Taking out time to perform a content audit for your blog is essential to know if the contents you are posting has any impact on your overall business goals. A content audit allows you to go through all the posts on your blog to see which you should update or delete so that at the end of the day, you have high-quality contents to serves the purpose of having a blog.

To perform a content audit for your blog, you need to have a goal in mind as to why you are performing the inspection. It could be to increase engagement, conversion, or improve content quality. After you’ve decided on your goals, proceed to create a list of all your contents and then analyze each of them to know how they are performing using the relevant metrics.

There are lots of things to take care of when performing a blog audit. Check out this article to find out more on it:

How to perform a content audit for your blog

Here is a detailed explanation on how to perform a content audit for your blog:

Know your goals

Before beginning the check, you need to determine why you are doing it. Do you think the amount of traffic coming to your blog is low due to the kind of contents you are posting? Is the content affecting the Google index of your site? Or do you want to increase audience engagement and conversion rates? 

All these are reasons to audit your site and will help you determine the specific metrics to use when deciding on what content to keep or discard. When you are clear on your objectives, the auditing becomes more comfortable and faster. So, take your time to determine your goals before moving forward.

Generate a list 

Start with generating a list of all your content by compiling all their URLs in a spreadsheet. Doing this for all the content you’ve created could be tedious, but luckily, there are different tools to help generate the list. 

Some of such tools are the Google webmaster tools. Google Analytics, Screaming frog, and Sitemap generator. The screaming frog’s free version could help generate a list of 500 links from your website. But if you have more links than that, it’s advisable to purchase the premium plan. 

Using these tools, all you need to do is enter a starting URL, and it will crawl up the links on your website and display it for you to see. When it is through, you can export the result or copy and paste them into your prepared spreadsheet.

Analyze with relevant metrics

You can analyse how the URLs are performing by searching for underperforming articles. By that, we mean pieces that are not getting traffic or leading to conversions.

You should analyze the contents with relevant metrics like the title of the content, length of the title, category, leading keyword ranking, main keyword search volume, meta description, number of backlinks, comments, shares, organic traffic, bounce rate, session duration, number of conversions, etc. 

There are lots of metrics to use, but you have to stick with the relevant ones to save time. Start with parameters that affect your click-through rates, such as the length of your blog titles, which should not be more than 60 characters. Then there is the meta description which you should optimize if you hope to attract more clicks. 

Create a column to add the metrics you wish to use to analyze your contents. And then, use the necessary tools to help with the metrics because manually doing it will only amount to errors and won’t give you an accurate result.

Categorize your content

After analyzing, you’ll need to categorize your contents in those you’ll update, keep, or discard. Organize first before taking any action so that you don’t drop what you would have kept and also, to keep you from feeling overwhelmed.

When choosing the contents to keep, go with those that performed exceptionally well on your blog. High performance includes high-level engagement such as commenting, sharing on social media platforms, subscribing, organic traffic, and so on. You don’t need to edit contents with these results since they’ve proven to be what your audience loves.

Contents you should consider updating are those that have shown potentials of increasing engagement if tweaked a bit or rewritten. For example, if you had written an article talking about free Instagram tools and you didn’t add the links to those tools, you could edit them and add to links to drive more engagement with the article.

Contents to discard are those that add no value to your target audience. You must have seen this from the key metrics you’ve gathered. These contents do not bring engagement; neither does it address their pain points. They are only there to add to the number of posts you have on your blog. They might have served their purpose of generating organic traffic, but if that’s all they could do, then you need to discard them.

Create a new content strategy

Now you’ve deleted the contents that are not worth keeping, and you’ve edited those you feel should have a second chance, it’s time to create a new content strategy from the metrics you’ve gotten to create quality content and reduce the number of times to perform a content audit.

Start by identifying your readers and then understand their interests. Your new content strategy should focus solely on your audience’s needs because from the metrics, you can see it’s more about them than any other thing. To understand your audience, find out their demographics and their interest. 

When you are successful with that, use the result to create topics and keywords for your upcoming contents. You can still make use of basic and advanced keyword search tools to get more keyword and topic ideas to help your content strategy.

Monitor the contents you’ve updated to see how customers and visitors are interacting with them and then use the new content strategy to create quality contents to drive more traffic, engagement, and conversion.