What’s a content audit?
A content audit is like a health check for your blog.
It’s a review of the articles you have on your blog to assess their quality, relevance and performance. This will tell you if an article fighting fit, if it needs reviving, or if it needs killing with fire.
The goal is to help you see what’s working for your business — and what isn’t. To identify any issues you need to address and help you get the best from your blog.
Why do a content audit?
Regular content updates are important, because:
- Some articles become stale or irrelevant over time
- Information, statistics and links need updating
- Language and terminology evolves and changes
- Articles stop performing and competing effectively
- SEO and search best practice can change.
Audits give you an opportunity to continually improve and optimise your content, so it’s always working for you.
6 Good reasons to give your blog a professional content audit
So how do you know if you need to do a content audit?
Here are 6 good reasons.
1. You’ve never had a content audit before
If you’ve been blogging for two years or longer and have never done a content audit, you probably have old articles that are past their useful date. This is the date when they stop being useful to your audience.
Change happens fast. Your content needs to stay current and relevant. If it doesn’t, you’ll end up losing clicks to younger, fresher content — and we can’t have that.
Your older content might contain information that’s out of date or links that no longer work.
If it’s really old, it may not represent your best work or current level of expertise. And it may not reflect the evolution of your brand or what you’re offering.
A content audit will highlight outdated content and recommend changes and updates.
2. You’ve been blogging without a strategy
You’ve been blogging by the seat of your pants. Writing whatever you felt like, whenever you felt like writing it. Now your blog is filled with posts that may not be cohesive and may not be contributing to your business goals.
A content audit will highlight mismatched content that isn’t working for your brand and explain the problems. It will then give advice on what you can do with that content and how you might improve it or repurpose it.
When I audit content, I can also provide a proper strategy and framework for future posts to follow.
3. You’ve had several people working on your blog
A number of different people have been contributing to your blog. Maybe they’re employees from different departments within your business. Or maybe you’ve worked with several different content writers over the years.
But if your contributors haven’t been working harmoniously, your blog could be a mismatched mish-mash of content, tones, styles and agendas that may seem incoherent, inconsistent and confusing.
A well-structured blog can support a variety of content, but it needs to feel unified and on-brand.
This means having a:
- Clearly defined audience
- Coherent remit and direction
- Consistent brand style and voice.
A content audit will lay the foundations to help to bring all your content into line, so it’s cohesive and has a clear rationale.
4. Your content isn’t converting
You were encouraged to start a blog to increase your conversions. But this hasn’t happened.
You know your blog gets reasonable traffic, but this isn’t converting into sign-ups, enquiries or sales. And that could be for a number of reasons.
For example, maybe your content:
- Isn’t attracting an audience that will convert
- Hasn’t been written with conversions in mind
- Doesn’t have the right strategy behind it
- Lacks clear calls to action (CTAs).
A content audit will show you where the problems are and give you the guidance you need to fix them.
5. You’re getting a new website
Having a new website is a bit like moving house. Your current house has accumulated a lot of stuff — and you don’t want that cluttering up your new place. So it’s a great opportunity to take stock of what you have and get rid of anything that’s dated or no longer serving a purpose.
The same is true for your new website. You don’t want to migrate all your content — just the articles that are still working for your business or that could be improved, updated or repurposed.
In this case, a content audit is like decluttering for your blog — so move over Marie Kondo.
6. You have no idea if your blog is working
You have a blog and you’re investing time or money in it. But you don’t know if it’s doing what it’s supposed to or having any impact on your business.
Maybe you’ve never seen the data from your blog and don’t know how to access it. Maybe you’ve seen the numbers, but felt overwhelmed because you didn’t know how to read them. Maybe you don’t know if your blog is even collecting any data.
To collect user data, your website needs to be linked with Google Analytics, now known as GA4, and Google Search Console.
With access to this data, the person doing your content audit should be able to give you the key metrics.
For example:
- The number of times it’s been viewed
- The number of visits it’s had from Google
- Its average ranking position on Google.
They’ll be able to check the data for any performance issues and suggest actions you can take to remedy them.
And they can set up a monitoring system, so you can check any changes or improvements you’ve made are having the desired effect.
Does your blog need a professional content audit?
Allow me to introduce myself!
I’m Jenny Lucas, a freelance copywriter and content strategist, based in Leicester UK.
I know the importance of regular content audits. By the time I did my first one, I had more than 100 articles on my blog. It was a big job, but it’s been incredibly worthwhile and I now have a system for reviewing my content on an ongoing basis. So it will always stay fresh and relevant.
I can do this for you, too.
My content audit includes:
- Setting up an inventory for all your articles, so you can see at a glance what you have
- An assessment your existing content to identify issues
- An assessment of your current blog categories
- An action plan for resolving the issues
- A content strategy and framework for future articles.
The price will depend on how many articles you have.
Want to find out more and see if I can help you? Drop me a message on my contact form and include the link to your blog.
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