What is a Content Audit?

Content audits are a useful way to keep track of your content, including blog posts, social media posts, events, and web pages, and report on how they impact audiences. They can be a good way to identify underperforming content and allow you to focus your efforts on content to convert.

A content audit is also a great planning resource and roadmap for future content creation for your school or college.

How to complete a content audit

Identify your goals

When you start a content audit it helps to know what it is that you are trying to accomplish.

A content audit identifies content that engages your target audience and can include SEO and conversion rate information. Before you begin, consider what you are hoping to achieve, some examples:

Identify which pages need to be SEO optimised
Identify the content that is seen the most by your audience
Identify which content is converting the most people into leads

Gather your content

Decide which content you are going to audit: blog posts, publications, key information pages (such as Admissions information), virtual tours or videos - just some examples.

Then collect the URLs of the pages you have chosen to audit.

Categorise your content

Once you know what content you will be auditing, you need to categorise these in a spreadsheet. Some categories you may want to include are content type, topic, author, publication date, format and target buyer persona.

Another important category is metrics, which can provide more information for your analysis later. Google Analytics can provide metrics of your choice - this may be page views, time spent on page or bounce rate.

It may start to look something like this:

Analyse your data

Now, it's time to look at your data to get a good measure of the state of your content. Here are some things to take note of:

Content that's missing — What is your audience interested in that you haven't covered?
Content that's underperforming — Which pieces of content aren't getting the numbers you want?
Outdated content — If you have old content, can it be updated or reworked to maintain optimisation?
Content that has performed extremely well.

Create a list of action points

You now know what to focus on based on the analysis and can go from there. Think about the posts to delete, update, re-write, or re-structure.

To organise these action items, add one last column to the spreadsheet — one that's close to the front so you can keep tabs on it. This column will let you know the action to take on a specific URL. Are you going to keep, update, delete, or re-write that blog post or page?

If you plan on ranking by priority or including a timeline for this audit, now would be the time to include that, as well. To make a priority timeline that fits in best with your content audit, think back to your goals and which items make sense to execute first.

Ready to get started on your content audit?

Download our free template spreadsheet which includes:

Content mapping - designed to help you consider SMART goals, themes, keywords and campaigns for every piece of content or event.
Content Audit - a worksheet that will help you review and organise your existing content so that you can see what works well and can be repurposed.
Event Audit - a worksheet that helps you to review past events and their success.