A Content Audit can help SEO ranking

We spend the bulk of our time generating and perfecting content. Once every quarter you should consider a content audit. This means combing through all of your content, honing in on the most content that is generating the most traffic for you, and dumping content that just isn’t generating leads.

What is a content audit?

A content audit is when you go through all of your content–webpages, articles, and even social posts, to see what is performing best for you and what isn’t working as it should. We often find that just 20 percent of our content is actually generating 80 percent of our leads. It is important that the 20 percent be fresh, relevant, and reaching your target audience.

Why do a content audit?

Over the course of time, we will most likely generate a lot of content. More isn’t always better however.

Google doesn’t want you to have the biggest website. They want you to have the best. The best means that you offer the most value to your reader as possible. Doing regular content audits is one way to ensure that that happens.

How to know which content to keep.

When we have created amazing content, it can be hard to get rid of any of it. Each piece involved our hard work and time. Here are a few steps that can help you decide what to keep, what needs to go, and what can be reused in another form.

1. Start with the analytics.

Go into your Google analytics account and establish which pages have been performing the best since your last content audit. If this is the first time you are doing this, you may choose to go back six months or even one year.

Take the total of all of your page views during that period and then establish what constitutes 80 percent of your traffic.

Go back to your analytics and remove all content that falls below that 80 percent mark.

2. What to do with failing content that you love.

Some of your most relevant articles may fall below that 80 percent mark. You have two choices on what to do with it. You can say that it hasn’t performed and needs to be repurposed in another form, or you can try to save it.

3. How to save a piece of content that isn’t performing well.

If you feel that the article is relevant and is a fit for your target audience, you may need to rework it. Perhaps it isn’t optimized for the correct keyword. You may need to add some infographics to it. Make some fundamental changes to the article, and then, if it didn’t have a very large audience previously, consider republishing it under a new date as if it is fresh content.

What to do with content that can’t be saved.

If you look at an article or piece of content and see that it really can’t be saved in it’s current form, you can do a few things.

• Create a social post with it.
• Use it on a podcast.
• Make it into a pin or reel.
• Share it in an email.
• Make it a downloadable product.
• Place it in a file to be looked and possibly repurposed at a better time.