How to Do a Content Audit That Will Reveal Hidden Gems On Your Website

• Updated on: 2020-01-13
• Read original article here

The year 2019 introduced Marie Kondo and her famous KonMari Method of decluttering. Some call it phenomenal, but Kondo herself considers it as life-changing magic.

Made to be applied for just belongings, the KonMari method has been applied to personal lives, relationships, careers, and whatever aspect you need cleaning up. But what about in the digital world? The Internet is a vast space filled with content in all types, forms, and lengths that some aren’t even needed anyway.

But what if we apply the KonMari method to the content we see online? Then you don’t really need magic, you just need a content audit.

One gruesome task every digital marketer needs to face at one point in their content strategy is doing a content audit. If you’ve done content auditing a hundred times or are just starting to do one for your own website, read on to find out the step-by-step guide on how to do a content audit.

In technical terms, a website content audit is an inventory of all the indexable content you have on your website mostly in the form of written blogs. But if you have more diverse content like images, infographics, videos, and even audio then you can count that too.

Line up all your content, consider their individual performance to your overall analytics then compare it to your set KPI. Only then can you consider content that can be thrown away.

From the chart above, most respondents answered that website performance like fast streaming and quick page speed is the first thing users expect when loading a website. To achieve the optimal page load speed, you can optimize images and fonts, and minify your Javascript or CSS codes for faster loading time.

Next on the priority list is the content of the website. Users check if the posts are still relevant, fresh, and updated.

If you’ve had a website running for more than 5 years, maybe even less, but you post and produce blogs on the regular then you definitely need a content audit. This is to make sure that the content you’ve produced is all working and converting for you? It’s not about quantity, but the quality you put online that matters most.

With just a simple content audit report, you can:

Be like Marie Kondo; put everything you own in your hands and ask if it sparks joy in your life. In the case of digital marketing and content, view all your content and see if it sparks interest and converts in your favor.

Have an area where you can lay all of your belongings and asses them one by one. 

Love them or hate them, spreadsheets are the lifeblood of every content strategy. Lay all your data in that single spreadsheet. Just keep adding tabs for every set of data you will be putting and laying down.

Tip: Google Spreadsheets saves time, space, and effort. Use it well.

Gather all your belongings and categorize them, placing them in proper bins.

Time to gather up all your content! You can download all the data and pages on your own, but if you have a number of pages then you might as well call a friend to help. Don’t worry about all the pages, just include all the indexable content.

Tip: Have a column to place your URL, Page Title, Date Published, Content Type, and all the other information you deem useful in your decluttering process!

The process of elimination and discarding to see what is needed and not.

What is an audit without checking for performance? Here is how to do a content audit of your website and data you’ll be needing from Google Analytics:

Gather everything you own, even the objects that mean the most.

Whether you’re actively doing outreach for your website or not, backlinks can be a big boost in credibility and your DA score.

Collect all the links, list them down in your spreadsheet, and review them one by one. Instead of asking “what sparks joy?”, ask what links are following the Golden Rule of E-A-T: expertise, authority, and trustworthiness.

Ask yourself and your belongings, “Does this spark joy?” If yes, then keep it. If not, discard the object.

Time for the most important step! The data you’re looking at is just bare skin and bones, you need to bring life to your data with a content audit. Once you’ve gathered all your data, process it one by one and then collectively.

It’s alright to take time with this step. This is where you really learn how to do a content audit of your website because this is where you’re dissecting your content strategy of the whole website and all its pages.

Tip: Review it all manually. No amount of SEO or online tools can give you the exact answer you need to improve your strategy. Put on your thinking caps, this is a long process.

Discard all the unnecessary and start arranging your kept belongings in its proper place.

As with all things, documentation is highly needed and very much recommended. Put your whole process in a presentation format and present all your data in a simplified manner.

An example flow would be: first, present the gathered data, second is show your elimination process, third is the end result, and so on and so forth. You need to put your whole content audit process into writing not just for formality, but for future reference when you do another audit in the years to come.

In KonMari, once you’ve touched an object be sure to put it back where you got it right away. Once you place something down and leave it, you are obligated to touch it and clean up again.

Just like with a content audit, if you don’t want to keep doing this tedious process annually or at least regularly, make sure what you posting online fits the bill and won’t even need to be audited.

Guest author: Aby League is an environmental researcher with a Masters Degree in Biology. She is working as a freelance writer and researcher of all things that interest her like Technology, Online Banking and Shopping, Market Research, and Innovation.