Content Audit
A content audit is a systematic review of all your existing content to understand what’s performing well, what needs improvement, and where opportunities exist to better serve your audience and business goals.
Why Content Audits Are Essential
Content audits help you make data-driven decisions about your content strategy instead of guessing what works or relying on outdated assumptions about your audience.
Identify Top Performers that can be updated, expanded, or repurposed to generate even more value and traffic for your business.
Discover Content Gaps where your audience has questions or needs that your current content doesn’t address, revealing opportunities for new content creation.
Optimize Resource Allocation by focusing your content efforts on topics, formats, and channels that generate the best results for your specific audience.
Improve SEO Performance by identifying technical issues, outdated information, and optimization opportunities that can boost your search rankings.
Types of Content Audits
Performance Audit analyzes metrics like traffic, engagement, conversion rates, and social shares to understand which content delivers the best business results.
SEO Audit examines technical factors like page speed, mobile optimization, keyword usage, and internal linking that affect search engine visibility.
Quality Audit evaluates content accuracy, relevance, brand alignment, and user value to ensure everything published meets your current standards.
Competitive Audit compares your content performance and coverage against competitors to identify opportunities for differentiation and improvement.
Conducting Your Content Audit
Inventory Your Content by creating a comprehensive list of all content assets including blog posts, landing pages, social media content, emails, and downloadable resources.
Gather Performance Data from analytics tools to understand traffic patterns, engagement metrics, conversion rates, and search performance for each piece of content.
Evaluate Content Quality by reviewing accuracy, relevance, readability, and alignment with current business goals and brand messaging.
Categorize Your Findings into groups like “high-performing,” “needs optimization,” “requires updates,” and “candidates for removal” to guide action planning.
Acting on Audit Results
Update High-Performers by refreshing data, expanding sections, improving SEO optimization, and adding current information to maintain their competitive advantage.
Optimize Underperformers by improving headlines, adding visuals, enhancing SEO elements, or reformatting content to better serve user needs.
Consolidate Similar Content that competes with itself by combining related pieces into more comprehensive, authoritative resources.
Remove or Redirect content that’s outdated, irrelevant, or performing poorly and can’t be reasonably improved to focus resources on valuable content.
Measuring Audit Success
Traffic Improvements show whether content optimizations are attracting more visitors and improving search engine rankings over time.
Engagement Increases indicate whether updated content is providing more value to users through longer reading times and more interactions.
Conversion Growth demonstrates whether audit improvements are translating into business results like email signups, downloads, or sales.
Efficiency Gains reveal whether focusing on proven content types and topics is generating better results with less effort and resources.
Regular content audits ensure your content strategy stays aligned with audience needs and business objectives while maximizing the return on your content creation investments, especially when moving efficiently between platforms like Google Docs and WordPress.
Examples
- Website audit revealing 40% of pages have no organic traffic, leading to content consolidation strategy
- Blog audit identifying top-performing posts that should be updated and re-promoted
- Social media audit showing which content types generate the most engagement and conversions
Use Cases
- Optimize website performance by identifying and improving underperforming content
- Discover high-performing content opportunities for repurposing and amplification
- Eliminate outdated or low-value content that may be hurting SEO performance
Pro Tips
Start with your most important pages and content types before expanding to comprehensive audit
Use analytics data to prioritize which content deserves attention first
Document findings in actionable formats with clear next steps and priorities
Set up regular audit schedules rather than treating it as a one-time activity
Common Mistakes to Avoid
Conducting audits without clear business objectives or success metrics in mind
Attempting to audit everything simultaneously rather than prioritizing strategic content
Focusing only on metrics without considering content quality and user value
Auditing content without having resources available to act on findings