Use this web content audit template to measure your content marketing success.
Content marketing is one of the fundamentals of a dynamic marketing strategy. All too often, though, marketing leaders don't take the time to measure the success and effectiveness of what their teams produce.
Without a performance baseline, content marketers struggle to determine the ROI and success of their content marketing efforts.
Auditing your content is an effective way to get more out of the content you create. Key performance metrics will elevate rockstar content and make it easier for your marketing team to craft compelling content.
Keep in mind that your audit criteria shouldn't stop with performance metrics. A content audit should also address customer focus and measure a piece of content against its customer journey phase, digital channel, brand alignment, and call to action.
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3 steps for auditing your digital marketing content
Let's walk through how to audit your digital marketing content and wrap things up with a few pro tips on a downloadable web content audit template.
1. Set the scope of your content audit
Before deciding how to quantify the ROI of your content, you need to decide the scope of your audit.
Depending on the size and volume of your marketing content, a full analysis of all of your team's content might be achievable. If your marketing team produces a high volume of content, your audit should focus on one segmented audit type.
Common content audit types include:
Editorial and brand quality: a qualitative look at the editorial quality of assets, as well as an evaluation of how well the marketing content adheres to and advances your company's brand.
Search engine optimization (SEO): a comprehensive look at the search performance of all content on your company's website.
Topical or thematic: examination of the top-line topics or themes your marketing content addresses.
Hybrid: combines elements of the previous audit types into a modified form (e.g., auditing content for both SEO performance and brand adherence).
2. Select your criteria
How you evaluate your content will be determined by the type of audit you choose. These criteria should be specific to the scope of the audit you have designed and should be clearly measurable.
In order to build out your content audit, your marketing leadership needs to select the criteria you plan to audit your content against.
Let's use an SEO audit as an example. An SEO audit might consider criteria such as readability, keyword, relevance, duplicate content, and metadata.
You'll also want to clearly outline a list of deliverables. In addition to a score for each individual piece of content, your audit deliverables should include other adjustments or calculations to improve the quality of your content.
Your SEO content audit deliverables might include:
List of all working links and broken links on your website(s)
Search ranking of all webpages from best to worst
List of target keywords
Recommendations for content/webpages to keep, refine, or retire
Template for creating SEO-optimized content
3. Score the content
Once all the content in your library has been assigned to its criteria, it's time to score each piece.
While some elements of the audit can appear subjective (e.g., the editorial quality of a piece), metrics such as digital performance data or a gap analysis can give your audit more data-specific precision.
It's time to design a scorecard to ensure your metrics and criteria are applied evenly across all of your marketing content.
If you need some ideas to get your scoring methodology started, we created this downloadable scorecard to kick things off:
Audit your Digital Marketing Content with our Content Marketing Scorecard
Making data-backed recommendations
All of the data you'v collected from your content audit provides a treasure trove of insight into where your content is successful, and where it could be improved.
Consider whether your highest-performing data correlates to a key moment in the buyer's journey. Is there a specific call to action that your most-shared content has in common?
Armed with this knowledge, you can build a strategic content strategy that is sure to effectively speak to your customer base and yield a high return on investment.