Creating a digital marketing strategy means you’re in it for the long haul, ready to improve your website’s performance organically with some savvy techniques that are search engine approved.
With that comes a serious of responsibilities – one of which is ensuring your business is creating content that accurately portrays the business’ mission statement throughout your website and making it appealing to your audience.
The primary way most businesses make sure they’re keeping their content on track is by performing a content audit.
A content audit is a way of monitoring and organising all your content within a given time frame. From this audit, you’re able to determine how effective your content is in doing its job, if there’s anything that might need changing and how you can move forward.
If you’re not sure whether your business would benefit from a content audit, you can see exactly what it can do for you below.
Optimise your content strategy
The main purpose of a content audit is to optimise your website’s content strategy.
This means ensuring that the content you’re producing and that’s already displayed on your site is accurate, relevant and appropriate.
When performing your content audit you’ll create an inventory of every piece of content displayed on your website, newsletter and throughout any other branding your business uses. Once you’ve done this you’ll look into the quality of the content and rate it using your own system – for example on a 1-5 scale, 1 being poor and 5 being fantastic.
By looking at each piece of content and thinking about if it accurately does its job, is easily found by people and supports business goals, you can determine what you need to change to optimise your content strategy.
Ensure your content aligns with your business goals
During your content audit, the main question you’ll need to ask yourself is ‘does this content align with my business’ goals?’ If the answer is yes, then happy days and onto the next question.
If the answer is no, however, you’ll need to put on the list of things you need to amend in order to accurately represent your business’ vision. This will benefit your business as in the long run your content will be consistent and will correctly convey just what your business is about.
By monitoring how well received this was by readers you can also see how your audience responds to your business’ goals.
Update your staff’s knowledge
When thinking about a content audit, the first thing that comes to mind is auditing the content that your audience sees. However, an internal content can also be incredibly beneficial.
An internal content audit involves looking at all the content you send to your staff, such as that in company guides and instructions, and checking it is up-to-date and accurate.
Once completed and amended, you should notify your staff and ask them to take a look. This then helps you keep your staff in the know and will ease any communication as everyone is on the same page.
Work on a core component of your goals
Content audits are especially useful when you have a particular goal to work towards. This might be anything from a specific target of sales to a decrease in a page’s bounce rate.
By having a goal to focus on, you can align your content to work in your favour. You might even do this by incorporating content types other than writing, such as by producing videos to include in your blog posts or by creating infographics.
Helps avoid alienating your audience
Without a content audit, it’s possible that you will end up creating generic content for your readers, which won’t appeal to them and will see your page views decrease.
Taking regular content audits helps you avoid alienating your audience as you can stay up-to-date with their needs and see what articles they are staying on for longer.
This way you’re able to continue creating content that works in a similar way, perhaps by addressing a specific need, rather than aimlessly creating content without knowing how it will be received, this gives you some insight, allowing you to plan ahead.
See where your company fits in
Performing a content audit can also help you see how well your content performs in relation to other companies.
By looking at their content compared to your own, you can see what strategies they use. While you can’t see how well it performs (only by looking at comments and engagement) you can see how they approach certain topics and what techniques they use.
It’s also worth noting that those you compete with on content may not be the same as those you compete with in business. For example, if you write about branding ideas, you’re competing with everyone else who writes similar content.
A content audit will help you see where your business fits in and what can be done to help you become a cut above the rest.
If you want to give your website’s content a boost, get in touch with our friendly team who provide top quality content for blogs, website pages and guides.
