What is Content Audit? Tips and How to Create a Template

If you have these problems, a content audit would help you a lot.

In this article, I’m going to explain the following topics.

• What is Content Audit?
• Ths Issues When You Run a Large Scale of Website
• The Benefit of Content Audit
• Actions to Take after the Content Audit
• How to Evaluate the Contents
• Process
• Template

Content Audit file is good to have because, in the current SEO Strategy, it’s important to organize your website contents and keep up to date.

What is Content Audit?

A content audit is a strategy to evaluate all the content’s quality and measure if it’s effective.

With the content audit, you can make a decision to get rid of underperforming, low-quality pages.

It’s also called Content Inventory, Keyword Mapping, etc.

Let’s see the difference for each term.

What is Keyword Mapping?

Keyword mapping is a process to match all the target keywords and all the content.

With this process, we can get to know

• what needs optimization
• what content needs to be built
• what keywords need to be targeted to fit with which content
• what work should be prioritized

What is Content Inventory?

A content inventory is a list of all the content on your site. Your inventory will typically include text, images, documents, and applications. To gain insight from your inventory, you will need to assess each piece of content.

Ref: Content Inventory | Usability.gov

Ths Issues When You Run a Large Scale of Website

If you run a large scale of website, you might have these common issues;

• Our website has too many pages and the navigation is getting worse.
• Do we need this old content?
• Which page should we prioritize to increase sales?
• What’s the weakness in our content?
• Where can I find this information?
• Who should I contact to edit this page?
• What’s the event/promotion/new content that going to be released in the next couple of months

The Benefit of Content Audit

To solve the list of issues above, a content audit can give you the following advantages;

• It can help: develop a content strategy; manage content quality;
• prepare content for migration or for development of a new site IA or design;
• evaluate content against business goals, editorial style guidelines, and templates;
• establish a common language among team members
• evaluate content for removal or revision, and pinpoint gaps in content.

Actions to Take after the Content Audit

There are 5 types of action items to be taken after the content audit.

1. Delete the contents
2. Redirect
3. Consolidate/Combine
4. Update the page
5. Leave as-is

How to Evaluate the Contents

Here are the common questions during the evaluation process.

• Is the page older than 6 months?
• Is the page about a core topic related to your business?
• Is the page targeting a keyword with a “meaningful” search volume?
• Does the page have thin content?
• Does it generate a “meaningful” level of organic traffic?
• Does it generate a “meaningful” level of non-organic trafiic?
• Does it have any external backlinks pointing to it?

Process

Content Audit Template

• Content Audit Template | Distilled

Conclusion

I hope this article helps you understand the basic knowledge and the outline of what is a content audit.