How to Do a Content Audit (the Strategic Way)

Navigation

• What the Heck Is a Content Audit?
• Why Should I Conduct a Content Audit?
• Three Types of Content Audits
• How to Do a Content Audit
• Content Audit Checklist
• Ready to Start Your Audit? We Can Help

What the Heck Is a Content Audit?

A content audit is a structured process for evaluating the performance of your content. It answers the crucial question: Is my content marketing strategy actually working?

A content audit helps you:

• Understand which articles are performing well and which aren’t. Publish a hundred articles, and you might assume that traffic to your blog would be distributed fairly evenly across each of those articles. In reality, most blogs have a handful of hyper-successful articles that generate the bulk of their traffic (like the diagram below) and many that contribute little. A content audit helps you find these outliers, emulate the success of your best performers, and move away from less successful approaches.
• Choose the right content lanes to achieve your goals. Different types of content are best suited to different business goals. SEO content offers a predictable source of organic traffic, but it’s often too specific and utilitarian to be shared widely and generate huge numbers of backlinks — something that thought leadership content is better suited to. A content audit can help identify “gaps” in your current use of content.
• Optimize your site structure to improve the performance of your content. Your website structure can help or hinder the performance of your content. It can group related articles together and make it easy for readers and search engines alike to access and understand this content — or it can bury your content a dozen pages deep.
• Unlock greater ROI from your existing content. Most content marketers spend their time and energy focusing on new content, but a content audit allows you to generate better results from content published months and years in the past. It can help reveal the right strategy for future content, sure — but it can also generate more revenue from the money spent on content in the past.

Importantly, a content audit boils down to an educated opinion on your content's current strengths and weaknesses. Many audits are little more than data dumps of keywords and page load times. In order to be useful, that data must be able to inform an opinion about what needs to change (and what doesn’t).

Why Should I Conduct a Content Audit?

You should conduct a content audit because many of your existing articles could benefit from being updated. Without an audit, you don’t know which ones. 

Content audits are most valuable when a company has consistently published content (that is, on a weekly or greater cadence) for over a year. At this stage, most blogs have enough content to become unwieldy and harder to analyze, and you run into one or more of the following problems.

Solve Strategy Issues

We’ve found two strategy problems that can be solved with a content audit:

• Your content strategy isn’t working. Here’s a common scenario: Company X realizes that content marketing is important, so they start publishing content every week to see what sticks. A year or two later, they realize nothing has stuck — traffic is flat, and leads are sporadic. Without an overarching strategy, they’ve struggled to gain traction, and they need to reset.
• Your content strategy is working. . . but it could be better. Some blogs become so big that overwhelm and decision paralysis are real issues. These companies often have hundreds of blog posts and thousands of monthly sessions, but the sheer number of articles, content properties, contributors, and go-to-market strategies become unmanageable. These companies know that their content could perform better — but they don’t know where to start.

Recognize either of these two problems, and there’s a good chance you could benefit from a content audit.

Improve Your Overall Content

Along with solving strategy issues, an audit can also help improve your overall content — from both a creative and technical standpoint. 

• Boost SEO and SERPs by identifying and updating keyword placement, metadata descriptions, and your content’s linking structure.
• Increase engagement by analyzing content that resonates with your audience using metrics like page views and on-site time. Then, use these drivers to enhance or repurpose current content.
• Improve conversion rates by uncovering the current content that’s leading your audience down your funnel and using this information to tweak copy and calls-to-action.
• Preserve content relevance and accuracy by discovering outdated or inaccurate pages and articles. Factors like broken links can hurt your credibility, so regular content maintenance helps uphold your reputation.
• Optimize upcoming content creation by understanding what’s already working on your site. Use the tactics and topics that resonate most with your audience to drive future results.

Three Types of Content Audits

Focus the specifics of your audit — the data you collect — on whatever your end goal is. If you’re looking to boost organic traffic, run an SEO audit. If you’re trying to increase click-through rates, go for a conversion optimization audit. 

Although you can design your audit for whatever KPI you’re after, here are some of the most popular.

Content Audits vs. SEO Audits

A content audit is not the same as an SEO audit — though they sometimes intersect, they are different tools designed to achieve different goals.

Ask a guitarist and a music producer to critique a song, and chances are, you’ll get different feedback. The guitarist might focus on the individual guitar riffs, the effects used, or the techniques employed during the solo. The producer might consider the song structure, the vocal harmonies, or the overall production values. Neither criticism is right or wrong — its usefulness just depends on the type of feedback you want.

The relationship between SEO audits and content audits is similar:

• An SEO audit is useful for improving your website’s search performance or fixing technical SEO problems but leaves many crucial elements of content performance unexplored. It can’t analyze the efficacy of non-SEO content, like thought leadership, sales enablement, or lead generation content, and it isn’t designed to pass comment on the subjective quality of your content — like messaging, tone, or user experience (UX).
• A content audit is designed to look at the totality of your content marketing. It incorporates elements of an SEO audit, like keyword analysis, technical SEO, and site structure recommendations — but it also focuses on the dozens of non-SEO factors that influence the success of each blog post. Conversely, elements of SEO that don’t influence your content marketing — like the performance of product pages — are given less attention.

An SEO audit is useful for understanding your content's search performance, but a content audit is a better tool for understanding the bigger picture — how well your entire library of content serves your bigger, broader business goals.

Content Audits vs. Usability Audits

You already know what a content audit is, but what about a usability audit?

A usability audit — sometimes referred to as an accessibility audit — is a comprehensive evaluation of your digital products aimed at assessing their ease of use and accessibility for all visitors. The primary goal of a usability audit is to identify issues that may hinder your audience’s ability to interact effectively with your website, app, or content.

During a usability audit, analyze your site’s functional aspects — navigation, information architecture (IA), user interface (UI), and user experience (UX) — along with your creative aspects — copy and design. A usability audit helps ensure that your website is user-friendly, your content is inclusive, and everything is accessible to all users, including those with disabilities.

A few examples of usability issues that this audit may uncover include:

• Confusing site structure
• Unclear calls-to-action
• Difficult-to-complete forms
• Poor mobile optimization
• Inconsistent visual design cues
• Improper text size and color contrast
• Missing text (image alt text and video captions)

Benefits of conducting a usability audit include:

• Improved UX: When your site is easier to access and use, it enhances visitor satisfaction.
• Better conversion rates: If your site has better user engagement, it will likely lead to more conversions.
• Decreased customer support costs: Improving your site’s interface minimizes the opportunity for user error, decreasing the need for customer support.

You can conduct a usability audit in conjunction with your content audit, as they have complementary benefits. Conducting a usability audit is necessary for identifying and addressing accessibility issues to ensure an effective UX.

Content Audits vs. Conversion Optimization Audits

A conversion audit, or conversion rate optimization (CRO) audit, is a comprehensive evaluation of your website’s UX. It thoroughly analyzes your customer journey and pinpoints potential areas of friction or technical issues that could impede conversion rates.

The primary goal of a conversion optimization audit is to identify and remove any barriers that allow your users to become customers by taking a specific action. You want to make your users’ path to purchase (or whatever action you want them to take) as clear as possible.

A comprehensive evaluation in a conversion audit may include:

• UX analysis: Evaluating your site’s overall layout, design, and navigation. Assessing how intuitive your UI is.
• A/B testing: Using different page and content variations — like headlines, layouts, and CTAs — to conduct experiments and determine which options are most user-friendly.
• User behavior analysis: Evaluating your user journey — using data sources like surveys, heatmaps, and click-through rates — to understand how your audience interacts with your site and content.
• Technical analysis: Assessing site performance elements like linking structures, page load times, mobile design, and the checkout process. 

The best time to perform a conversion optimization audit is after you have a clear understanding of your customers and their typical journeys. Then, your audit can help you identify ways to prioritize improvements and enhance UX, which will boost conversion rates.

How to Do a Content Audit

The basic premise of a content audit is simple: you collect data — like traffic, keyword rankings, conversions, and links — from all of your articles in a big spreadsheet.

That process of data collection can be useful in some circumstances — it might be that you’ve started a new role and you’re looking to take stock of the company’s existing content inventory. But it has limitations. Answering even a simple question like, “What are my best-performing articles?” can quickly become problematic: Is a high-traffic, low-conversion-rate article good or bad? The answer: it depends on the goal you’re trying to accomplish.

“Is a high-traffic, low-conversion-rate article good or bad? The answer: it depends on the goal you’re trying to accomplish.”

A content audit spreadsheet of a thousand data points can tell any number of stories. Like our earlier example of both a guitarist and a music producer analyzing a song, you’ll get better results from your analysis if it’s focused on a particular area or problem. With that in mind, the first step of a content audit isn’t diving into the data — it’s narrowing the scope of the audit and working out where you want to focus. Then, you can continue the step-by-step content auditing process.

1. Identify Your Main Area of Focus

Though it might feel counterintuitive to limit the scope of your audit, prioritization is key. Any type of data analysis can become big and complicated. By starting with a smaller, concrete goal, you greatly increase the likelihood of your content audit actually achieving the goal it set out to achieve.

Chances are, there’s a solid reason you started googling “content audit.” You’ve encountered a painful problem or a source of anxiety, and you’re hoping that an audit can help. It might be that:

• Your organic traffic is declining month-over-month.
• You have too much content, and you need to free up some headspace.
• You have a hunch that technical problems limit your content's search performance.

Recognizing this problem provides a focal point for your audit — a way to guide the data you collect and make sense of it within the context of a broader business goal. Each problem requires different data points to understand and different strategies to solve. And each problem will take your content audit in a different direction.

If this process feels a little cart-before-horse, don’t worry. There’s no need to have a fully vetted hypothesis at this point — even a simple hunch is useful for focusing on the types of data that will prove most useful.

2. Choose Your Data Points

Most “how to do a content audit” posts recommend collecting every metric under the sun, but that can be problematic — too much data can overwhelm and make it harder to reveal the story hidden within. There are a few core data points that are almost always useful, like traffic and conversions. Beyond those, it’s better to choose additional data points sparingly, using your main area of focus to guide your selection.

If organic traffic is declining, article traffic and keyword rankings provide a useful starting point. If you have too much content, article traffic and conversion data will help you identify articles that can be “pruned.” If you’re worried about technical SEO, Core Web Vitals and linking structure will steer you in the right direction.

There’s one crucial data point missing from this list, and that’s because it can’t be quantified: the subjective quality of your content. Data-heavy audits can make it easy to overlook important qualitative hallmarks of quality:

• Are your articles difficult to read because of weird formatting or typography?
• Could you convey more information by including more graphics?
• How well do your articles align with current company messaging?
• Or, most telling of all — are your articles just boring?

Each of these qualitative data points can have a huge impact on content performance, but they won’t show up in a generic auditing spreadsheet.

3. Choose Your Content Audit Tools

A content analytics tool like Google Analytics is the primary tool you’ll need to run a content audit. It provides access to those core data points — traffic and conversions — from earlier, allowing you to separate good content from bad. To get started, export your chosen data points and import them into a spreadsheet.

Beyond that, other more specialized content audit tools can provide additional context and data, ranging from paid tools like website crawler Screaming Frog (great for quickly importing all of your article URLs into a spreadsheet or analyzing on-page SEO at scale) to free tools like Animalz’ own content refresh tool, Revive (designed to quickly identify articles suffering from content decay).

Each additional tool brings with it more data — and the potential for greater complexity. Most first-time content audits are well served by a modest combination of one content analytics tool, one website crawler, and one keyword research tool. Then, once you’ve identified your areas of improvement and you’re ready to update your site content, you can use the quality and management tools to create and store your pieces.

4. Create a Content Audit Report

A content audit report brings all the previously mentioned elements together into one streamlined document. So your report should include your: 

• Main content goal(s)
• Selected data points
• Results from whatever tools you use (like the exported spreadsheet from Google Analytics)

Once you’ve created your first report, you can turn it into a content audit template to share and reuse in the future.

5. Use Your Data to Make Strategic Recommendations

Data points are just numbers — strategic interpretation is what makes them useful, revealing a practical plan of action to get you from where you are to where you want to be.

Tackle your analysis in chunks. For each of your chosen data points, run through these three simple analytical frameworks:

• Review historical performance. How has your data changed from month to month and year to year? Changes in growth rates and drop-offs in crucial metrics like referring domains or keyword rankings can help reveal concrete problems to tackle.
• Compare to industry benchmarks. How does your data compare to similar companies? Even if your traffic is growing, it’s possible that you aren’t growing fast enough relative to your competitors — and exploring their content strategy could be extremely lucrative.

Look for outliers. Which data points stick out as exceptionally good, exceptionally bad, or just exceptionally weird? These outliers make it easy to identify successful content types to replicate and unsuccessful content types to ditch.

If you’ve limited the scope of your audit to a single primary problem and chosen your data points accordingly, your analysis should lead you toward a useful recommendation. Here’s a theoretical example of that thought process:

• Problem: Website has low domain authority
• Data: The number of backlinks per article, content type
• Analysis: Our SEO content generates almost no backlinks; our thought leadership content generates most of our backlinks
• Strategy: Shift focus for new content away from SEO and toward thought leadership; refresh and re-promote old SEO content to generate new backlinks

Below are some of the most common recommendations we make in our content audits:

Content Audit Checklist

Most of the foundational elements — UX, functionality, relevance — are the same regardless of the specific goals of your website content audit. But other considerations aren’t so obvious. 

Ask yourself these questions to drill down into your content assessments:

• What actions should my user take during each stage of the funnel, and how can I make these processes more efficient?
• What is my overarching content goal, and how can I create calls-to-action that support this goal?
• What is my primary target persona or ideal customer profile (ICP)? What are my secondary audiences?
• How often do I refresh my site and content (e.g., monthly, yearly)? How often should I?
• Are there relevant internal links pointing to and from each piece of content?
• What is the average time users spend on each page?
• What is my content’s bounce rate — both the overall average and for individual pieces?
• How has my content performed over time (e.g., past three, six, or 12 months)?

Depending on your specific type of content audit — SEO, usability, conversion — include the relevant questions from this checklist for a more holistic assessment of your site.

New Revenue from Old Content

Most content marketers spend the majority of their time and energy thinking about future content. Our tools and processes — editorial calendars, keyword research documents, you name it — are biased toward content creation. And when you’re starting out with content marketing, that allocation makes sense. You need to publish to see what works and what doesn’t.

But today, well over a decade after content marketing hit the mainstream, many blogs are sitting on years of accumulated content. Locked up within those paragraphs and page headers are thousands of dollars of unclaimed revenue. Small changes, like updating old posts or tweaking your site structure, can generate new traffic, new leads, and new customers.

A content audit is the tool that reveals those opportunities. It helps you see beyond individual articles and understand exactly how well your content serves your business goals. It can help shape the direction of all future content — and it can unlock unclaimed revenue from your existing articles.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published on February 18th 2021. It was updated and expanded by Court Bishop in June 2024.

Ryan Law and Andrew Tate

Follow @thinking_slow