What Most Companies Get Wrong With Content Audits

Source: Search Engine Journal

Content marketing is one of the most effective methods for improving authority within your niche, establishing a loyal following, boosting website traffic, and acquiring new customers.

While it requires a consistent upload of new content over a period of months (or even years) in order to be successful, the reward of content marketing is so great that business owners and marketers are prepared to make this commitment. In a 2016 study, 60% of marketers stated that publishing blog posts was a priority for them.

Content marketing is particularly useful for attracting new visitors to your site, without the need for paid advertising. In a 2015 study about blogging frequency, companies that published 16+ blog posts per month got nearly 3.5X more traffic than companies that published 0-4 posts per month.

While inexperienced marketers use the ineffective ‘Publish and Pray’ approach to content creation, those with more experience create content in accordance with a predesigned strategy and evaluate their results meticulously.

If you aren’t auditing your content marketing efforts, then you will never fully understand what is working and what isn’t. As the age-old business adage states: “What gets measured gets managed.”

By successfully auditing your content, you can stop wasting your efforts on things that don’t produce results and put your energy into avenues that will drive your business forward, as verified by the data. A data-driven approach (both quantitative and qualitative) is essential if you’re serious about taking your content marketing to the next level.

If you’re going to perform a content audit, it’s important that you do things correctly. Many companies make vital mistakes during their auditing process which ultimately results in lessons not being learned and ineffective practices being carried on in the future.

Here are some of the most common mistakes to avoid when performing a content audit.

Poorly Defined Content Strategy

Before moving onto the audit itself, a content strategy should be in place. If you don’t have a content strategy with clearly defined goals, then auditing your content will be an exercise in futility.

In a 2014 study, only 44% of B2B content marketers stated they had a documented content strategy.

Ultimately, a content strategy should be designed to improve the long-term profitability of the company. This is achieved by delivering high-quality content to a targeted audience on a regular basis, which improves niche authority, brand awareness, website SEO, and eventually turns returning readers into paying customers.

If you have a clear vision of what a successfully executed content strategy will look like (with definitive metrics to back it up), planning your blog posts becomes a lot easier — as does auditing them.

While there is no one-size-fits-all approach to creating a strategy, typically you will want to define your core goals, messaging (market differentiation), methods of content production, methods of distribution, and perhaps most importantly, your consumer profiles.

Consumer Profile Creation

A consumer profile contains the key attributes of the ideal person who will be consuming your content. It’s best to separate this into demographic and psychographic attributes.

Demographic attributes include age, income level, gender, and marital status. Psychographic attributes include values, desires, pain points, and interests.

You may even wish to give your ideal consumer a name and find a photo of him or her to accompany it. If you have a specific person in mind every time you go to create a blog post, it becomes a lot easier to deliver high-value content.

With a clearly defined consumer profile, your auditing process also becomes easier. Instead of simply looking at the metrics available, you can ask yourself whether Bob or Suzanne would have resonated with the content and gained actionable insights from it.

Ultimately, content isn’t there just to generate SEO juice for your website, it’s there to connect with people and generate long-term trust for your brand.

Choosing the Wrong Metrics

The first step of a content audit is to create a content inventory, with every piece of content on your site included. Alternatively, you may wish to perform an audit just for your blog posts.

However, a content audit can quickly become dysfunctional if you’re making assessments based on inferior metrics — or even worse, inconsistent metrics. The metrics you choose should depend on the goals stated in your content strategy, but here are some of the things you definitely should keep track of.

• Article title and length: It doesn’t matter how great your article is; if the title is lackluster and includes no emotional words then people will be unlikely to click through to read it. Conventional wisdom states that the ideal length of a title is between 50-70 characters.

• Meta description and length: A compelling, descriptive meta description can dramatically improve your CTR. The optimal length of a meta description should be around 155 characters.

• Bounce rate and time spent on page: With a low bounce rate and a high amount of time spent on your page, this is an indicator that your content is engaging. If you see statistics like this but your article is still attracting minimal traffic, then the problem is with your title, meta description, or promotion.

• Social shares: Check out Shared Count to determine how many social shares you are receiving per post. A low count may signify underwhelming content, but it may also mean that your social sharing buttons are inappropriately placed or too small.

• Page views: Traffic is one of the most significant indicators of how effective your content is, especially when you cross reference other metrics such as bounce rate and social shares. Determining the most common ways that people arrive on your site is also helpful in terms of planning your outreach strategies.

Some of the other things you might want to record are the number of images per article, the length of each article, the most popular times of the week for publishing new content, the quality of your writing (give yourself an honest 1-5 grade), and the amount of comments generated.

I know it’s tedious, but try to record as much as possible before you start your analysis. Missing data can have dire consequences when you try to determine trends relating to your content’s performance.

Ineffective Trend Analysis

Gathering the data is the first hurdle in performing a content audit, but if you aren’t able to analyze it once it’s collected, then your efforts will be wasted.

Oftentimes, you can find yourself staring at a spreadsheet for hours trying to observe trends with no success. This is why it’s best to get a fresh set of eyes to look at the data with you — particularly someone who isn’t involved in your niche so they have no preconceptions.

If you spend your entire working life involved in a particular subject area, it’s easy to miss obvious things that other people will see straight away. Don’t make any immediate strategy innovations based solely on your own analysis — run through the data with your associates to make sure your deductions make sense.

While it’s highly recommended that you gather data for all your content, some of the most blatant trends emerge when you compare the top five and bottom five performing blog posts within a time period.

Scan the two groups for commonalities, such as image quality and…

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