So your e-commerce business has been creating content for a while now, but you’re unsure about what direction to take your content.
Whether you want to focus on growing traffic or increasing the conversion rate on your website, content needs to be updated often to meet these goals.
In addition, keeping track and remedying any gaps in your online content can increase customer engagement with your business.
In order to make changes to your content marketing strategy, it is worth conducting a content audit beforehand.
What is a content audit?
According to HubSpot, a content audit is a process that involves collecting and analysing content on a website.
While collecting content can help your business take inventory of what you’ve published thus far, analysing content is vital to addressing what needs to be created, updated or removed from your website.
As useful as it is, many companies are missing out. A content marketing study by Curata found that 37% of content marketers never complete a content audit.
Even though a content audit can be time-consuming and boring to set up at first, the insights that appear will be valuable to your content team as your business grows.
How often should you perform a content audit?
This depends on what type of content is being produced and how often content is being released.
At the bare minimum, a content audit should be performed annually. But ideally, a quarterly review can benefit your content strategy at every stage of the buyer’s journey.
Why is it important for your business to produce a content audit?
If you have specific business goals you would like to achieve, a content audit can help you get there by applying various evaluation metrics to your data set.
Typically, content can be analysed through a range of metrics: SEO, user behaviour, engagement and sales.
By looking at what’s performing well and what needs improvement, you can adapt your content strategy so that it aligns with different functions of your business, including sales and customer service.
How to conduct a content audit:
- Identify your business goals
Set out one main goal, or a couple of smaller goals, that you want to achieve with your content. Whether you want to improve your SEO rankings or increase your conversion rate, just make sure you have a clear goal to work towards.
- Gather and categorise your content
With your goal in mind, you should take inventory of content that will be audited. If you would like to manually perform a thorough content audit, use a spreadsheet to collect at least a year’s worth of content.
But if you’re stringent for time, selecting 30-40 URLs from your site will help you spot trends in your content. Make this an automatic process by using one of many website crawler tools available online.
To categorise content, include details such as:
- Type, format and length of content
- Date & time of publication
- Stage of the buyer’s journey
- Apply metrics and analyse data
Once you have organised your content, now you’re ready to analyse your data set using content auditing tools like Google Analytics. There are various metrics you can apply to your analysis, including:
- Organic traffic
- Conversions
- Bounce rate
- Backlinks
- Time viewed
- Pages per session
- Unique visitors
- New vs. returning users
Try to find trends and patterns in your data that can help you understand how visitors engage with online content that appears on your site.
Not only are metrics a good way to see how well your content is performing, but they provide specific insights that can help you come up with a plan to reach your overall goal.
- Come up with action steps
Having finished up your analysis, the next step is to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your current content strategy.
As part of this evaluation, you should be asking questions like:
- Is your content attracting the right people?
- How well does your content serve customers’ needs?
- Are your content goals being met?
To put your findings into practice, set out tangible action steps. One of these steps may involve removing, improving or leaving content as it is so your website is up to date.
By fulfilling your action steps, your business will be creating content that meets your goals and satisfies your customers.
In Conclusion
Content audits are one of the best ways of figuring out how to improve your content marketing strategy.
By understanding how your content performs against metrics, you can make strategic decisions about the content you will make soon, generating greater engagement with visitors.
While conducting a content audit can be daunting to begin with, once you get the hang of it, you’ll be performing content audits regularly to make your content fits with your evolving business goals.
At Floodmaker, our team of experts are here to help you get started with your content audit. Just take a look at our services to learn more!
No Comments yet!