Content Audit Checklist For 2022

Content Audit Checklist For 2022. A content audit allows you to know what it’s working and what it isn’t. It’s one of the most forgotten concepts in the SEO world due to its time-consuming and difficult process. Nevertheless, It’s necessary to perform content audits regularly, at least on an annual basis, to outperform the competitors on the search results page.

Content auditing helps you find new SEO opportunities to implement on your website. For example, did you know that adding keywords to the heading of your post gives search engines more hints about what your blog post is about?

For the last few years, content has become an essential part of SEO. With proven results, excellent content writing helps sites to get quality traffic. Content is now one of the parts of SEO along with technical SEO and off-page SEO, no wonder content audit is a regular feature in SEO audit services.

The Benefits of Content Audit

Your content audit should help you update your existing content, improve the rank of your webpage on search engines, and make the website you present to readers simple to navigate and without any error.

In addition, content audits:

• Identify areas for content repurposing
• Find content gaps
• Evaluates Content quality 
• Improves the information structure
• Improves organic search visibility
• Maximizes conversion rates

The importance of content audits

To know what works

Yes, that’s right. Who doesn’t want to? Every business owner would like to know what sort of content is giving the highest Return Of Investment. Knowing that would assuredly help the owner to decrease his cost considerably.

For achieving goals

Every business functions to accomplish a goal, so it becomes crucial for online businesses to chalk out a strategy to achieve that. With content playing a vital role in it, it’s necessary to audit content to check whether it’s helping to achieve the goals or not.

To avoid obsolete content

People like to often consume new content. If the website hasn’t updated its content for years, it may become outdated and inappropriate to modern times. As a result, It mightn’t give real value to the customer. Besides, having outdated content can affect the crawl budget and rank in the search result.

For providing accurate information

Some websites include facts and figures as their primary content on the website. With time, these numbers and facts become obsolete. Such elements can provide incorrect information to the users, risking the chance of embarrassing the brand’s reputation.

Tools Required for Content Audit

Next are the tools required for a content audit

1. Screaming frog 
2. Content Inventory Data Sheet
3. Google Analytics
4. Google Search Console 

Content Audit Checklist

A checklist is a great way to keep track of the essential task on hand. Keeping track of the completion of these tasks may help us accomplish a particular goal. A content audit checklist is the essence of your content marketing strategy.

Next are some of such checklist

1. Content Inventory List
2. Content Data Sheet
3. Metrics to Check

Content Inventory List

Having a content inventory plan is the first step towards beginning the audit. After all, it’s essential to audit content to create useful content for the future. 

This content audit checklist includes all the URLs on the site, be it webpage or blog. Getting all the URLs manually is a dull process, so we can use tools like screaming frog, a crawling tool, to collect all the pages on the website. 

Content Data points

• Content-type
• Content published date
• Author
• Word count
• Page Score
• Comments 
• Shares
• Sales Funnel Stage
• Content relevance
• Calls to action

SEO Data points

• Headings
•  Title
•  Meta description
•  Primary Keywords
•  Organic Traffic
•  Bounce rate
•  Backlinks
•  Avg time spent
•  Pages visited
•  Unique Users
•  No. of Images 
•  No. of Videos
•  Page entry and Exit
•  Broken Links
•  Conversion Data

Key Content Metrics To Look on

• Traffic

Organic traffic is the most significant of all. Traffic is the point of convergence for which everybody is improving the site. On the off chance that your content isn’t producing sufficient traffic, it may indicate there is a need to tweak the content strategy. It very well may be as far as content arrangement, content circulation or the whole content itself. The content on the page might not have covered the subject elaborately, or the wrong keyword has been engaged. 

• Bounce rate

High bounce rate on the pages require prompt consideration; this could flag that we have totally misconstrued the client intent. 

• Links 

Backlinks are a fundamental Google positioning element, and a quality backlink goes about as a demonstration of approval for your pages. It’s okay to have a few backlinks on recently made content pages. Backlink sets aside an effort to develop. Continue auditing your backlinks routinely, sometimes content tends to get wrong connections. It’s important to dispose of such backlinks which might corrupt your page expert according to Google. An SEO office, careful about these backlinks, review the backlinks consistently to get important experiences. 

• Time spent 

Any webmaster would need to make content that can command client notice just as his time. The additional time a client spends on the site, the more the odds of him are for changing over. It is vice versa if a client spends less time on the website, it might indicate the content is less tacky and not resonating with the client. 

• Session 

Client investing energy in pages is fundamental yet how many pages a client investigates on the site is additionally similarly significant. The more the pages a client investigates, the better are the chances of him getting converted. It can likewise be useful in measuring the viability of the business pipe we have made through between linking of content on the site. 

• Unique visits

Unique visitors are the people who are visiting your website interestingly. New unique guest implies the content is getting a great deal of views. More views will give better ROI from the content as well as: conversions, shares and backlinks. 

• Traffic sources

Measuring the traffic source can assist you with figuring out which sources are sending the top traffic. Organizations can build promotion of content through that channel consistently to obtain another customer. 

• Conversions 

Conversion objectives metrics should be estimated to check if content pieces made exclusively for conversion are accomplishing the ideal outcome or not.

Conclusion:

Dissecting the data and inferring important insights is urgent to create agreeable content later on.

Testing and refreshing the content often is vital to find the sort of content the client engages with the most.

Besides, checking out your content marketing patterns can help you get the content that resonates with the customers. Each piece of content your audit will have a few data metrics joined to it. These metrics will tell you if you’re hitting the mark or missing it definitely.