Content marketing strategists insist on the quality and novelty of content – which isn’t a bad thing at all; after all, this is what search engines prefer. It’s an uphill journey if you are new on the market, but if you have been around for some time, then you need to look bad at what you’ve done so far in terms of content.

Content audit: why and how

This is where a content audit comes into the picture. It’s good to know where you are standing before making any changes to your strategy. Did your existing content bring enough traffic? Did it convert well enough? A professional audit will consider all factors involved and reveal to you how your content has been performing up to the given point. The best practice is to schedule a content audit each year if you want your strategies to be successful. However, this is largely influenced by how much content you’re adding to your website and how frequently. It may therefore be a more or less laborious task. What is even more important is to schedule one right before anything else – it is an assessment of all your posted content. Do this before content writers begin to work on more material.

The effects of an audit

A content audit can get you to reconsider old content and refresh or repurpose it. Moreover, you will preserve good tactics and change what hasn’t worked. Audit results are used to identify any gaps there may be. It can certainly lead to a better understanding of the available solutions. Your writers will know what to focus on and how to create content that works. In addition, you will see which pages are indexed by Google, what is in place and what is missing in terms of SEO elements, what your URL authority is. An audit can get you to stop spending money on tactics that don’t work and also save more as you reuse existing content. A content audit can ease your maintenance efforts, improve the SEO and enhance the user’s experience.

All in all it will render a marketing strategy more efficient and allow you to make tweaks to the budget.

How to use it to your advantage

A professional will conduct a content audit based on a series of strict rules and tools. You may then consider certain aspects and parameters, to be used in shaping better strategies.

• Identify the URLs that drive more traffic,
• Find out what is being shared the most and provide more of that,
• See what content type and word count yields better results and use it more,
• Find the pages that generate more user engagement,
• Begin to revise content, now that you’re armed with relevant data.

Make sure to get recommendations so you can adjust your strategy, including audit frequency. A content audit is different from a SEO audit but encompasses more, including SEO related elements of high relevancy. Use the data you acquire to create content that is better in terms of word count, approach, tone, information contained, shape, linking, optimization and so on.