How you approach a content audit will depend on your goals. While you can create a content audit that achieves all of the benefits I listed above, it will be much more effective if you pick one or two goals to focus on.
For instance, if you want to use a content audit to improve your SEO, then you’ll want to focus on identifying content gaps and pages with missing metadata. That means paying particular attention to the technical SEO of each page.
Given you are reading a digital marketing blog, I’m going to write the rest of this guide as if you were running an SEO-driven content audit. You can still use this guide if you’re looking to improve your reader’s experience or make your content more inclusive and accessible, but just know some of the more technical aspects may not be relevant.
Content Audit Tools
Software tools are an essential part of the content audit process. Rather than go through your website manually, noting each issue in turn, you can use the following tools to automate much of the process.
Google Analytics
Do you want to compare the performance of your pages? Then use Google Analytics to find traffic data for each page.
Note: Be aware that Google is sunsetting Universal Analytics on July 1, 2023, in favor of Google Analytics 4. If you haven’t already, you should make the switch to GA4 before completing your content audit. The faster you switch, the more historical data you’ll have and the easier it will be to reuse your content audit in the future.
Broken Link Checkers
As you analyze your content, you’ll want to find and fix broken links. Integrity, Ahrefs, and Dead Link Checker can help you there.
Content Inventory
You could manually pull each content link associated with your website, but that could take far too long and you could risk overlooking some things. Instead, you may want to try a content inventory tool like Screaming Frog or DynoMapper.
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