What is a content audit?

There’s never been a more important time for every business to optimise their content.  In fact, in this expanding digital world, content has never been more king.   However, creating content certainly is not just about putting information and images together, it’s all about the value your content is adding to an online platform, especially a social media platform.  So, it’s vital to make sure the content you are pushing out is of top quality, informative and relevant to your business.

 In fact, content is so important that a digital marketing strategy cannot be executed without it.  Content is the driving force behind any marketing campaign.  To help you understand the importance of content it’s a wise choice to complete an accredited digital marketing course, so you are able to bring your online content to life.

Content explained

Basically, content is information used to describe a service, product or information on a certain topic.  There are many forms of content such as, text, graphics, images, video or a website.  Content is so important because it offers your readers valuable information, tools or incentives.  Content drives traffic to your site, blog or social media post.  Content is essential and tells your audience what you’re all about.

Why is a content audit necessary?

Your digital content will continuously grow, so it makes sense that this information needs to be catalogued and analysed periodically.   To optimise content included in your digital marketing strategy, it’s necessary to analyse its performance, strengths and where it’s not performing well.  This process is called a content audit.  The main reasons for conducting a content audit is to improve your search engine optimisation (SEO) and reveal how your content is contributing to your overall conversion performance.

Benefits of conducting a content audit

Although it may seem like a daunting task, we now know it’s necessary to carry out a content audit but let’s discuss the benefits of auditing your content regularly.    Yet, many organisations underestimate the benefits of doing this exercise and don’t quite understand all the benefits of doing so.

Here are some of the main benefits of doing a content audit.

• Be current – Having outdated content on your website is not only embarrassing for your brand, but Google loves new content, which will improve your search ratings. There is so much content that is time-sensitive and should be updated when it’s no longer relevant.
• Pick up website errors – When was the last time you went on to your website as a visitor? Doing a content audit can bring website errors to your attention that you may otherwise not be aware of.
• Enhance user experience – Perhaps your content was put together a while back. Your users will thank you for updating content with new information, images and videos.
• Identify strong pages – Identifying themes, topics and content format that is preferred by your website visitor is key to creating similar content.

 How to carry out a content audit

There’s no doubt the process of a content audit can be a time-consuming process so let’s take a look at how to get started.

• Determine your goals – Decide why you are doing a content audit to streamline the process. Specifying what you want to achieve will help you focus on what’s important.
• Your URLs – To get started you’ll need to make a list of all your website URLs and there are handy online tools available to help you do this.
• Do an inventory – Create a simple spreadsheet where you’ll list the URL name, link, keywords etc so you have all the necessary information in one place. Just update the spreadsheet whenever you carry out another content audit.
• Analyse content – This is the most time-consuming part of a content audit. Go through all your website, which means every word, image or video.   Evaluate whether it’s still current or whether you can enhance the content by updating it.
• Develop a strategy – Once you’ve reviewed and analysed all your content be sure to put a plan of action in place accompanied by a completion date.

 Conclusion

Digital content must be treated like any other part of your business.  It should be taken care of like any other company asset, which means being reviewed and updated regularly to make sure its relevant and topical.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

Want to learn more about content marketing and digital copywriting? Check out our course on Digital Copywriting and Content Marketing! Please visit our course page to learn more about our other online digital marketing courses.er!