How to Run a Content Audit on Your WordPress Website?

by Vipe Team in WordPress Marketing; Published on 05.11.2021

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Most businesses nowadays rely on their content to attract traffic and engage with their audience. Although that is a great tactic to improve your marketing strategy, very often companies don’t realize that their content may be outdated and not relevant for their readers anymore.

That’s why it has become more important than ever to not only produce high-quality content but also to review and analyze it. This process is called running a content audit – a crucial part of any content marketing strategy.

In today’s article, our WordPress development agency will take you through everything you need to know about performing a content audit so you can do it yourself. Let’s begin!

What Is a Content Audit?

To understand what type of content to create, update, edit or delete, one must perform a content audit. Тhat is the process of collecting and analyzing assets of your content – such as landing pages, blog posts, etc. The goal is to find the strengths and weaknesses of your content strategy and if needed – to change your content plan to suit your marketing ambitions.

Why Is It Important to Perform a Content Audit?

Running a content audit is an integral part of every content strategy. It’s proven to be beneficial for both your website’s traffic and your readers. It will allow you to analyze how your content performs and will provide you with priceless information considering your articles, landing pages, etc. Thus our WordPress development agency believes that’s one of the aspects of content marketing no one should underestimate.

Moreover, doing a content audit will help you track the quality of your content, and you’ll be able to see if it gives the wanted results. This way, you can notice if your articles are optimized for search engines – do they have meta tags, keywords, etc. Consequently, a properly done content audit can have invaluable SEO benefits. You’ll also be able to locate which posts need to be updated, including all types of bad-written articles or ones that do not resonate with your target audience anymore.

All of this determines the need for a content audit. Our WordPress development agency reminds you that by performing it you’d be able to put your efforts into what works best for you and your WordPress website as well as to improve your SEO and keep your readers satisfied.

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Run a content audit for your WordPress website in 5 easy steps

Now that you’re well aware of what a content audit is and why you should perform it, our WordPress development agency would like to guide you through the steps you need to run one yourself.

Have a Clear Focus

Since running a content audit can be a time and resource-consuming process, our WordPress development agency strongly advises you to define your goals and have a clear picture of what you want to accomplish. The first thing most companies want to achieve with their site is to improve their SEO to attract traffic to their pages and boost sales. Thus, you should consider which pages need to be optimized for search engines or which content needs to be updated to suit your current SEO strategy. Don’t forget that internal linking also plays a huge role in your optimization.

Furthermore, you might contemplate going through your content to analyze what is most interesting for your audience and what generates traffic and engagement. You can share the best content in an email newsletter or update everything outdated and not resonating with your readers. Nonetheless, our WordPress development agency reminds you that this tactic is a great way to improve your conversion rates.

Systemize Your Content

The next step is to decide on the type of content you want to audit. Our WordPress development agency has noticed that most often people count on their blog posts, product descriptions, landing pages, etc. Although a lot of sites also have multimedia content, today our focus will be concentrated on the textual one.

To start categorizing your content, you need to collect the URLs of the pages you’ve decided to review. How you will accomplish this process, depends on the size of your website. Those who run a small one can collect the URL addresses manually and add them in some sort of spreadsheet.

However, big WordPress websites need to take a different approach. The most efficient way to do so is to use a tool and collect all the URLs you want to audit. Screaming Frog is a great one for this endeavor. It will provide you with the information you need by using your sitemap. If you don’t have a sitemap, you can once again use a tool to generate one for you. You can learn more about sitemaps in the blog of our WordPress development agency.

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After you have collected all the URLs you need, you can classify your content on a spreadsheet. You can create different categories to put your content in. This way you’ll not only keep yourself organized but you’ll also guarantee the analysis you perform meets your needs. For example, you can create categories such as content type, number of words, date of publication, author, etc.

The categories you create must be valuable and bring you information. Nonetheless, collecting metrics for each piece of content is just as important. It’s great to collect metadata such as titles, meta descriptions, meta tags, etc. By now, your spreadsheet must be full of enough information.

Conduct a Data Analysis

Now that you have gathered the data you need, our WordPress development agency suggests you analyze it more critically. That is the only way to measure your content properly. However, this is a multiplex process that takes time and dedication. There are several questions you need to keep in mind when you analyze your data.

Think about your audience – what is it interested in, what are its needs, what does it want to consume that you perhaps haven’t included in your content. Then, see what types of content are not interesting to your readers, and if they are outdated, consider deleting or updating them. Consequently, the next thing you must review is the content that is doing very well and it’s attracting many visitors to your pages.

You can put the results in another spreadsheet so you have everything organized, and you can access it any time. Anyhow, if you prefer to save yourself some time, you can use a tool for analyzing. One of the most popular ones on the market is Google Analytics. It will give a clear vision of which content is performing well. As a result, our WordPress development agency reminds you that you’ll be able to track the effectiveness of your content in terms of your marketing goals.

Action Time

Our WordPress development agency would advise you to create an action plan once you have finished analyzing your content. The plan must resonate with your marketing goals. To accomplish it, you can add one more column to your spreadsheet and write what you’ll do with the particular piece of content.

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Are you going to delete it, keep it the same, or edit it? There are many ways you can refresh your content. For example, you can add images and video, improve the CTAs, add new information, add new links, etc. If you want to get more in-depth information on updating your blog posts, our WordPress development agency has a great article on the matter.

Modify Your Marketing Goals

If you don’t align your content audit with your marketing strategy, the whole process will be pointless. Tracking and analyzing your ups and down in your content strategy is the only way to improve your conversion rates and make sure that what you produce is engaging and interesting for your targeted audience.

Thus, you should always note what works and what doesn’t for both your business and your readers. Our WordPress development agency advises you to make sure that your content contributes to your marketing efforts. Don’t forget that the digital world is extremely dynamic and what does wonder today, may not bring anything to the table tomorrow.

Perform your content audit now!

If you have never performed a content audit, our WordPress development agency encourages you to start doing it as soon as possible. Moreover, auditing your content is something you should do a few times a year. As we already said, that is the only way to ensure everything is working properly.

Dynamic industries need to perform this process even more often to keep with all the changes and find ways to keep their readers’ attention all the time. That is the only way to keep your targeted audience satisfied and make sure the efforts you put into your content are worth it.

Our WordPress development agency believes that running and reviewing a content strategy complex task on its own. Hence, if you prefer to put your efforts into expanding your business and perfecting your content, it is best to leave the maintenance of your website in the proper hands.

The WordPress developers at our agency – Vipe Studio, have many years of experience in developing fast and UX optimized websites. Hence, there is no doubt they can craft one for you too. If you’re ready to take your website game to the next level, don’t hesitate to contact us. We would love to hear from you soon!