The Checklist for a Content Audit – Doing Away with Bad Content

Do you remember the last time when you audited your content? You would probably not remember the day and if you’ve been recently realized that you should perform an audit now, you are not alone as there are many others like you who have never been attentive about running a content audit. Majority of the content curators are extremely focused on designing new content and they focus on such a level that they forget to run an audit for the content that already exists.

Few of the Viable Reasons Behind Performing a Content Audit Every Now and then Are:

• Outdated: Did your content become outdated or stale overtime? No, you don’t require beating yourself for that as it is not your fault that your content has become stale. Some topic that was relevant two years back might not be relevant at present. You might just have to add that extra spice every now and then to make it adaptable.
• Goals: Is your content being able to attain its goals? Are you being able to gain ROI from the content that you had created? You won’t know the answers unless you perform a measurement.
• Inaccurate information: Since your content has aged now, the data and statistics that you once felt were accurate are not outdated. Hence, with an audit, you can check all such issues and safeguard the reputation of your brand.

Content Data Audit – Which Metrics Should you Track?

For performing a content data audit, here are the few metrics that you should definitely track:

• Organic traffic: You might be thinking that your content is getting lot of organic traffic and that you don’t have to invest that extra money for advertising as people would just read your content, love it and get engaged in it. In case you’re not getting enough of organic traffic, this could be a red flag that you should take note of.
• Bounce rate: Do you think your readers are bouncing off the page of your content without viewing the other pages of the site? If yes, then this is one of the biggest signs of poor content. Your content is nothing but a gateway which leads the users from a search to your site, informs and entertains them.
• Backlinks: You have to bring back the backlinks, not the bad ones but the good ones which provide us a lot of credibility and boost. The backlinks which are produced by your content on a daily basis have to be tracked for few reasons. Your backlinks will keep changing with time and all backlinks aren’t good enough to be kept. Hence, this is a metric which needs to be checked.
• Unique visitors: You might be eager to have lots of unique visitors who would view the content and the large numbers of views which are obtained by a piece of content. With increased number of views, there will be more conversions, shares, engagement and backlinks.
• Time on page: In case your content is a blog post of 2500 words, what is the average time that is being spent by the readers? Is it just 18 seconds? If yes, then something is definitely wrong. This specific metric is going to tell you whether or not the content that you created is perfect for your audience or whether you need to improve.

Therefore, now that you know the reasons to perform a content audit and the metrics to check, what are you waiting for? Take into account every single information given above and run a content audit as soon as possible.