Content marketing would definitely be the most up–and–coming form of marketing taking into consideration the popularity of social media platforms. Ever since social media has taken the market by storm, a lot of businesses have diverted most of their focus towards content marketing via social media and other engaging platforms.
However, just like most things in the market, even content can get obsolete. People need to change in accordance with the current latest norms in order to be more relevant.
This is something that a lot of creators of content put their focus on while creating new content however, a lot of creators tend to forget about the content that already exists. Most of the things created by them in the past are something they don’t want to visit as it reminds them how badly they did it back then.
But that needs to change and content marketers need to audit their content time and again. It will help them by providing a better insight towards their development and also keep their old stock of world fresh for the world to see.
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What is Content Auditing?
Audit of Content means returning to the initial stage of your site when the author first started publishing and look at it properly. The relevant person has to identify what works for their self-curated site and what doesn’t.
This assessment is done by keeping in mind the KPIs i.e., key performance indicators, which are basically the metrics or benchmarks set by a person for their work.
A content audit will definitely help content marketers in understanding:
- What would work best for their website?
- What sort of content would be preferred by the target audience?
- And, what needs to be removed from your website to make it more efficient?
The answers to these questions are important as they help a great deal in the generation of leads and for marketing purposes. There are various Content analysis tools and algorithms that would help a great deal in evaluating and conducting a content audit.
They give proper insight and would help a content developer in researching the ways the content could be more appealing. Since one knows how a content audit would be helpful to content developers and marketers, let’s look at why it’s done?
For SEO Purposes:
Search engine optimization can be termed as the biggest marketing tool. There’s hardly any creator of content who hasn’t used it once since the results would be quite astounding.
After conducting a content audit, which will lead you to categorize various keywords, images, and several such elements that may potentially help a content developer to improve the rank of the website on search engines. This particular action would help in increasing traffic of your website which would ultimately lead to better sales in the future.
Better Content Strategies for Marketing:
This is done to sell the developed content without it being too obvious. It should be presented in such a way that would make the target audience is drawn towards it. So basically, a particular content audit would be performed to check whether the particular efforts that a content developer has put with regards to content marketing are working or not.
The developer would have to check the page’s length, visit metrics, shares, etc, in order to analyze the performance with which the content is being received by people. It will help in analyzing how one can improve their lacking areas in order to get a better response in the future.
How to Perform an Audit?
Once you understand the requirement for a content audit, a content developer should know how could they perform it that would provide some good results. It is imperative for businesses, no matter what niche, to keep up with changing times.
This would also help them in seeing how much growth they have witnessed and what they can do to keep doing the same work in the near future too.
1. Identify the Areas that are Weak
While starting with the respective auditing process for your content, then the first step is to understand the areas where the respective content is lagging. If you don’t know the weak areas, one can definitely not progress ahead. One simply needs the assistance of certain analysis tools and software for content that will figure out which URLs haven’t been performing efficiently.
All one needs to do is select one such tool and see for yourself how your websites have been working. These tools will give the content developer a proper analysis of its high and low points, so understanding when a particular trend hits the market and when it slowly became obsolete.
This information would help in planning how one can get those URLs back on track. One can either completely delete those URLs, or edit something in order to keep it fresh and relevant for the present targets. Either way, one needs to remember that the content should do its work of helping one generate good leads for their business.
2. Finding The Right Keywords For Improving Ranking
Keywords play quite an important role in increasing traffic. According to Ahrefs, 69.7% of search queries contain more than four words. That’s why it’s important to target long-tail keywords. Sometimes it can happen that while your website has everything it needs to do well, it still isn’t performing up to the mark because of some misplaced keywords. SEO analysts should target the right keyword for the business.
One needs to find those keywords and arrange or update them with other keywords in a way that will help in improving the ranking of the relevant website, without stealing its essence. There are several keyword research tools available in order to assist you with the right keyword selection for your website.
3. Updating High-Priority Urls With The Assistance Of Content Optimization Tools
The major purpose of having a content audit is majorly to look for problems, if any, with your content and later fix them. The first two steps would help a person in identifying every problematic aspect concerning the relevant content. Now comes the final process for conducting a content audit: making relevant changes in order to make sure the audit works out.
One needs to check the top 20 ranking pages from a search engine such as Bing or Google and then use keyword research software to help one understand why those pages are performing efficiently. Which would be the keywords that draw the highest attention? How are they making their information more useful? What is contained in that particular content that would make it relatable to people?
one can always make some changes to their relevant content by editing what one has written in past and deleting that part that isn’t relevant today. By adding fresh information, you help in giving it an easy upgrade.
These are some steps to do an easy and quick content audit. SEO expert Michelle Thomas recommends that, while performing a content audit, you should always focus on content marketing ROI i.e., return of investment. Whatever effort you are putting in making the content saleable, you should always get more in return.
Conclusion
A content audit is necessary for those businesses that thrive on content marketing. It helps them in always keeping their content in check so that it never goes stale or out of fashion.
