How can you create a content audit in 5 simple steps?

What result do you expect from the content? The answer is what will guide the rest of your decisions. Your audit shouldn't be about what you think everybody else is doing. No. It should be about what you believe your content should do. So if your readers are getting what they want and need from your content, it's good. That's all that matters. Don't fall into the trap of trying to fit your writing into other people's opinions.

To create a content audit in five simple steps, start by compiling your content inventory, including all types of content and relevant details. Next, define evaluation criteria such as audience relevance and engagement metrics. Assess each piece of content against these criteria to identify top performers and areas for improvement. Then, analyze your inventory to uncover content gaps and opportunities for enhancement. Finally, develop actionable insights and recommendations based on your findings to optimize your content strategy and better serve your audience's needs.

1. Inventory: Compile a comprehensive list of all existing content assets, including blog posts, articles, videos, and social media posts. 2. Assessment: Evaluate each content piece based on criteria such as relevance, quality, and performance metrics like engagement and traffic. 3. Categorization: Organize content into categories or themes to identify strengths, weaknesses, and gaps in your current content strategy. 4. Analysis: Analyze the findings to identify trends, patterns, and areas for improvement, such as outdated or redundant content. 5. Action Plan: Develop a plan of action based on the audit results, prioritizing content updates, optimization, and creation efforts to align with business objectives and audience needs.

- Inventory: Compile a comprehensive list of all existing content. - Assessment: Evaluate each piece based on relevance, performance, and alignment with goals. - Analysis: Identify strengths, weaknesses, and gaps in the content. - Action Plan: Determine what content needs updating, repurposing, or removal. - Implementation: Execute the plan, making necessary revisions and improvements to optimize content effectiveness.

Data doesn't lie, so don't rely on your gut. Screaming frog is a great tool to inventory and analyze site pages. A great feature is that you can connect it to tools like Google Analytics, and PageSpeed Insights. Then export all of the data so you can review it all in one place. This helps to identify the pages that are performing, and the ones that aren't. Based on the data, you can decide to leave a page alone, redirect it, refresh it, remove it. You may see a pattern of pages that are easily fixed. And you may see a more pervasive pattern that is impacting your whole site. If you had no concrete goal about the purpose of your content audit. The data will help identify what you should go after first depending on the needs of your business.

If you are auditing for a client, pay attention to what their end goals are. Very often, the client has tunnel vision. So they try to force the readers to follow their desired course of action. Instead of persuading, they coerce. So look out for that. Then, outline a strategy to overcome the issues. Expect some pushback so prepare for that. The point is, the audit will often bring out other flaws.

If you have multiple pieces of similar content, you should consider combining them into one article, especially if there's a lot of topical overlap. One well-written, comprehensive piece of content is going to do a lot more for your website than a bunch of short, similar, or scattered pieces. If you have too many similar articles, you risk keyword cannibalization, as well as frustrating your website's visitors.

Here are some simple processes to follow to audit your content. - Gather all your content from blogs, websites and Social media pages. - Now organise them by grouping them into different categories like videos, blogs and infographics. - Now review the quality of those content based on their engagement metrics (Likes, Shares and views) -Now find the loopholes or areas where you lack - Now plant and implement new strategy. Update all your existing content and create new content. - Continuously monitor your content and make changes when needed

There are so many tactics that help your content rank higher. After your content audit, you will have identified some patterns that need to be addressed (for example, perhaps many of your pages don't have enough internal links.) Once you've identified these patterns, they should be added to your checklist for your content strategy, and content calendar. Be proactive to ensure those patterns don't continue.