How To Conduct A Content Audit Step - By - Step Ep. 565

hi and welcome to the seo podcast unknown secrets of internet marketing my name is chris burris one of the owners of ewr digital my name is matt bertram marketing consultant marketing consultant welcome back to another fun-filled edition of our podcast uh this is podcast number 567 it's the fifth one in 2023 uh is 2023 going pretty fast for you i feel like it is like it's insanely fast i think every year it speeds up yeah you know i have a theory about that maybe we should save that for the green room we can't for the for the uh formerly known as the green room um we're excited we've got an article today the article is how to conduct a content audit step by step uh pitiff to ashley segura um she is a vip contributor uh over at search engine journal this is going to be a good article we do have a review that i wanted to share with you really chris let's hear it yeah so this review it's from uh peter germanzy if i'm pronouncing that right i think that's right it says uh and he actually left it uh for ewr digital over on uh clutch and it's uh ewr has helped us grow our search engine presence and provide a consistent flow of well crafted content for our audiences uh he gave us five stars it feels good to do that um it's friday right normally we do our podcast on thursdays yeah um it's the day after uh rodeo kickoff in houston rodeo cook-off kickoff yeah in houston i can't even say it say that yeah you had a good time dragging a little bit today a little slow i got i got a drip today so yeah yeah yeah you should have just been taken my vital c yeah well you just gave me some so we'll we'll see being back to normal let's just jump in so my i guess my point is uh it's friday we want to get out of here um we want to

go we want to deliver great content and then we want to go party and so let's jump into this how to conduct a content audit step by step it's a fact that even the best content writers and search engine optimizers occasionally strike out with a new piece of content just occasionally for whatever reason and despite your best efforts not everything you publish is going to be a hit don't waste those non-hits use those less than successful pieces of content to figure out where you went wrong take action to correct it and use that new knowledge to create stronger new content what is a content audit and why is it important that that will and then we'll give you step-by-step instructions for performing them on your own is what we're going to do in this podcast or have you prepared i know you read it like you yeah i did read it um yeah let's get into it all right what is a content audit uh so ashley says that a content audit is a process of systematically inventorying and evaluating your website's current published content the content you could be audit auditing runs the gamut it could be web pages landing pages blog posts product descriptions videos slide decks white papers i don't see infographics infographics we'll add that to to the list there good job karen all right so first why do you need to audit your content again nothing is immune to the passage of time including your content things that were once considered irreviewable facts become incorrect all the time the internet age has only accelerated that process regular contact uh content audits address the following questions these are the questions that you want to address i'll read them okay why don't you do one i'll do the next one okay what is your existing content is that content valuable how do people find it how is it performing is it accurate is it still accurate um so a content audit step one set your goals like so like everything you know

the the age old adage of uh ready aim fire and then kind of the newer version of it is ready fire aim i read that book right because like if you're just aiming the problem with ready aim fire is a lot of people just are like ready aim and they never fire aim yeah aim aim yeah aim yeah so better to ready fire aim and before you do anything so the first thing you should do is figure out how you're going to measure the content so it's it's it's not test and measure it's measure and test know what you're going to measure and then test it especially in this case because we're auditing existing content you want to measure it and you want to set your goals it's important to start with clearly defined objectives about what you want to accomplish you should have at least one goal at least and then determine the metrics with which success will be measured here are things that you could include improving se results for specific pages or your entire website increasing engagement or conversions removing outdated or redundant content improving the standard of existing pieces of content deciding on a new organizational structure for your website so step two so step one like figure out that goal and how you're going to measure it step two collect and categorize content by the way we're going to split this particular podcast in two this is going to be fairly short compared to some uh so we'll stop about halfway through and then and go on so so step two is collect and categorize content first determine which types of content you're going to be reviewing and collect their urls now you can do this manually with excel and google sheets and put that spreadsheet together or you could use an online tool like hubspot or sem rush or screaming frog that's what i would do i love screaming yeah that does it pretty quick and and actually offers a pro tip if your site is larger than a

few pages you will likely want to use a content audit tool you know i was auditing a website uh just yesterday and i was trying to find a tool because i i wanted to turn it into a flow chart of like you know an organizational site is the uh site map in the form of a flow chart i couldn't really like i found one tool it didn't really do it and part of the problem is it didn't recognize that everything under this menu should have been a different layer right level so everything was super flat and there was no kind of menu structure built into it so i i just had to do it well when you're building websites as well um building the content flow out building on like the slug outlay like all this stuff's really important to organize information and you know if if you have a small website uh or you have one one one company that you're doing it for you're you're trying to organize content into different buckets and to get a sense of like okay we offer these five services say how many blogs do we have written about each type of content right it is the first like layer and then you can go deeper on that uh and and and have those decision trees on information you can use things like answer the public um there's a little tool seo that uh can help you sort content uh as well to figure out what topics to go after and um you know like i don't know how many people are doing this like i think people are not having a content calendar and they're just you know creating stuff now you can do this for sales assets you can do it for videos um you need to figure out like what are your goals right like and i know you talked about that earlier but i think it's so important why are we doing a content on it what do we need to do well we're

going to be doing xyz right like okay we're going to build out a content calendar for social media we're going to build a content calendar out for gmb posts or gbdp posts we're going to build a content calendar for uh new services or case studies or what whatever it is but you need to understand what what the goal is have that end in mind and then figure out well where are you at it's kind of like setting a baseline if you're going to be running a marketing campaign well we got to get a baseline and then we can figure out okay this is this is where we start from okay and we make changes are we going up are we going down right and so yeah doing a content on it or even doing like a sitemap sitemap audit sorry i can't speak today sitemap audit for um you know a project that you have or a website that you have super important like and and you know i just encourage you to dig into this because it's so valuable and if you don't know where you sit you you don't know where you're going you don't know what you need to do yeah yeah in reality you should stop and do some planning because you're going to spend time on this and if you plan appropriately that time is going to be spent really intelligently now if you don't then the time might just be spent and that's not intelligent uh all right so we got a pro tip uh you're you're going to want to use an audit tool you'll want to track the following for each piece of content in a separate content details audit spreadsheet you're going to want to track track the url the author which team produced it is that the content team the social team the seo team i think you have different calendars in my opinion yeah right well and this is like lumping all potentially lumping all of that you don't want to lump it together

yeah i mean like if you're using like an excel or google sheets document you um have different tabs and one social media one's content one's many blogs one's whatever you know so then content goal what was the purpose of that content backlinks traffic conversions the word count how many comments that they have shares break this down by social so one of the biggest things that that certainly that that we've improved as a company um over the years and it's certainly been something that i really focus on with our team what is the purpose of this piece of content yeah what do we want them to do what action do we want them to take what keyword do we want to rank for what is the purpose of this document and it might be multifaceted yeah okay and to understand what that is and why it fits in and is it relevant and then how effective is it like you don't get answers to things that you don't measure and so willy-nilly just creating pieces of content for seo or something like that it's just you're spinning your wheels more than you're helping yourself out right and if you're really clear with what your your goals are and your strategies are and what that piece of contents purpose is and how effective is it is at that you can approve that i mean we were talking earlier and we should have recorded some of it uh but we were talking about funnels and we were talking about why don't you use the analogy of writing that hit song uh and maybe this is a tangent but i think it's certainly helpful because i think we should save it for okay yeah after the green room because i that that keeps coming up so that's not something that that we'll forget we'll hit it again uh at some point um all right so how you structure that information that we just outlined is determined by your goals you may also want to track some things like what

product or service does that content support the keywords that you're targeting with that content and and the word count which i thought was you know it is in there so that's a repeat all right so step number three is so track metrics and analyze data you're looking for tangible kpis that allow you to assess the health and performance of your site and specifically you're doing this content audit you're going to be making changes to content you want to be able to assess whether those changes were valuable or not valuable so you've got to be able to have those tangible kpis uh so one perform a past audit before we get into the data you must backtrack and audit your past produced content hopefully you've already got this in the spreadsheet maybe you don't if you don't you want to know that the content you've published perform how well it performs and to help you get a gauge of what kind of content you need to create in the future and what kind not to create if you know how well it's done whatever the criteria on and everything that was i don't know an infographic failed probably not or a video succeeded then you know that you need to create more of that so there are some really great like social media tools out there that let you measure how well this post is doing against your body of post or your last post and also what pieces of data um you know what are people responding to what is your audience responding to to help you improve your content um and you can do the same thing with with blogs like one is like is it getting on the decks from google yeah because we have a lot of new clients that come to us and they're like they got my rankings thinking yeah like it's the content is just non-original um and that that is you know one of the concerns with ai is you know uh you got to be more original

here because if the content's not useful uh google's going to take it out of the the indexing yeah right and so if it's not in the index it doesn't help you at all right and so um with with blogs you can one is it indexed to like you know how much are people spending on it well is it ranking how many people are going to it what are they doing on that site you know smaller sites you don't have a lot of data to work with like you you actually have more data on the social media side uh until you really get your blogs ranking yeah and really there's a huge shift even you know because primarily when i think content i think blogs i mean like we're not looking right now at how is this image performing like we are on videos like you got video data but um but how is like this image performing i don't i don't really know um how people are assessing that assessing that but but i think i think text content and i think that you know you want to also probably think about uh utilizing text content on other platforms where they're going to get a lot more traffic or running even ads to that content to test it out better um but but your blogs should not just be for seo they should be people should want to read them and they should rank and um you know they should be answering questions in the search engines and and it should be or it should be a traffic driver to your to your site um you know and and if you're not doing that run some traffic to it you know or share you know always going up sharing stuff on social media you know they and linking it back to your website's not necessarily a good thing because they don't want them to leave the site right right uh you know sometimes a window will open and they can read it from that but

but i think that um you need to get people in front of your content to see how it does because if you don't know if you're producing good or bad content you know like you gotta lay that baseline down so yeah so assess that you know what kind to create what kind not to create you want to decide how far back you want to go for this content audit um ashley recommends going back at least one year and gathering data for how your content performed the year before many website analytics tools like google analytics or sem rush's content audit tool can quickly inventory and your content based on your sitemap data these can provide you with a list of content urls to audit so he gives the example of one of the reports it's got the url the workflow flow status so he can define like hey it's in progress or it's actually published how many shares does it have how many facebook shares how many twitter tweets uh or retweets how many sessions on that content on that page average session duration bounce rate so to combine all these together can help you identify those outliers that deserve a second look because maybe maybe there's some type of content or some um uh subjects in the content that are are doing really well on tiktok or not doing so well on instagram my wife actually has a viral video on on tiktok actually legitimately viral yeah it's cool as hell uh i i told one of my business partners about it and he was like what what is she getting naked because you can't get from from here to there um but no it's it's it's a it's about menopause right my wife went through early onset menopause and that content is doing really well so you might look at the breadth of work that she's doing that she's publishing and you go like okay well menopause ironically is actually doing really well on tiktok so if you thought tiktok was only young kids

like that is not true anymore i have heard that that's shifting a lot i mean it's really just like what is the average attention span of americans and it's getting shorter it's continuing to get shorter and well guess what goldfish is way ahead of us man yeah and and so i i i'm you know i'm hearing really positive things about tiktok as well um and and the demographics are changing so yeah yeah oh well facebook's coming back too yeah so yeah all right so so so you got this content you look you looked at it over the past year you did an audit of it make sure you prepare yourself for ongoing audience uh so now you can repeat this audit activity for new content weekly is ashley's suggest suggestion upload the most recent numbers and statistics every week over time again take note of any drastic changes and again that that drastic change could be on tiktok or on instagram or on facebook or it could just be the bounce rate or it could be whatever it is you're looking for those outliers because they can tell you if you dig into them and you spend a little bit of planning with them you can understand why it's working that way uh and make adjustments yeah i i think like however you're building out your your content calendar uh if it's weekly or if it's a over a longer period of time you you build it into that model and you build on that information uh to continue to have a living breathing document that you can utilize versus something that you do once and then you put on a shelf and it collects dust sort of thing yeah yeah and and she makes the note right in terms of assessing it weekly sometimes evergreen content specifically can take months before it really takes off so just know that some of these are will have lag times just depending on the type of content that that is so true right so true like topics

are so important um and then different topics uh different times and you know you know there's news there's google new strategies there's different things that uh if you're trying to grab attention right there's this constant level of attention uh and then there's like hey look at look at this shiny object kind of attention and i i think that that's a really good note to know that evergreen content sometimes takes longer because you're having to wait for people to find it yeah and and appreciate it and share it yeah yeah and and also like you need to probably look at the topics too on how many people um like if you're very narrow down on the funnel um those are going to be the right people but there's not going to be probably as many of them and so it's going to take a little bit longer to to work through the process yeah all right so here are some metrics to track comments a properly moderated comment section can add valuable user generated content to your blog posts and articles that makes sense if one of your content goals is to build a community on your website uh you will want to know what content types and topics generate conversions use the ugc link attribute to ensure you're compliant with google's requirements for link markup uh so when what that's saying is there are sections on your website that if if it's user generated content should be defined to google and schema as user generated content and the links that come out of that need to be defined as user generated content you need to be telling google the proper story if you don't allow comments on your blog check for comments on your social media posts about your content some marketers brush off social shares as vanity metrics i can certainly say that to some degree i think that way and i also like to dig into the actual comments because there's a lot of value in them right so if you're just going

for comments for common sakes okay not not a big fan but if you're going to get comments so that you can um mine those comments for real nuggets that can help guide what you're going to do next like that's absolutely worth well also the amount of likes that the post gets and the amount of shares really that the post gets and the amount of engagement just in general however you're measuring it um there's actually a different point system for a lot of these algorithms right like short comments versus um long comments uh is well it tells you if the contents like resonate yeah resonate with people like it's not a vanity metric like it that that's important to know it's an impact yeah like if nobody's liking your stuff or you got like just a handful of people liking it make better content right um because the reality is like with your wife's posts it will go viral like if you're following the guidelines of what the platform's trying to do and you do things in a certain way and you're not putting links up in the post and you're following these right things and you hit on a right topic and you you have enough authority right or sometimes you don't even have to because you know they're they're they're showing it based on how much engagement it is like tiktok you don't have to have all these followers because it's going to show based on interest so if you have a even a small group of people um that are that are interested in talking about something they're going to share it to them and then it's going to share it to their friends it's going to share it to them and and that's how it goes viral because that's how real information travels yeah so i i can tell you and just thinking about it right now my search uh process has changed and what drove me is that at the conference that i was at recently somebody was talking about how

if they're looking for a product they'll actually go to tiktok and look for reviews of the product which i would never do right yeah but at the same point i know that i'm doing a lot more of my um kind of background research on youtube now oh yeah right so i'm looking for videos to do it because i don't feel like reading an article or i'm doing it during lunch so i can listen to a quote-unquote article or experts speak about it uh instead of instead of having to read it from youtube yeah i'm getting actually my my news from youtube and it makes a lot of sense too to to get little short snippets because maybe i just need a couple pieces information i want to hear what a bunch of people have to say a couple sentences about one or two things and so i i think that there's still a lot of opportunity uh to create that content because there's a lot of times where i'm really interested in a topic and i go through a couple videos and then i'm like i want more like i need more people producing content about that specific thing and so yeah the searches is the search is changing for sure so it's important all right so next again metrics to track uh organic traffic obviously seo podcast ideally your content will receive a lot of organic traffic uh if you aren't getting organic traffic you could these that could be a potential red flag perhaps something is wrong with i don't know your content strategy how you're distributing the content the queen that we reference that we use which is content is king distribution is queen and who wears the pants the queen wears the pants and the family uh the content type and the actual content itself so that really wraps up part one for how to conduct a content and audit step by step uh patiff to ashley it's a great article uh we'll cover the rest of it um just a

just a teaser right so we're talking about metrics you should be uh looking at the next one is bounce rate you want to hear us talk about bounce rate and backlinks come join us on the next podcast um well chris because we we have more people watching our stuff we we should go back to uh having um props and and now i'm like bouncer i'm like bouncy balls and bouncy balls and yeah there's bobble heads yeah that's the bobble head yeah by the way if you're if you're watching this you know what that sound is because you you can see it well if you're listening you also know what it is because i just said it well the next big focus and i i think a past podcast we had um we had the wrong input so we apologize about that but um we are focused on making higher quality content and uh adding adding more bells and whistles to the production side of things as we're getting more sponsors so we have another sponsor um that'll be coming soon yeah i'll be announcing it uh next i think probably next podcast and um and so so really this podcast was uh to to educate um our team as well as uh everyone else out there we thought there was value in it and that's why why it was started um and and now now we're looking at um really turning into a business we're gonna there are ways on our website invest as you podcast to support us uh value for value we would love for you to uh connect with us like our stuff share comment um best seo podcast you can find it anywhere and uh there'll be ways to donate and and we're going to really step it up uh and i have some uh plans to build out a podcast network so you can be part of that journey with us and you may have already been part of the journey all the way up to now and if that's

true we want to say thank you very much yeah you guys have made us the most popular seo podcast one of the top internet marketing podcasts on itunes in the note itunes tones tones uh itunes in the known universe and and we want to thank you for that patiff to you yeah um if uh if you would like to grow your business with the largest simplest marketing tool on the planet the internet go to ewr digital for increased revenue in your business uh just once you're at ewrdigital.com click the free consultation yes it's right there in the upper right hand corner uh schedule a time you can schedule a time right there real time with one of our internet marketing experts well you will get value real time right into the consultation you schedule it and then oh yeah and it sets the appointment yeah yeah this is this is a situation where uh the form on the website is standing by the internet marketing consultants you can schedule time with um go schedule that time you will get value out of that call if you don't like reach out to me or matt and we'll like we'll make sure that some value is delivered to you unless of course you're doing everything 100 correctly um in which case why would you fill out that form all right uh until the next podcast my name is chris burris my name is matt bertram bye bye for now