Content audits involve analysing the content across a website to look for insights that can help you create better content in the future. This is sometimes known as ‘content gap analysis’. Auditing the performance of website content such as blog posts, service pages, videos, and landing pages in this way, will help you design a successful content strategy going forward. 

Content audits will also help you identify areas of weakness in your current content, such as outdated content or where content could be cannibalising other content. In these instances content could be deleted, 301 redirected or merged with other content. 

How do you do a website content audit?

Set your goals

The first step of a content audit is to set goals. For example, you can combine a content audit with content optimisation techniques if your goal is to improve how your existing content performs on organic search. If some pages are performing better than others on search, a content audit can help figure out why this is the case and what you can learn from your success to improve both your existing and future content.

Your goals will also dictate which metrics you measure for your content audit. When focusing on SEO and lead conversion, for example, useful metrics to measure could include:

  • Search queries
  • Rank
  • Organic search traffic
  • Bounce rate
  • Time on page
  • Number of backlinks
  • Conversion rate

A content audit will help you understand what content is performing well and identify any gaps that you can fill with future content.

Organise your content

After being clear about your goals, the next step is to collect and categorise all of the URLs you want to analyse. This could involve setting up a spreadsheet listing the URLs with columns for the metrics you want to measure on each page. If you don’t like the idea of using a spreadsheet, there are also online tools available that can help speed up the content audit process.

Categorising and keeping your findings organised will help you a lot with the analysis phase.

Analyse each individual piece of content

With your goals defined and your content organised, you can then start extracting data and analysing how well your content is performing.

In addition to extracting raw metrics, a content audit will also allow you to look out for any opportunities to expand or refresh content to make it more relevant or accurate. A lot may have changed since you wrote a blog post several years ago, don’t risk giving website visitors a bad experience by providing them with inaccurate or out of date information.

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