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Digital marketers are constantly working to ensure their content is accessible and performing well, from updating web pages for SEO compliance to removing broken links. This makes it all the more important to regularly evaluate your website through a process known as content audit. How often you conduct your content audit would determine its efficiency.

This article discusses how a regular content audit can enhance your website performance and how often you should conduct it for it to ultimately benefit your website. But, before knowing the answers to such queries, it pays to know first what content audit means.

What Is A Content Audit?

A content audit is a comprehensive evaluation of your website, in which you examine the quality of each piece of content on your site, and how users are interacting with each page (including page views, time spent on a page, bounce rate, etc.). It also shows how search engines rank each page (i.e., the keywords it’s ranking for).

A content audit is a way to evaluate the current state of your website, including what content you have on it and how it's organized. You can also use this process to determine whether or not your site is serving the needs of your customers, and whether or not it could be improved in any way.

Furthermore, you can use a content audit to evaluate your existing content and determine if it's still relevant, if it needs updating, or if it should be removed. This can also be used to get an idea of how much time you spend creating new content, as well as maintaining old content.

Types Of Content Audit

Your purpose for the audit determines what type you're doing. That being said, here are some of the types of content audit:

1. Keyword Content Audit

This one focuses on the keywords that are driving traffic to your site and how they’re being used throughout each piece of content on your site (including titles, meta descriptions, and headings). This type of audit will help you understand where there are opportunities for optimization concerning keyword usage across different types of content (like blog posts vs. social media posts vs. product pages).

2. Content Marketing Audit

A content marketing audit is a process of evaluating your content and identifying opportunities for improvement. There are two types of this process:

• Content Gap Audit: A content gap audit analyzes the gaps between what you have and what you need to succeed with your content marketing strategy. It can help you identify how much more content you need to create, as well as where they need to go.
• Content Effectiveness Audit: This particular type of content marketing audit evaluates the effectiveness of your current content by measuring its performance against goals, such as engagement rates, conversions, lead generation, and so on.

A content marketing audit can be time-consuming. So, you must start with clear, defined goals to make it successful. Examples of goals include increasing audience engagement, improving your SEO results, and improving your conversion rate.  

Once you’ve set your content marketing audit goals, decide on what content to review. You might want to audit your landing pages, blogs, and product listings first before your portable document format (PDF) files and videos. This allows you to boost audience engagement by improving the first content they see on your website.
 

3. SEO Content Audit

SEO content audits are a great way to ensure your website is up to par with search engine algorithms. If you've been around the SEO block, you may already know that this type of audit is used to identify areas where your site can be improved to rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs).

A regular SEO content audit will also help improve the overall website experience of online users by ensuring fast web page loading and optimization of helpful keywords. All SEO technical elements undergo a thorough evaluation to ensure your website meets SEO metrics and adheres to search engines’ SEO algorithms, allowing easier crawling of your web pages. 

 

Why You Should Conduct A Content Audit

Conducting a content audit is an essential part of any SEO strategy because it helps you to determine which pages on your website are actually useful to users and which ones aren't.

In fact, conducting a content audit is one of the first steps in creating a solid SEO strategy for your site. It can be as simple as taking a look at a list of all the pages on your website, or it can be more detailed, like looking through every single piece of content to see if it's relevant and up-to-date.

In addition, implementing regular SEO content audits is highly beneficial to your overall SEO marketing. You’ll be able to develop a successful SEO content strategy, such as on-page and off-page SEO tactics, to improve brand visibility, awareness, and authority. 

On-page SEO strategies include optimizing images and creating informative and compelling content. On the other hand, off-page SEO tactics include guest posting, local listings, and social media marketing.

 

How Often Should You Conduct A Content Audit?

How often you should conduct your content audit depends on several factors. These include the following:

• Rate Of Publishing

If you're only publishing new content once a month and all other pages are static, you can probably do a yearly content audit. However, if your website is large and you publish new content daily, then a six-month audit is, perhaps, the most ideal thing to do. Moreover, if your site has been around for over five years (or maybe even less), it should be in your best interest to do quarterly audits instead of yearly ones because your page structure could've changed so much that it's not even worth trying to fix any issue at the moment.

• Number Of Social Media Platforms

Using social media platforms, you should do a content audit more often to ensure that your brand stays relevant. If you’re not using social media platforms, there's no need to conduct frequent content audits. Ensure that your blog is updated regularly with new posts and that your website is maintained by the company or person who created it.

• Website’s Size

The size of your website will determine the amount of time you need to complete the audit, as well as the resources need to do so. If you have too many pages on your website, it’ll take more time and resources to complete the audit. If, on the one hand, you have fewer pages on your site, you’ll be able to complete the process quickly and efficiently.

If you have a small or medium-sized site, then it's more likely that your content audit will be a reasonably simple process. You'll probably only need one or two people to complete it, which will take about two days. On the other hand, if you have a large website with thousands of pages and hundreds of subdomains, your content audit will take significantly longer and probably require more than one person. Check the size and other SEO metrics with our Website SEO Checker.

 

Conclusion

The frequency with which you conduct a content audit depends on several factors: how big your website is, how quickly your industry changes, and your team’s availability, among others. By taking into account such crucial aspects, you can accurately determine the frequency that your site needs. With regular content auditing, rest assured that you’ll be able to fulfil your SEO goals in no time.