Coral background

How to Achieve Your Business Goals with a Content Audit

Posted on 7 September 2023, Written by Jane

Edited on 3 May 2024

It’s time to talk about content audits. We know adding regular content to a website is good for SEO. But what happens next? Do you know how that blog you uploaded a few months ago is performing? Is it achieving what you want it to do? 

Chances are, you’re not really sure. And this often applies to most of the content across your website. If this sounds familiar, a content audit is what you need to get back on track.

To help you understand how to make the most of an SEO content audit, we’ll cover:

What is a Content Audit?

Why Does Your Business Need an SEO Content Audit?

What’s Involved in a Content Audit?

#1. Understanding Your Marketing Goals

#2. Creating an Inventory of Content

#3. Analysing the Data

#4. Producing a Content Action Plan

How Often Should You Conduct a Website Content Audit?

The Benefits of a Content Audit for Your Business

SEO Content Audits with Pod Digital

an infographic showing the 4 stages of content audits

What is a Content Audit?

A content audit is the process of reviewing all the content on your website and creating an organised document to understand what you’ve got and how it’s performing. It creates an overview of how people perceive your brand online, giving you the bigger picture of where to go next. 

From here, you can analyse your content and focus on the areas that need improvement to ensure your website is helping you to reach your business goals. 

In short, a content audit is the only way to understand what you have and what you need. And, increasingly importantly, what you don’t need

Why Does Your Business Need an SEO Content Audit?

Everything in life needs regular maintenance – our cars, our homes, even our bodies. So why would you treat content differently? As nice as it would be to simply write it, upload it and leave it, you’re never going to get the best performance with that approach.  

Especially not when it comes to digital marketing. As search engines change their algorithms (cough, Google’s giant E-E-A-T update, cough), you need to tweak your content to make sure it’s working hard for you and your business. 

The more you understand your target audience and what they want from you, the better you can optimise your content to reach more people through SEO. And the more people you reach, the bigger your pool of potential customers. All the pieces of the digital marketing puzzle start to fall into place when you understand what you’re working with and what you want to achieve from it. 

You should always be asking yourself, what are your business goals and how can your content help with this?

What’s Involved in a Content Audit?

A website content audit includes 4 key steps:

  1. Understanding your goals
  2. Creating your inventory of content
  3. Analysing the data
  4. Drawing up an action plan

Let’s break these down into more detail.

#1. Understanding Your Marketing Goals

Content audits aren’t a quick piece of work, so set clear objectives before you start to ensure you’re not wasting valuable time. 

You may just have one objective, or you may have several. They could cover areas such as:

  • Identifying areas for improvement within your content
  • Increasing engagement with your target audience
  • Boosting conversions/leads
  • Improving SEO performance, such as higher rankings for certain keywords

In some cases, businesses are looking to reorganise their website, so use a content audit to understand what pages and posts resonate best with their audience. 

#2. Creating an Inventory of Content

Once you’ve established what you want to achieve, it’s time to create your inventory. How you do this is up to you – either manually or by using a content audit tool – but it needs to be well organised. 

We recommend tackling this in two halves: website pages and blog posts

Why? Because they’re often written in different ways and serve different purposes. It’s also an effective way to manage your time if you can’t commit to doing everything at once, which is often the case when you’re trying to run a business at the same time.

A woman working at a laptop with a spreadsheet open

What to Include in a Content Inventory

We like to use spreadsheets when creating an inventory, as there are lots of details to include. The key columns to have are:

  • URLs of the content you’re reviewing 
  • Date it was published/updated
  • Which category/pillar it’s part of
  • The intent of the content (is it top of the funnel lead generation? Designed to get traffic? A top conversion page?) Learn more about the intent behind keywords in our previous article
  • Content type
  • A notes section
  • Performance data (which is part of the next step)
  • Actions (to be determined in step 4)

It may seem like a lot, but it’s the best way to keep yourself organised and on track for achieving your objectives. 

#3. Analysing the Data

Now you’ve got the wireframe for your inventory set up, it’s time to analyse how your content is performing. The metrics to track depend entirely on what your objectives are, but some common ones we use are:

  • Page visitors
  • Engagement time
  • Conversions
  • Keyword rankings – how many are ranking and how are the positions changing?
  • New vs. returning customers

#4. Producing a Content Action Plan

Everything you’ve done so far should identify what content is performing, what isn’t, and where your gaps are. 

Now it’s time to use all the information you’ve collated to create an action plan. This is often the step people struggle with most because recording the data is one thing, but knowing what to do with it is something else altogether. 

This is where your “actions” column comes into play. When we’re completing content audits at Pod, we generally allocate one of the following actions to content:

  • Rewrite
  • Refresh
  • Delete
  • Repurpose
  • Merge (for example, if you have duplicate blogs)

We also assign a priority level so we know where to focus first. 

Depending on the size of your website and how much time you can dedicate to your action plan, it can take anything from a few days to a few months to complete all of the actions and bring your website up to the standard you want. 

Someone typing at a laptop with a clock face over the top

How Often Should You Conduct a Website Content Audit?

There isn’t a set answer to this, but the more frequently you audit your content, the better it’ll perform. In an ideal world, we’d suggest auditing your content once or twice a year

The other option is to initially invest your time into doing a comprehensive audit backdating your content, and then add to it each week. This “little and often” approach makes it much easier to keep on top of your data and notice any changes in patterns. 

It’s worth remembering that content, especially featured blogs or evergreen content, can take a while to really start performing. 

Other times you should conduct an audit include:

  • If there’s been a big algorithm update 
  • You’re creating a new strategy
  • You’re redesigning your website
  • Your website is a few years old and you haven’t yet done an audit
  • You notice a change in website performance and want to understand what’s happening

The Benefits of a Content Audit for Your Business

Content audits are a marketing essential. Why? Because of how many benefits they bring to you and your business. 

They’re incredibly effective for

  • Understanding how your content is performing
  • Creating a marketing strategy for moving forward
  • Identifying strengths and weaknesses across your website
  • Making informed decisions about achieving your business goals
  • Improving website performance, especially through SEO

There are two main areas companies see improvements after conducting a content audit[1]:

  • Better rankings
  • Increased engagement
A digital graph showing an upward curve of improvement

Increased engagement is good for two reasons: 

  • People stay on your website for longer, which sends signals to search engines that your content is high quality and improves your SEO performance 
  • People are more likely to share your content – this helps your backlink profile and reaches more people

In fact, stats show consumers are 131% more likely to purchase from a brand with high-quality and effective content[2]. It helps to build trust between your brand and your audience, too, with 64% of consumers finding a brand trustworthy if they read a piece of educational content produced by them[3]. 

SEO Content Audits with Pod Digital

In short, content audits ensure you have the best possible content on your website to help you achieve your business goals. With an increasing focus on user experience and helpful content, it’s never been more important to ensure your content is up to standard. 

As a digital marketing agency specialising in working with SMEs, we understand the time pressures faced by business owners. It’s why we’ve created a FREE content audit template to help you maximise your marketing efforts with minimal stress. Simply enter your email address in the form above to receive your content audit template.

Still short on time? Get in touch with us today to discuss us conducting your content audit for you. Our experienced content marketing professionals are on hand to help you achieve your business goals through industry-leading content. 

Contact The Team Today
Jane

Jane

Content Director

Since joining Pod Digital in September 2021, I have built a team of amazingly talented content and social media strategists. As a published author, and someone who has spent many years teaching grammar, I have a passion for the written word. Nothing makes me happier than the request, “Can I have a hyphen check, please?” Away from the office, I love to run, ride my horse, Trudy, and walk my two wired-haired dachshunds. (Please note correct use of a hyphen).

Let's get started - Call 01455 564 564

Contact The Team Today

Start transforming your business

    What Services Are You Interested In?