How a Marketer Can Stay Busy During Busy Season: 4 Tips to Performing a Content Audit

Depending on the size of your firm, busy season can mean a couple of different things. If you are a smaller firm, you may assist with tax season, and if you are a larger firm, it may be a time for a vacation — or a time to catch up on a variety of projects. If you choose the latter, we have a solution for you! Performing a content audit will organize your content, assist with SEO, locate content that can be updated, and allow you to plan for future content.

What is a Content Audit?

So, what exactly is a content audit? According to Hubspot, a content audit is the process of collecting and analyzing assets on a website, such as landing pages or blog posts. Content audits keep an inventory of a website and provide insight into which content to create, update, re-write, or delete.

4 Tips to Begin Your Content Audit

It is very easy (and common) to not have a content strategy. Accounting marketers — and marketers in general — are often pulled in several directions. Allow busy season to begin the content audit process. Here are four tips to start your audit:

1. Start a document.

Use Google Sheets, Excel, or any other platform to organize your content. Review your website and note all the content that was created in the last year, two, or even further. Determine the type of content you want to assess. Pro tip: Take baby steps with this process. If you analyze all content ever created, it may get overwhelming. Select one type (i.e. blog posts), get comfortable with the process, determine your goals, and track away! 

2. Utilize Google Analytics.

If your main goal is repurposing content and locating the most popular content or content where improvement is needed, start with Google Analytics! Determine the amount of time you want to search and review the page content. In Google Analytics, follow the below click path on the left menu bar.

• Behavior
  • Site Content
    • All Pages

A list of all the pages on your website will populate with traffic from the most views to the least views. This is when you can start documenting the content you want to track and determine if updates need to be made.

How can you tell if your content is performing well? The key metrics to focus on are views, bounce rate, conversion rate, and time on page. By analyzing these metrics, you can tell a lot about your content. For example, if there is a high bounce rate, review the content and potentially reassess the call to action.

3. Organize your content.

Once the list is populated in Google Analytics, start your review and organize. SEM Rush suggests different areas to review, including:

• Buyer’s journey stage (awareness, consideration, decision);
• Content type (blog post, manual, product description, landing page);
• Content format (text only, images/video present, with/without call-to-action);
• Number of words;
• Date of publication or last modification;
• Topics

By tracking these specific items, you will find areas where there are content holes and content is needed.  

4. Plan for the future.

Once the content is organized, the existing topics are noted, and other areas you want to track are specified, you can now determine what is needed. Start mapping out your desired topic, the content type, and the number of words (do you want long- or short-form content?). Decide if you need content at the beginning of the buyer’s journey or content for existing clients, or even both.

There are tools available to assist with your audit. Both Hubspot and SEM Rush have templates you can follow to begin the process.

In conclusion, performing a content audit is a perfect way for a marketer to keep busy. Once the season slows down, review your content plan with your partners, and assign topics if you don’t have an external copywriter. Good luck!