What Is a Content Audit and Why Do You Need One?

Let’s say your team’s content strategy has been rolling along according to plan for months or maybe even years. You’ve got an efficient pipeline pumping out blogs, ebooks, infographics, social media, and thought leadership. And yet, the results still don’t reflect the effort. This is your cue to take initiative in the next planning meeting and suggest a deep dive to see why.

This process—going through your backlog to see what is effective and what is lacking—is called a content audit. Rather than a chore, a website content audit is a useful exercise for maintaining an effective marketing strategy. It helps teams take a big-picture view and explore content gaps and potential opportunities.

An overview on the content audit process

So, are you wondering how to perform a content audit? There are lots of approaches and tools and you should consider whether your end goal is to improve SEO, increase conversions, or drive traffic. Regardless, your audit should contain these key steps below.

1. Find every asset produced in a certain time period

This is the most time-intensive part of the process, and it can get unwieldy fast. The trick is to set boundaries. You don’t want to waste time going back 10 years—any data or commentary you used has likely lost its relevance. Instead, review and inventory content from the last two or three years.

Pay attention to how much you struggle during this exercise. Does your organization have an efficient labeling and archiving process? How can you improve on it to ease future content audits?

2. Map content to your marketing infrastructure

Once you round up all your content, the next step is to tag everything. Not only will a sound tagging structure help you organize your old assets, but it’ll also give you direction for new pieces. Common tags could apply to parts of the marketing funnel, personas, topic pillars, industries, and so on.

3. Identify what’s worth keeping

This is the fun part. As you’re applying your taxonomy, a good audit will reveal what content you can reuse, repurpose, or discard.

Benefits of a content audit

Now that you know how to conduct a content audit, what can you expect next? There are several universal benefits, and having a tidy content inventory is just one of them.

Save money

When surfacing forgotten assets, you might find content immediately ready to go live or assets that only need minor revisions. After Contently conducted an internal audit in 2022, we discovered 22 articles that offered our audience crucial advice but had outdated research. We updated the copy and then resurrected all 22 links. Rather than start from scratch, the audit saved us time and money that can be redistributed elsewhere. Just this year, we went deeper and reviewed a decade’s worth of blog content to determine what needed refreshing or rewriting — instead of creating new content — so we could continue to provide the best-quality content to our audience.

Increase efficiency

Wasting content is bad, but this stat is even more disheartening: on average, 42 percent of salespeople don’t use B2B content marketing assets to generate sales/revenue, according to a Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs study. Why? Maybe because your content is either unusable or unfindable.

Either way, your content ecosystem has a problem. If people can’t easily find the content they need, it doesn’t matter how good it is. And if content is easy to find content but not very good, it won’t get used either.

An audit is the perfect opportunity to assess why content goes unused. Perhaps there is a workflow breakdown, or your salespeople don’t know where to access the content they need. Whatever the reason, make it a point to decrease the clutter. So, if you find a piece of content that can’t be repurposed, delete it.

Maintain consistency

Marketing departments reorganize all the time — software systems change, brand guidelines evolve, and goals adjust. As you’re deciding what content to keep, make sure old assets fit these changes. Getting to this point may require updating tags, tweaking language, and uploading content into a new system.

Once you’re done auditing, you’ll have a great opportunity to do a broad analysis of what content performed well and why. You can then use that historical data to inform your strategy moving forward.

Companies that take the time to maximize their editorial assets can see big results. Are you ready to start a content audit? Contently’s expert content strategists can help you with the overall strategy, recommendations and execution of each step.

Ask the Content Strategist: FAQs about how to perform a content audit

How often should a content audit be conducted?

It’s generally advisable to conduct a content audit annually or bi-annually, depending on the volume of content and changes in your marketing strategy.

What tools can be used to conduct an SEO content audit?

Tools like Google Analytics, SEMrush, Screaming Frog, and content management systems (CMS) with built-in analytics can help you identify what content is performing well and what content could use some attention if you’re doing an SEO content audit specifically.

Who should be involved in the content audit process?

Typically, a cross-functional team involving marketing, sales, and sometimes even IT or product teams should be involved to ensure that the audit is comprehensive and aligned with broader business goals.

To learn more about how to do a content audit or how to build a content strategy that performs, subscribe to The Content Strategist.