may also choose to use the following programs for further insights:
Scoring The Data
After reviewing each page of content, we’ll decide whether to keep it, update it, or delete it. Our marketing agency assigns each page a letter grade based on its overall performance. A page with a score of A or B is a top-performing page and should be kept. Assets with a score of C or D are good but could be improved. Pages that get an F should be removed or combined with other assets. With our technical expertise, we complete a 301 redirect for any post that is absorbed into another one.
If a blog post has been on your website for years, has no backlinks pointing to it, and is never visited, it could be hurting your rankings. If no one is visiting a URL, and it doesn’t add value to the site, it doesn’t need to be there. We suggest adding a “No Index” tag to these kinds of pages.
Taking Action
Here are some actionable items that we may recommend based on the findings from your content audit:
If you’re looking to improve your online presence, give us a call at 604.559.7509. or visit our digital marketing agency in Vancouver – we always have chocolate.