How to Audit Your Content Marketing Strategy

Looking for a wild way to spend your evenings, or a fascinating project to really dig your teeth into at work?

A content audit … is not it.

Auditing your website’s marketing content isn’t a glamorous activity, but it’s an absolutely critical part of getting the most out of your content marketing campaigns. A content audit will tell you what’s working for you, what isn’t, and where your opportunities lie to further leverage the content you’ve already created.

“It’s smarter to find another 10,000 people to consume what you’ve already created as opposed to creating more.” ~Derek Halpern, Social Triggers

That said, not all content is created equal. Some of it will always be better than the rest. An audit lets you evaluate and identify the strongest pieces in your content inventory.

It’s a worthwhile activity, albeit not necessarily an exciting one. Here’s how to get it done quickly and effectively with minimal hassle.

Step #1 – Identify Your Campaign Goals

Now, before we get into the meat of the content campaign auditing process, there’s one preliminary step you need to take that will determine how you approach the rest of it.

You need to start by deciding on a goal for your audit.

There’s no “one size fits all” approach to content auditing, so the specific steps you take and the level of complexity you invest in each of them will depend on what you’re hoping to get out of your audit. Any of the following could be potential goals:

• Determine what types of content to create next. Analyzing the past performance of your current content according to the metrics you choose will give you plenty of ideas for filling out your content calendar. Does your audience prefer blog posts, or videos? Podcasts, or infographics? If you’re looking for more creative ways on how to populate your calendar, have you considered celebrating national holidays and fun events on social media? Brands celebrate special occasions on social to be “more in the moment” and engage their audience in new ways.
• See where your competitors are beating you. If you’re lagging behind your competitors in content performance, comparing your existing content to theirs should give you ideas on where you can improve. A tool like BuzzSumo or SimilarWeb makes it easy to see what’s working for any website or competitor.  
• Justify your expenses to your boss. If your manager isn’t convinced that content marketing is paying off relative to its investment, auditing your content is the only way to show how your efforts have performed.
• Figure out where to begin a paid content marketing campaign. In my opinion, native advertising is a tool that all marketers must get comfortable with in order to counteract the tremendous amount of noise online. But before you undertake any kind of paid campaigns, you need to know which of your current content pieces are performing best to determine where your dollars will be better spent.
• Plan for a website redesign. If you’re changing things up on your website, consider adding some new elements with a website maker such as Box Mode or Pixetic, and listing your current content will show you where you need to setup URL redirects, as well as give you ideas about the past content pieces you might want to display more prominently on your new site. Both SEMrush and Screaming Frog can do the heavy lifting for you.
• Evaluate your guest author efforts. If your site uses multiple guest authors (free or paid), measuring the success of their content relative to each other will show you who to work with in the future and who to let go.
• Eliminate the ROT. Any piece that is either redundant, outdated, and/or trivial should get the axe.

Your audit might encompass all these goals, a few of them, or none of them, if you have other priorities. But being clear on what you hope to achieve with your audit will prevent you from going through all of the following steps without capturing the information you need to consider your efforts a success. You need to know what you’re looking for before you go looking for it.

Step #2 – Catalog Your Content

The next step to auditing your content is, unsurprisingly, to catalog the content you’ll be auditing. For this step, you’ve got a few different options. You can either manually go through your site and build out a spreadsheet like the one below, or you can use a spider tool like Screaming Frog or Content Analysis Tool (CAT) to automatically catalog all of the content on your site.

(Be aware, though, that Screaming Frog and related tools usually inventory every piece of information on your site by default. As a result, the spreadsheets they generate may contain things like image links, tag pages and category pages that aren’t relevant to your audit.)

Unless the number of pages you have is so high it’s time-prohibitive, it’s best to do this manually so you only collect the data points you want.

Whichever approach you use, consider including any or all of the following columns, depending on your audit goals:

• Content piece title
• Content piece type
• URL
• Publish date
• Author name
• Social shares (including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Instagram)
• Page visits
• Page bounce rate
• Inbound links
• Conversions
• Content grade (a subjective measurement we’ll describe in more detail later)

Put together in a spreadsheet, your content inventory and chosen metrics should look something like this:

Your content inventory will likely have more data and columns – this is just a sample set to give you an idea of what the process should look like.

If you’ve created a substantial amount of external content (for example, guest posts submitted to other sites or infographics submitted to directories), you may want to include links to these content pieces as well. You may also want to inventory media files like images or videos if these elements have played a major role in your content campaigns.

Step #3 – Gather Content Performance Data

Once you’ve tracked the content pieces that you’ll measure as part of your audit, your next step will be to gather performance data according to the metrics you’ve chosen to evaluate.  The following resources will help you find this data:

• Social shares. If you have a plugin like GetSocial or Shareaholic installed on your website, you can pull data on social shares from there. If not, a site like BuzzSumo can find these numbers for you, as can services like GetSocial (which also tracks dark social) and SharedCount. You can also use an Instagram audit tool to discover your profile’s real stats, impressions & suggestions. If you want to analyze it in more detail across each platform you manage, you can e.g. export Instagram analytics and draw various conclusions.
• On-page metrics. If you’re evaluating on-page metrics like bounce rate or average time on page as part of your audit, your site’s analytics program (Google Analytics or some alternatives like Matomo or Plausible Analytics) will have this information.
• Backlinks. Determining the number of backlinks pointing to each of your content pieces can be done using sites like Ahrefs or Majestic SEO. Be careful, though, to watch for the difference between total links and unique referrers, as this will give you some insight into the broader appeal of your content.
• Conversions. Understanding how each of your content pieces plays into your site’s conversion rate can be complicated, but if you have a tool like Marketo or Eloqua on your site, you may be able to measure the revenue impact of your content. Google Analytics’ sales funnel data can give you some insight as well, but doesn’t include the multi-touch attribution modeling needed to assign the full value of a conversion to each content piece.

Whatever data sources you decide to use, your spreadsheet should look something like this at the end of this stage:

Step #4 – Rate Your Content

Earlier, I mentioned something called “Content Grade” – a subjective metric I use to evaluate the relative quality of each content piece. There are a number of different ways you can assign grades to each piece of content involved in your audit. You can evaluate it based on:

• Word length. How long is the content piece? Blog posts and articles with more than 2,000 words tend to perform better in the search results than shorter works. A BuzzSumo study found pieces with 3,000+ words received the most social shares, while Hubspot discovered their posts between 2,250 and 2,500 words garnered the most organic traffic. There’s no magic number, but longer does do better overall.
• Uniqueness. Content that offers a fresh take or unique information on a subject has more value for readers than a piece that’s rehashed from somebody else’s content and should be scored accordingly.
• Timeliness. Is the content out-of-date? If so, it may be worth updating the piece rather than creating something new on the same subject. Assign content pieces that are worth updating higher scores than those that aren’t, and pieces over a year old should probably be either updated or deleted depending on their value.
• Subject matter. What subject does the content piece cover? If it’s on a topic you’ve already covered to death on your site, giving it a lower score will encourage you to focus on other topics in the future.
• Overall value. Does the content piece support your current business goals? If not, assigning it a lower grade will ensure that you prioritize other existing content pieces (or create new ones) instead of focusing on those that don’t.

Again, you can go as complex as you want with this metric. You can create an in-depth grading system that assigns high scores only if combinations of certain metrics are met, or you can go with your gut and just assign a grade based on instinct. You might want to include all of the variables listed above or just assess content based on the one that’s most meaningful for your audience and your website.

Regardless of the approach you take, you should end up with something like the following:

Step #5 – Analyze Your Competitors’ Content

If you’re evaluating your content for internal purposes only, you can skip this step. But if you want to see how your current content efforts stack up against the content your competitors are putting out, you’ll want to repeat the entire process described above for your competitors’ website.

Obviously, there are some metrics you won’t be able to measure when it comes to your competitors’ content. Things like bounce rate and average time on site aren’t really accessible if you can’t log in to your competitors’ analytics databases. Competitor conversions are also difficult to manage, though you may be able to make some estimates based on average content conversion rates and “best seller” or “popular post” lists on their websites.

However, pretty much all of the other metrics described above can be analyzed using the right tools. Here’s what I like to do:

1. Log in to Buzzsumo and enter a competitor’s URL in the search field.
2. Sort the results by “Total Social Shares.”
3. Export the list and add a column for “Total Backlinks.”
4. Manually go through each of a competitor’s Top 10 posts by social shares to capture total backlink and unique referrer numbers.
5. Transfer this information over to my content audit spreadsheet.
6. Assign content grades to the competitors’ content pieces according to the same rubric I used on my own content.

Certainly, you can choose to evaluate any number of competitor content pieces you want (I’ve only shown five here for simplicity’s sake), and you aren’t limited to measuring just one competitor. You can also choose to include as many or as few competitor metrics as you like, based on the goals of your content audit.

Step #6 – Evaluate Your Data

Up to this point, you’ve done the hard work of establishing your audit goals, cataloging your content, and gathering data on its quality and performance.

Now, it’s time for the fun part!

Taking all of the information you’ve gathered together, it’s time to assess what’s working and what isn’t when it comes to your content campaigns. This is a somewhat subjective process, but even taking the time to analyze this information puts you ahead of competitors who are simply posting content for content’s sake. In fact, 37% of marketers never complete an audit of their content marketing strategy.

To see just how open-to-interpretation this process can be, here are a few conclusions you could draw from the data in the spreadsheet above:

• “Blog Post 8” on my website performed poorly across all the different metrics I tracked. This could indicate that the subject of the post is one that doesn’t resonate well with my audience and shouldn’t be repeated.
• “Blog Post 10” on my site led to the most conversions of all the content pieces I tracked. This topic could be a good one for more content in the future.
• “Blog Post 6” on my site had good social interest, but fewer conversions than posts with similar social share numbers. This could indicate that the content piece needs a stronger call to action.
• “Blog Post 4” on my website received a conversion, even though its social shares were relatively low. This could indicate that this content appealed to visitors who were further along in the buying process (reaching those who were close to making a purchase, rather than those who were just surfing for initial information), making it a potentially good place to expand my content campaigns in the future.
• “Competitor Post 4” performed very well for the competitor I tracked. This could represent a good subject for me to create content around in the future, if I haven’t already addressed it with my site’s content.

You could have looked at my spreadsheet and come to very different conclusions from the same sets of numbers, which is why I say this is generally a subjective process. If you’re new to interpreting data like this, consider the following recommendations:

• Start by looking for outliers. Unexpected numbers tell you that something’s going on – either good or bad. Use these data points to shape your understanding of different trends.
• One data point does not a trend make. That said, while looking at outliers can be helpful, be cautious about establishing trends and making corresponding decisions based on a single data point. There’s no way to know for sure if you’ll be able to replicate the exact conditions that led to success or failure for the given example.
• Consider all possible causes for different trends. Seeing a post with low social shares could mean that the topic didn’t resonate with your audience … or it could mean that you posted it at a time when they weren’t that active. Taking all possible causes into account will prevent you from coming to the wrong conclusions or wasting time on corrective actions that aren’t really necessary.
• Keep your eyes on your own data. Articles on the Huffington Post, for example, will have more social shares than the posts on your website, but that doesn’t mean your content is inherently worse. Compare your data points against others from your own site – not against other sites with vastly different audiences.

Step #7 – Plan for Content Improvement

Finally, using the data you’ve gathered and the conclusions you’ve drawn, put together a plan to improve your content campaigns going forward. Remember, you can do all the data analysis in the world, but it doesn’t mean a thing if you don’t actually act on it!

Here’s how to do it:

1. Take a look at your editorial calendar and make adjustments to the posts you have scheduled. Based on the results of your audit, you may want to change your post frequency, the days or times you post, the topics you cover, the types of content you post, or who is in charge of creating the content. As an example, you may decide to go through all the content you assigned failing grades to and bring them up to at least a “C” level.
2. At the same time, create a list of overall website improvements that should be made based on the data you’ve gathered. For instance, if you notice that some content pieces are performing weakly in terms of conversions, you may want to set aside time to evaluate the calls to action used on those pages.
3. Evaluate your guest posting strategy. The performance of your past guest posts or your competitors’ guest content may affect where you post in the future, what subjects you cover, and the kinds of content you create for these opportunities.
4. Share your results with the person or team in charge of your social media posts. The results of your audit may inform when you share updates, which networks you participate on, or what post formats you use (for example, Facebook image posts versus link shares).

It’s a good idea to add “Action” and “Priority” columns to your spreadsheet, and input what’s going to happen to each piece (such as leave, remove, update, merge, improve, and so on) and whether it’s a high, medium, or low priority. It’s always nice to have everything in one convenient place. Also, don’t forget that it is important to be able to do the right import csv into google sheets, If your spreadsheets have different formats.

Whatever types of changes you’ve decided to make, assign (reasonable) deadlines to their completion and put a person on your team in charge of making sure they’re met. It’s common to want to put your audit behind you once you’ve completed these steps, but the reality is that it’s just the beginning of the work ahead. Giving one person or team ownership of the changes that result from your audit will ensure all the work you put into your evaluation doesn’t go to waste.

When was the last time you conducted an audit of your content marketing campaigns? If it’s been more than six months, set aside time on your calendar to put this important process into action.