Content is one of the core pillars of digital marketing. After all, fantastic content is what gets your brand’s voice out into the world while simultaneously explaining to your customers what exactly you’re all about. From social media posts to blogs and infographics, the beauty of content is that it is extremely customizable to your brand’s needs and marketing goals.
However, not all content is good content. To really appeal to your consumers, your content needs to be both timely and relevant. Typically, when it comes to developing a comprehensive content strategy, you might feel the impulse to create and post new content right away. But that isn’t always the best course of action, as new content may not work in your favor the same way old content can.
Repurposing existing content not only saves you time and energy, but can also have exponentially positive results on your business’s ROI. According to SEMRush’s marketing research, 61% of marketers reported that updating and repurposing their existing content packed the biggest punch in terms of content strategy success in the last year.
To ensure your content is performing to the best of its ability, it is important to dedicate some time completing a content audit. A content audit is the process of thoroughly reviewing all the content on your website. Your overall objective is to reveal your content’s strengths and weaknesses while identifying what could use some improvement.
When executed properly, a content audit can provide a lot of value when it comes to meeting your business’ marketing goals. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to complete a content audit from start to finish.
Your Guide to Performing a Content Audit: 5 Steps
Step 1: Identify Your Goals and Objectives
A content audit is a long and complex process, so as with any other digital marketing tactic, it is important to identify your goals and objectives before starting. When brainstorming ideas, zoom out and think about your goals, not just for your content audit but also for your marketing efforts as a whole.
Are you looking to establish brand recognition in a new market? Do you want to build brand authority? What benefits do you want to gain from completing this content audit, and what results do you want to achieve?
Some possible goals, and questions you could ask yourself about them, could be:
Enhance Audience Engagement
Do you have low engagement on your website and social media pages? Are you creating content that isn’t resonating with your audience? If so, you can set your sights on identifying the most engaging types of content for your target audience.
Improve Your Search Engine Optimization
Do you have strong content that’s not showing up on the first page of a Google search for your target keyword? Chances are you’ll need to double down on your keyword optimization and use. What about your website? Is it a poor performing site with a lot of technical errors? A website needs to technically sound in order to show up in the first couple of search engine result pages.
Increase Your Conversion Rate
If your content is not converting your audience into customers, then what is it doing for you? If you are noticing a high bounce rate on your website, a very low average session duration time, a decrease in page views over time or lower traffic than you’d like, your content needs to be better amplified.
When creating your goals, you’ll need to be as specific as possible. Doing so gives you a great benchmark of your definition of success and will keep you on track to reach your objectives.
Step 2: Create a Spreadsheet of All Your Content From a Given Time Period
With your goals in mind, the next step is to take stock of all your content from a specific period. Determining time frame is important because the standard of relevant content changes depending on the industry. If you are in an industry that changes all the time, you may not need to go 10 years back since that content will no longer be relevant in today’s world. We suggest choosing a time frame that seems reasonable based on your industry.
In a spreadsheet, make a list of the kind of content you are planning on reviewing. This can include anything you post, from Instagram photos to tweets and blog posts. Then go back through your posts and collect their URLs. If you are looking to review every piece of content you have, downloading your sitemap from Google Search Console is a helpful tool for gathering all the information you need in one place.
Categorize your content’s URLs based on criteria you and your team come up with. For example, you could catalog the content based on length, keyword performance, time spent on the page or format.
Step 3: Research How Successful Each Asset Is
It’s always a good idea to come up with a benchmark and/or metric that helps define what success means for each piece of content. This will likely be the most time-consuming part of your content audit because discovering and analyzing data can take a lot of time.
However, there are some great tools online that can compile all this information for you with the click of a button, such as BrightEdge and the SEMRush Content Audit tool. Once all your data has been collected, you should organize it into three separate categories: reuse, repurpose and discard.
You can delete every piece in the discard pile, create a plan on how to reuse existing content and develop a method for repurposing and updating the strongest performing assets. Content that has consistently received good traffic and/or steady interest can be updated with timely stats and new information to continue engaging users.
Step 4: Identify the Gaps in Your Content
For this step, you’ll want to work with the pieces of content in the repurpose and reuse categories. Take a good look at those assets and map out which content is most relevant to your target audience(s) and which one of your business functions is impacted the most. Doing this will help you better relate to your audience while understanding how your content is serving potential customers.
What you find during this step will help identify what is missing from your content. You can use these content gaps to your advantage when developing material meant for a specific audience or aimed at a particular part of the buyer’s journey.
Remember, the goal of your content should be to answer your consumers’ questions before they even have the chance to ask them. If you find that your content doesn’t answer a specific question or doesn’t relate to a certain subset of customers, that is a content gap you will need to address. Use your findings to create a more robust content strategy moving forward.
Step 5: Use Licensed Content to Supplement Your Content Calendar
Once you identify content gaps, consider using licensed content to supplement your regular editorial calendar. Sometimes, it can be exceptionally difficult to create the content that your audience is craving, so using licensed content can help close any gaps. You can utilize editorial content or articles produced by thought leaders from renowned publications like The New York Times, which allows you to reach new audiences and boost credibility, all while saving you time spent creating new content.
When you use licensed third-party content, you can harness the power of thought leaders in your industry to create a content strategy that will inspire and engage your target audience, prospective customers and returning consumers.
Final Thoughts
A comprehensive content audit can make all the difference between content that is performing for you or against you. Following the five steps above can help you complete a thorough content audit that will bring your digital marketing and online presence to a whole new level. Content can be used to complement current digital initiatives by giving employees new assets to promote. Content can help grow the business and brand through by improving engagement or building trust with consumers.
Incorporating licensed content solutions from NYTLicensing can help drive your content strategy to success. By curating news from world-class journalists from The New York Times as well as other publications, NYTLicensing’s expert storytelling inspires audiences to take action through the power of content.
