When Do You Know It’s Time for a Content Audit?

You’ve dedicated yourself to keyword research and learning the best SEO practices. You’ve written blog post after blog. You’ve even gone back and optimized older web pages. But something still isn’t working. Maybe you’ve hit a plateau, are losing leads, or are seeing a decrease in views. You feel like you’ve tried everything, so why are you still facing these content issues?

The answer may be you haven’t conducted a content audit. Read on to learn why this audit can transform your content’s performance and revolutionize your marketing strategy.

What Even Is a Content Audit?

In order to perform an effective content audit, you first need to know what it is. Luckily, this is a situation where the name describes exactly what it is. A content audit is carefully going through all of the past content on your website and asking yourself a few questions:

• Is it still relevant?
• Is it outdated?
• Is it optimized for current SEO practices?
• What do the page’s SEO metrics look like?
• Does it match your current voice and brand?
• Is it generating leads or clicks?
• Where can you improve your content?
• What keyword(s) is this targeting?

Depending on your audit goals, you can pick and choose which questions you want to answer and even add more if these don’t meet your needs. The great thing about content audits is you get to choose what their purpose is and what objectives they should serve to meet. It’s the choose-your-own-adventure of audits, and the adventure is growing and improving your reach through content!

5 Signs a Content Audit Is Due

Even if you now know what a content audit is, you may still have questions about when you should perform one. Every year? Every week? Every day? The answer is: it depends! But through our experience, there are a few key indicators of when a content audit should be performed.

1. Viral Blogs Are Losing Steam

You did it. You hit the benchmark of marketing success—one of your blogs went viral! But as time went on, interest waned, and suddenly, your once viral blog is now quickly declining in clicks and views. Sound familiar? If you can relate to this story, it is probably time for you to conduct a content audit.

There are several reasons why your viral blogs could be losing traction. Maybe the content is already out of date or irrelevant. Or perhaps it’s something as simple as some of the links in the blogs are now broken and need to be updated. Either way, the only way to discover the issue is to perform a comprehensive content audit to discover the underlying problem.

2. Organic Traffic Has Plateaued

Content marketing is like hiking. You have to just keep on moving and pushing forward in order to get to the height you want. With so much effort going into this process, it can be frustrating when you hit a plateau. You’re not moving up, but you’re also not moving down. You’re just stuck at your current altitude.

Luckily, there are ways to push past that plateau and continue climbing high! If you post a lot of content and have a large archive of blogs, it could be that some of your blogs are cannibalizing each other. Content cannibalization happens when you have multiple pages on your own site competing against each other for the same SEO keywords. If you discover this is the case during your audit, it’s best to either combine those pages into one or leave the best-performing one and get rid of the rest.

A plateau can also be caused if you’re not reaching your target audience. If you want to write content for your target audience, you need to know their needs, wants, and struggle points. Perhaps, your audience has changed, and now you need to shift your content to match their desires. An audit will help determine if this is the cause and even provide information on what audience you’re reaching and if it’s your target audience.

3. You’re Getting Unqualified Leads

Unqualified leads can be a frustrating problem. It looks like someone is interested in your service, but they are unable to follow through. No one wants to be led on by false promises—or in this case, unqualified leads. If you find that there’s a rise in the amount of unqualified leads coming to your site, it’s time to perform a content audit.

A good question to ask is, “What do I need to change in my content to turn unqualified leads into qualified leads?” You may be able to answer this question based on the inquiries you are getting. Who is your content catering to? Do you need to be more specific in places to avoid confusion? A drip campaign may also help keep qualified leads within your funnel while getting rid of unqualified leads through the process.

4. You’re Launching a New Website

A new website is always an exciting time for a business. You get to show off your new look and attract new customers with a modern, fresh site. But before you migrate all your content from your old website to your new one, you should take a step back and perform a content audit.

A new website is all about getting a fresh start for your business. That’s why it is vital to ensure that your content is getting the same refresh. You don’t want old, outdated content to hold back your new website. Before migrating your content, ask yourself the following questions:

• Does this content still represent who we are?
• Does the content match the tone and feel of our website?
• Is there anything that is no longer relevant to us or our audience?

A content audit will help you feel confident that your content will match your new website and help generate new leads rather than potentially causing issues for you down the road.

5. You’ve Never Done One

If you’ve never done a content audit before, then we say it’s better late than never! Even if you’re not having any ranking or lead generation issues, it’s always a good idea to audit your content. What could be a non-issue now could snowball into an SEO pitfall if left untreated. But you’ll never know if there are any underlying issues without properly checking. Take the first step to ensure your content is working for you by performing your first content audit this quarter!

How to Do a Content Audit

Now that you know the signs of when to perform a content audit, you need to know how to perform an audit. Depending on how much content you have, an audit can be a long, time-consuming process but definitely well worth it in the end. There are a few steps that go into a content audit:

1. Figure out your goals and objectives for the audit.
2. Find all the content you need or want to audit.
   • If you have a lot of content, categorizing it may make your process a bit easier.
3. Review your website analytics against this content.
4. Create an action plan based on what you discovered.
5. Implement!

Ideally, if you’re not having any of the issues we mentioned, you should perform a content audit about once or twice a year. Having an audit done on a regular basis can help you identify issues before they affect your views or lead generation.

Feel Confident in Your Content with PHOS by Your Side

Whenever it comes to content, it’s always good knowing that someone has your back in navigating the world of SEO and writing high-quality content that will attract potential customers. Our copywriting and marketing strategies are there to do just that. We’ll partner with you to create great content catered to your brand and audience, analyze the data to ensure we’re reaching your goals, and optimize wherever we need to.

If you’re ready to invest in your content creation and optimization, connect with us today! We can’t wait to learn more about you, your business, and your content goals.