When it comes to streamlining your content marketing efforts, it pays to audit your material so you know where the strengths and weaknesses lie. But this isn’t something you should be doing on a whim, as if it were some casual errand, you’ll get around to doing at some point.
Your website is the lifeblood of your company, without it you are bound to fail, so it’s a good idea to conduct this type of audit as soon as you can.
Set Your Objectives
It’s like anything else, if you don’t have a clear-cut goal in mind, you’re not going to achieve success. So, consider what you want this audit to tell you. That means knowing what types of business goals you hope to reach and the results you expect. Do you want higher conversion rates? Better SEO results? Perhaps you are having trouble with audience engagement.
Once you have determined the goals for your website content audit, you can start to assign the metrics that are pertinent to those specific goals.
The Metrics
When you are figuring out which metrics should apply to your particular goals for an audit, you will want to focus on the four major classifications. These include: User behavior, SEO, audience engagement, and sales. Placing an emphasis on one set of metrics per goal will give you a clearer picture of the efficacy of your content marketing.
As an example, you might consider user behavior metrics and engagement metrics to better define the tastes of your intended audience. You can then adjust your content to meet these demands.
Content Inventory
Your audit is going to be time-consuming because it relies on a separate assessment of each type of content you offer on your website. So, you will do an audit of your blog posts separate from any product descriptions that are listed on your site. Each audit should be performed by the metrics you choose.
These audits can be done with your internal content as well as anything that has been published externally. Your content need not only be written material either, you can audit visual content such as videos or entertainment and educational content from games to quizzes.
Organizing Your Content
You will start by gathering the URL’s of all the web pages you wish to have audited. Once you’ve chosen the pages that are most critical to your audit, you can then organize all of your data under various headings and criteria. A content marketing company like Motion can be a valuable ally in auditing your content and giving you a list of the most important web pages based on your metrics.
Analysis
Once you have all of your data and the metrics by which it has all been categorized, you can then start to analyze every part of your content based on the goals you are hoping to reach. Your analysis will allow you to pinpoint which content is working well, which content needs to be updated or refreshed, and any content that is working against you and should be removed from the website entirely.
