How much time do you invest in creating your website content? Whether it’s your about page, your sales pages, or your blog, I think we can agree that content creation is a time-consuming endeavor.

So you create all this fantastic content, publish it on your website, share it on social media, then what?

Have you ever conducted a website content audit?

How often do you review your published pages? How do you measure the effectiveness of your content? Do you have a plan in place, to make sure you’re hitting your goals?

An audit is necessary. It sounds boring because it is. But it’s oh so critical! After all, what’s the point of publishing a bunch of blog posts, videos, images, and such, if you don’t take the time to figure out if it’s helping you to achieve your business goals?

And here’s the best part: I found a great infographic that lays a plan for you to conduct a basic, DIY website content audit.

 

What is a content audit?

A content audit is a comprehensive way of taking stock of all of the content on your website (a content inventory), and evaluating how well each piece is performing against your business objectives.

 

According to Salesforce.com, there are 5 reasons why you should conduct a basic content audit:

1. Identify ways to improve your content marketing
2. Find gaps in your conversion funnel (the funnel is the process, or trail, your prospects travel to go from cold lead to warm lead to hot prospect to paying customer)
3. Diagnose problems with your SEO strategy
4. Discover your best performing content pieces
5. Improve your overall user experience

 

Content audits help companies find out what’s working, what’s not, what to scrap, and what new pieces of content to create. They help to better understand user behavior as it pertains to content, helping prioritize where a company needs to improve.

 

5 Steps to Conduct A Content Audit

1. Start with your purpose: Who is your audience, and what kind of content do they care about?
2. Take inventory of your content: Use a spreadsheet to compile all of the URL’s, titles, keywords, and meta data for your website
3. Collect and organize your data: For each piece of content, figure out what you want to measure? Is it social shares? Traffic? Time on a web page? Total conversions?
4. Analyze for gaps, opportunities, and insights: Based on your key metrics, what’s working? What’s not working? What content needs to be updated?
5. Take ACTION: Based on your findings, figure out what content meets your objectives and metrics, and create more of it. What content did you think was great, but isn’t hitting the mark? Which pieces need to be updated? Which topics should you be focusing on more often?

The infographic below summarizes the key steps to conduct a website content audit. However, for an in-depth approach I highly recommend visiting the accompanying article on Salesforce Canada’s blog. It is a thorough breakdown of the entire content audit process.

 Via Salesforce

Ciao,
Miss Kemya

 

When is  the last time you conducted a website content audit?