How to Do a Content Audit: The Ultimate Checklist

When was the last time you ran performed a content audit?

Most content creators are so focused on creating new content that they forget to audit their existing content.

Here are a few reasons why you need to audit your content:

Hopefully one, if not all, of those bullets spoke to you and you now understand why it’s so important to audit your content regularly.

Now, let’s get into the audit breakdown.

The first part of a content audit is dissecting the basics on the content piece and is a one-time entry on your audit.

Looks at how the content was created, how many people it took to create the content, and the basic publishing information.

You’ll want to track the following for each piece of content in a separate content details audit spreadsheet:

Here comes the fun part.

The content data portion of your audit needs to come with it’s own handy dandy excel doc, just like this one I created for you guys and gals.

Before we get into the data, you need to backtrack and audit your past produced content.

Knowing how the content you’ve already published performed will help you gauge what kind of content you need to create in the future, and what kind to not create.

This part of your content audit is going to be very in-depth and time consuming in the beginning.

You’ll need to decide how far back you want to begin your content audit and then gather all of the content URLs for that time period.

I recommend going back at least 1 year and gathering data for how your content performed the year before.

Collecting all of your past content URLs doesn’t have to be a manual process, though.

Luckily, there’s plenty of website analytics tool like Google Analytics or SEMrush’s Content Audit (disclosure: I work for SEMrush) tool that can quickly audit your content based on your sitemap data and provide you with the list of content pages.

Once you’ve caught up and added all of last year’s content into your Excel doc, you’ll want to repeat this audit activity for new content on a weekly basis.

It will be much easier to keep track of your content and audit it regularly when you’re only having to go back one week to input data.

Add the following to your Excel doc and upload the most recent numbers and stats on a weekly basis.

Over time, if you see any drastic changes take note.

Sometimes content, especially evergreen content, can take months before it really takes off.

Here are the metrics you’ll want to track for your content data audit:

Ideally, our content would be receiving a lot of organic traffic.

We wouldn’t have to put any extra dollars towards advertising, people would just organically come across our content, love it, and engage.

If you aren’t getting a lot of organic traffic to your content that could be a potential red flag.

Perhaps there is something wrong with:

By evaluating the organic traffic metrics regularly in your audit, you’ll know when you can pat yourself on the back or when you need to start over.

Are users bouncing right off your content page without viewing any other pages on your website?

If so, that’s a sign of bad content.

Ideally, your content is just a gateway that leads a user from a search to your website, entertains or informs them, and then guides them to tour the rest of your site for their needs.

Unsure of what a good bounce rate is?

Rocket Fuel put together this graphic to describe the variety of percentages:

Bring on the backlinks – but only the good backlinks that give us a lot of boost and credibility, please!

You need to track the backlinks that your content produces on a regular basis for two big reasons:

If your content is a long-form blog post of 2,500 words and the average time on page is 18 seconds, something is wrong.

This metric will inform you if your content just isn’t right for your audience, or if it is and you need to create more content focusing on topics just like it.

We want lots of unique visitors viewing our content and increasing the amount of views the piece of content gets.

The more views, the more chances of ROI from content like conversions, engagement, shares, and backlinks.

How many pages is the user looking at after they have viewed your content?

What pages are they going to?

A blog post about the best winter coats to have can encourage a user to then click on links within the blog post and shop around on your website for different coats. Heck, maybe they’ll even make a purchase (