10 Reasons Why You Need Content Audit For Effective Marketing

The success of any marketing campaign depends on the ROI generated for the business.

And one of the ways to improve ROI is by identifying what marketing strategies are effective and which areas need improvement.

Likewise, a detailed audit helps you find the weaknesses of your content effort that hurt your ability to rank higher and drive more traffic.

In this guide, we’ll talk about ten reasons why you need a content audit for effective marketing.

Let’s get started.

What Is Content Audit In Marketing?

Content audit in marketing refers to analyzing the organic performance of existing content to improve marketing efficiency.

This helps identify what type of content to focus on, what pages need improvement and everything that improves the overall content quality, so the website performs well in search engines.

Now, let’s dive into the key reasons to perform content audits for better marketing efficiency.

10 Reasons to Audit Your Content At Regular Intervals

1. Organize Your Content Effectively

Effective content auditing starts with managing your entire content inventory at scale.

This includes key information about each content piece, such as:

• Page title
• URL
• CTA
• Metadata
• Funnel stage
• Format (blog posts, infographics, videos, etc.)
• Last updated date
• Writer, etc.

The spreadsheet looks like this:

Organizing existing content saves you a lot of time and resources as you get a clear idea of what topics are covered, what content gaps to be filled, and what articles can be reused instead of creating content from scratch.

Also, an organized content inventory makes SEO professionals’ and content teams’ jobs easier to review and assess each piece of content in one place.

2. Improve Content’s Performance In Search Engines

One of the key goals of doing a content audit is to improve the organic performance (ranking positions, clicks, CTR, etc.) of existing pages.

In most cases, most of your web pages drive little to no organic traffic from search engines.

There could be various reasons:

• Not fulfilling the user’s intent
• Lack of content depth
• Link authority
• Missing on-page SEO
• Indexability issues, etc.

And doing the SEO content audit will help you in two ways:

First, it will identify pages that could perform better in traffic, CTR, or conversion.

Second, the auditing report will highlight the key action items that need to be made to improve the pages’ performance.

As a result, you can achieve more business revenue without massively increasing your budget to create new content in the first place.

3. Identify Content Gaps

To perform well in search engines, you need to outrank competitors by targeting low-competitive keywords and creating higher-quality content. This is where a content audit gives you an overview of your existing content inventory compared with top competitors.

For example, a content gap analysis helps you find the following:

• Content topics covered by competitors but not on your website
• Keywords with less competition
• New keyword opportunities to outrank top competitors in the SERP

This way, you’ll get a data-driven way to focus on content strategies that are proven to work and improve overall content marketing efficiency.

Using tools like Semrush or Ahrefs will show your website’s organic position as compared to competitors. Here’s an example:

4. Fix Every Marketing Funnel Stage

When it comes to the content marketing funnel, a prospect goes through several stages (awareness, consideration, and decision) before buying a product.

That means the user consumes content at different stages with different intents.

Brands that provide valuable content in each stage earn more trust, move users through the funnel and ultimately convert users to paying customers.

By doing a content audit, you can identify whether you have enough content for each buyer’s stage or not. Use Semrush to get an overview of the search intents of ranking keywords.

An example:

This will help you discover what type of content to create based on buyers’ journeys.

Some possible content types based on the marketing funnel are:

• Awareness stage: Create educational content like blog posts, videos, newsletters, and infographics.
• Consideration stage: Focus on publishing product comparisons, features, key benefits, use cases, eBooks, etc.
• Decision stage: Invest more in case studies, FAQs, product demos, webinars, etc.

5. Find Proven Content Ideas

Doing content audits at regular intervals is not only helpful in finding issues with the existing content but also gives you a lot of new content ideas.

For instance,

If you check the Google Search Console’s performance report and sort the query list by high to low, it will show you many relevant keyword opportunities to target with new pages.

Similarly, eCommerce brands can get new content ideas from the users by integrating site search with Google Analytics.

Therefore consider content audit as an effective way to track the performance of your website content and find new content topics directly coming from users.

6. Achieve Business Goals

One of the benefits of analyzing content performance is that it starts with aligning business goals.

If a business wants to drive X amount of traffic by Y time, then the entire audit process will focus more on creating pages, targeting keywords to achieve the goals, improving ranking positions, etc.

Likewise, the auditing process will also vary for a business goal of driving X amount of leads in Y time.

In short, whatever the business goals and KPIs you have, a content audit will help you prioritize content efforts that will have the most impact on your success.

7. Remove Content That Degrades The Overall Website’s Quality

If you apply the 80/20 principle in SEO, you’ll find that most of your website traffic comes from a small portion of pages.

On the other hand, many pages are bringing almost no organic traffic. If that’s the case with your website, you need to manually check the quality of each page so Google can rank them higher on the SERP.

Fortunately, the content auditor will do the job of identifying these weak pages that do not contribute in:

• Traffic
• Conversion
• Business value

Then you can either repurpose, delete or redirect these pages, as having low-quality pages can significantly affect the overall SEO performance of your website.

8. Increase the ROI of Your Marketing

ROI in marketing means how much you’re making in profit by investing a specific amount.

For example, if you’re investing X amount in creating, managing content, and generating X+1 profit, you have a positive ROI.

Also, it is important to increase the ROI as much as possible to become more efficient in marketing campaigns.

And to increase the marketing ROI, content analysis and auditing play an important role. An SEO-driven content audit helps you in reducing total cost, time, and resources by:

• Removing or updating low-quality pages to generate more traffic (without creating more content)
• Improving user experience
• Identifying growth opportunities for optimization

In addition, it helps you focus on content topics, pages, and areas that are more likely to generate traffic and conversion.

9. Ensure Every Page of Your Website Is Optimized for Search

The efficiency of a website can be measured by evaluating the average traffic per page. This denotes how many pages you’ve created to reach a certain amount of organic traffic.

It is calculated by the ratio of total domain traffic and the number of indexed pages in search engines.

Imagine that websites A and B receive 10,000 traffic per month, but their indexed pages are 650 and 380, respectively.

In this case, the efficiency value of website B (10,000/ 380 = 26.32) is much higher than website A’s (10,000/ 650 = 15.38).

A detailed content audit process helps you achieve higher efficiency by auditing every page of the website and optimizing it for the right keyword to rank well in search engines.

As a result, you’ll spend as little time, money, and resources as possible to achieve better output from organic rankings.

10. Consistency In Brand Voice And Messaging

Every brand has a unique tone and style of voice.

To stand out from the competitors and set a legacy, companies need to ensure consistency in every piece of content on the website.

The contact will likely lack consistency in brand voice and messaging when you hire multiple content writers or go through a rebranding process.

This is why you need to conduct audits and maintain consistency in brand messaging so it resonates with the target audience and helps to build a recognizable brand.

So far, we have learned why you should conduct a content audit to improve marketing efficiency significantly.

With that in mind, let’s discuss the characteristics of a successful content audit.

What Makes A Content Audit Successful?

The expertise and experience of content auditors are key things that impact the effectiveness of content audit reports.

So, it’s important to validate the expertise of your SEO or content team before you hire them.

This is where Pazeviews helps businesses of different types (SaaS, B2B, B2C, D2C, etc.) by providing a detailed analysis of existing content performance.

Here’s what makes us the right choice for your brand:

• Understanding business goals: Our process starts with understanding business goals and key KPIs to align our auditing process
• Result-oriented: From finding content gaps to identifying low-performing pages, every step is aligned with giving you results in terms of traffic, leads, and conversions
• Clear action tasks: We ensure that our client gets a list of action items so they know exactly what the issues are, their solutions, priority and why it matters
• Active support: Our team of SEO and content experts will be available to clear your doubts

Want to discuss your project’s requirements? Book your free consultation call for content audit services right here.

Conclusion

Since you now know the true benefits of performing content analysis for effective marketing, it’s time to audit your content by keeping SEO, conversion, and ROI in mind.

I hope this guide helps you understand the potential of going through your existing content to identify and improve the weaknesses in your content strategy.

Have any questions or service queries regarding SEO, audit, or content writing? Contact our team and book an appointment call for free.