Author: Guest Post / Source: Duct Tape Marketing < All Articles A content audit of your website or latest marketing campaign is an
A content audit of your website or latest marketing campaign is an absolute must. But let’s be honest: most marketers and business owners despise them and are terrified of them in equal measure.
They can be tedious, time-consuming, and confusing.
But this is not a post on how to conduct one, though. You can read guides from Quick Sprout, Mightybytes, Majestic, and Duct Tape Marketing (of course) if you want step-by-step instructions.
Instead, we’re going to focus on some of the mistakes that businesses make when it comes to their content audits. As the saying goes, if we don’t learn from history, we’re doomed to repeat it. So let’s learn.
These five mistakes are common but easily avoidable.
Mistake #1 – You Have No Concrete Goal
There is no one-size-fits-all audit process. There is no one reason to conduct an audit.
Before you go any further, you need to know exactly why you’re doing the audit in the first place, because that’ll influence everything about it.
So ask yourself: why?
Maybe your sales and marketing departments aren’t playing well together, and that means lost leads and blown opportunities. Companies that include a blog in their content strategy, for example, generate 67% more leads than those that don’t…but only if those two teams are working together (collecting names and contact details, passing that info along, and so forth).
Or maybe you’re seeing plenty of traffic arriving at your site, but it’s not creating the leads and revenue to go along with it.
Or maybe your content is failing to attract a crowd. Whatever the reason, you need to identify it beforehand.
A content audit can examine your SEO, or assess the quality and user experience, or examine conversions, relevancy, whether stuff is up-to-date, its accuracy, and more.
An audit is a means to an end, not the end unto itself. You’ve got to use the data collected to inform and guide your content decisions and marketing strategy. If not, you’ve wasted a lot of time, energy, and money on a fancy spreadsheet that will sit and collect digital dust for you.
Answer why so you can document a concrete process and goal.
Mistake #2 – You Focus on the Wrong Metrics
This is really an extension of the first mistake because if you don’t have a clear reason and goal for the audit, you’ll have no idea what to look at when the data starts to pour in.
Once you have those in place, you can zero in on the metrics that matter to that goal and reason without wasting time or effort on unnecessary data points.
An audit concerned with SEO? You’ll want to examine…
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