A periodic content audit is necessary to keep your content marketing strategy on track.
Even the best content marketing strategies can eventually go off the rails. Your oldest posts may look immature by comparison. They might gradually become out of date. They might even be impossible to categorize with your current category and tagging system.
If and when this happens, you need to conduct a content audit to evaluate where you stand and set new standards moving forward. But how should you go about this?
Data Analysis
Everything starts with a thorough analysis of your previous campaign performance. Generate a full list of URLs for all your existing blog posts, and dig into Google Analytics. Study your best- and worst-performing pieces of content, including their organic traffic, referral traffic, conversion rates, bounce rates, and other important metrics. Also keep an eye out for articles and pages that are no longer relevant to your brand. From here, you’ll generate a list of pages that need some kind of update.
Culling
Some posts simply have no further use. They’re completely obsolete, or generating zero traffic. If you have posts like this, your best bet is to cull them entirely—delete them, and set up a 301 redirect to make sure any traffic they would have generated is not completely lost.
Combining
Many of your underperforming posts won’t be completely useless. By themselves, they may be weak; they won’t generate much in the way of traffic or conversions, but they still have something valuable to them. For these posts, your best bet is to stitch them together into a single, much more detailed and thorough post. It will take some revising and editing to make it work, but the long-term benefits are enormous. It’s much better to have a single, impressively detailed, high-ranking page than dozens of small pages that aren’t generating any results. The key is to find the right points of overlap, and combine those posts coherently.
Running a content audit is time consuming, but it’s an important step for your campaign. If you need help getting started, contact us for a free consultation today!
