How can you identify low-performing content for a successful content audit?

2 Use a tool to crawl and inventory your content

The next step is to use a tool that can crawl your website and collect all the URLs and metadata of your content. This will help you create a comprehensive inventory of your content and see its structure, hierarchy, and attributes. There are many tools available for this purpose, such as Screaming Frog, SEMrush, Ahrefs, or ContentKing. You can export the data to a spreadsheet or a dashboard and sort, filter, and categorize it according to your needs.

3 Analyze your content performance data

Once you have your content inventory, you need to analyze the data and look for patterns and trends that indicate low-performing content. You can use Google Analytics, Google Search Console, or other tools to get insights into your content performance based on the metrics you defined earlier. For example, you can check the traffic, engagement, and conversion rates of each page and compare them with your benchmarks or industry averages. You can also look at the rankings, keywords, and backlinks of your content and see how they affect your SEO.

4 Set criteria and score your content

Identifying low-performing content can be made easier by setting criteria and assigning a score to each piece of content based on its performance data. A scale from 1 to 5 or a color code from red to green can be used to rate the content. Additionally, different criteria can be used for different types of content, such as blog posts, landing pages, or product pages. Relevance, accuracy, quality, and value are some examples of criteria. Relevance measures how well the content matches the intent and needs of your audience; accuracy looks at how accurate, up-to-date, and reliable the information is; quality considers how well-written, formatted, and optimized the content is; and value assesses how much it provides to your audience and your business goals.

5 Prioritize and plan your actions

The final step is to prioritize and plan your actions based on the scores and criteria you applied to your content. To decide what to do with each piece of content, you can use the following matrix: keep it, improve it, consolidate it, or delete it. If the content is high-performing and meets all the criteria, you should keep it, but monitor its performance and update it if needed. If the content is low-performing or mediocre, you should improve it by rewriting, reformatting, optimizing, or adding new information. For low-performing or redundant content, you can consolidate it with other content by combining similar pieces into one and redirecting the old URLs. And if the content is low-performing or irrelevant with no value, delete it and redirect the URL to a relevant page or a 404 page. Following these steps will help you identify any low-performing content on your website and take necessary actions to improve its quality, user experience, and SEO in order to achieve your goals.