How to do a Content Audit of Your Business Blog

We’ll be the first to admit that conducting a content audit of your business blog isn’t the most exciting work to do. We know because we’ve done it on the Keyhole Marketing website.

A content audit requires you to go back into your blog archives and optimize the blog posts you’ve already written. It involves an analysis and assessment of your existing content in order to uncover your strengths and weakness so that you can constantly be meeting your marketing goals.

Once you publish a blog post, that should not be the last time you ever look at it. Revisiting and updating your content is important so you can stay relevant with keywords, search terms, and any missed opportunities you find to optimize your content to its fullest capacity. We found a ton of great content simply sitting in the archives of the Keyhole blog, that with some TLC could be made even better.

Getting Started: A Look at The Current State of Your Business Blog

To get started, we first looked at our business blog posts to see how good or bad we were doing with every piece of content that already existed.

Extract Key Data

We recommend using tools to extract the data you’re looking for in an efficient manner. We conducted a deep dive into Google Analytics and Google Search Console to see how existing blogs have performed so far. You could also use the SEMrush Content Audit tool that provides social media data, metadata, keywords, backlinks, content length and more.

We collected Google Analytics data for the following metrics:

• Sessions: Total number of sessions (time a user is actively engaged with website) within the date range.
• Percentage of New Sessions: An estimate of first-time visits.
• New Users: The number of first-time users during the selected date range.
• Bounce Rate: The percentage of single-page sessions in which there was no interaction with the page. A bounced session has a duration of 0 seconds.
• Pages / Session: Average number of pages viewed during a session.
• Average Session Duration: The average length of a session.

It’s important to use data to get a big picture overview in order to understand the current state of your content. Your posts could be receiving high traffic and also a high bounce rate — meaning users are interested in the blog topic but the post don’t provide enough value right off the bat. Additionally, content that focuses on awareness may generate more traffic and less conversion, while content that focuses on conversion may see less traffic but generate more leads.

Ultimately, these numbers should reflect your content marketing goals, and anything that doesn’t match up is an opportunity for you to enhance.

Investigate State of Your SEO

We then extracted all of the information we had inserted into the Yoast SEO WordPress plugin into a spreadsheet, including:

• Focused Keyword
• Meta Title
• Meta Description
• SEO Slug

Next, we identified the blog posts with the highest SEO potential to rank high in search results in order to start understanding what content to update or remove from our website.

Pull Out All Content Elements

Next, we used the WP All Export WordPress plugin to extract the following content included in all published blogs:

• Blog Title
• Permalink
• In-blog CTAs
• Resource CTAs
• Word count
• H2 + H3 Tags
• Categories
• Tags

We imported this information into our master spreadsheet to better understand what is and isn’t working, and where we can make improvements.

Review Images

Finally, we extracted the Alt Text information we had inserted for all blog graphics—both featured and in-blog images.

Next Steps: Find Opportunities to Finalize Incomplete Blogs and Enhance Content

After collecting all of this data on your blog posts, it’s time to assess your content and determine how you can improve it. After updating some of our content marketing goals, here are some ways we are enhancing our content:

Boost SEO Practices

We used SEMRush to search for the best focused keyword and incorporated it into the Yoast SEO Plugin. Then, we edited the following sections to reflect the new keyword.

• Meta Description
• SEO Slug
• Blog Title
• Permalink
• H2 + H3 Tags
• Image Alt Text

Finally, we cut down the list of “Categories and Tags” to the essentials, incorporating high volume search terms only.

Optimize Business Blog Content

Here are some actionable tips we followed for optimizing business blog content:

1. Rewrite and Refresh Your Content: If there is a blog post that isn’t performing well — but you know you want to keep — consider rewriting it to include updated examples, recommendations, new stats, trends and keywords. Additionally, make sure each of your blog posts are at least 500 words, and add content to those that don’t reach that baseline.
2. Update Your CTAs: Ensure you have a CTA somewhere in the blog post and consider updating old ones. Include any relevant offers that may exist, or link to helpful resources you have since published.
3. Add Multimedia: Videos and photos drive organic traffic to your blog posts, lengthen the amount of time people spend on your site, and increase your chances of appearing in search results. Add multimedia to any blog posts that do not currently have them.
4. Optimize Your Metadata: Rewrite titles, meta descriptions and h1, h2, and h3 tags. Use the most relevant keyword phrases to attract a new audience.
5. Structure Your Content: Structuring your blog to follow a clear and logical process can increase your rankings in search engines. It can also entice readers to stay on your site longer. We recommend implementing content pillars into your content marketing strategy.
6. Update Google on Your Changes: Use Google Search Console to inform Google about your content updates and submit newly updated pages to Google’s index.

We strongly suggest performing a content audit before moving forward with your long-term marketing strategy. What has worked for you in the past may not work in the future. Making continuous adjustments is necessary to staying relevant with Google and your audience.