To achieve their content marketing goals, most businesses focus on creating new blog posts. According to a survey by Statista, 22% of online bloggers stated that they published blog posts weekly, while 2% did so daily. While this approach to new content can bring in new traffic, it’s also important to analyze and update your existing blog content.
Conducting content audits can come in handy in helping you identify blog posts that can be improved and updated. Investing in a content audit is key in developing a plan for blog growth.
If you want to revamp your old content and give your blog posts a breath of fresh air, here are some tips on how to do so.
What Is A Blog Content Audit?
A blog content audit involves collecting and analyzing content on your website to identify which blog posts need to be updated, re-written, or deleted to improve user experiences and boost traffic.
Conducting an audit helps you identify your content strategy’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as adapt your editorial plan to your marketing goals. Doing a content audit can help you understand what’s working and what’s not, helping you make more informed content marketing decisions. This process allows you to fix issues such as outdated data, broken links, or focusing on wrong keywords which could be affecting the performance of your content.
5 Tips to Audit Your Existing Blog Content
Auditing your existing blog content will take a significant amount of time; however, it’s worth the effort. Here are some ways to refresh the content to be relevant to your audience, whether you are using Blogger, WordPress, or Medium.
Identify Your Goals
You need to start with clear and defined objectives to allow you to focus on what’s important. Consider the goals for the audit – do you want to improve SEO, the conversion rate, or audience engagement?
With goals in mind, you can plan the audit better. For example, if your company objective is to increase your quarterly sales, your content audit should be focused on boosting SEO to reach more customers. To do so, you need to identify which keywords are worth ranking for, analyze the quality of the content, and optimize it.
Put Your Content Together
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Gather all the content that needs to be audited. Putting together the blog posts that need to be improved makes it easier to focus on important areas, especially during the content development process. If you have a small website, you can put all the content on a spreadsheet.
However, if you have a lot of content, there are online tools such as SEMrush, HubSpot, or Google Search Console that you can use to pull together all the information. These tools can audit your blog content based on sitemap data, which consists of all the information on your website.
When gathering content, you don’t have to use all the blog posts; choose a time frame according to your current marketing strategy. To make the audit faster, categorize and organize the content by author, number of words, and topics.
Collect Your Blog Metrics
Part of starting a successful blog involves creating a detailed plan on how to promote your blog to get traffic. One way to measure your blog’s success is by looking at the metrics.
Statistics show that 32% of bloggers always check their blog analytics. This is essential because it enables them to see the most viewed blog posts and the value they have for the readers.
A content audit comes in handy when you need to collect data about targeted keywords, backlinks, page views, bounce rate, readability, and more. You can use tools such as Google Analytics or Ahrefs if you need the metrics to gauge the performance of your blog.
Collecting and analyzing metrics helps you create better content for your audience. It improves overall user experience, and boosts content search rankings. You can also tailor your content to specific customer segments and make it appeal to more targeted audiences.
Assess The Content
Once you’ve collected the data, you need to analyze it based on the goals set. Blog posts are a key component of content marketing; therefore, they need to be updated. You can assess the blog posts by identifying content that’s missing, underperforming, or outdated, as well as content that needs to be removed.
Keep the relevant blog content if it’s still performing well and is relevant to your audience. For blog posts that have statistics, you can revise them, remove old information and include the latest data.
On the other hand, if you are unable to improve a piece of content and believe that it doesn’t bring any value to the reader, you can remove it from the website. You can do this with content that is related to products that are out-of-stock, old seasonal campaigns, or with duplicate content.
Adjust Your Content Marketing Strategy
Once you track your blog content failures and successes, you can align the new changes with your content marketing strategy. This involves reviewing what works and what doesn’t, and keeping it in-line with the company goals and industry trends.
One of the ways to do this is to scale your content production process by hiring a new content team, changing the style, and creating a new content calendar. This will play a key role in improving the quality of your blog posts and increasing organic traffic, conversion rate, and audience engagement.
In addition, you should conduct a content gap analysis against your competitors. Compare your content with your competitors’ to identify which blog posts you need to improve. It helps you identify which keywords you should be focusing on, what type of posts are preforming best, and if there is room for you to try to compete with them. If you want your content marketing strategy to be successful, you should perform regular content audits to adjust your content to the market needs.
Summary
Crafting blog content is a key element in online marketing. Businesses use the content to reach more customers and boost their sales. Although a blog content audit takes time and effort, it’s necessary to conduct it regularly because it’s an important measure of your content’s efficiency.
You can conduct monthly or quarterly audits to assess whether your blog posts are performing as intended. To make the process easier, invest in blog content audit tools such as Google Search Console, SEMrush, or HubSpot. This tactic can help save your company time and money, and improve the accuracy of your results.
