Marketer’s Guide to Manage and Plan Content Audits Faster and Smarter

If you’re reading this, you have an important task at hand. You have to perform a content audit on your assets to see how to make them better.

But it wasn’t always like this. For a long time now, you’ve been creating and publishing content about your target industry for your marketing campaigns. A good number of those pieces of content did great and showed up on page one of Google.

Several others managed to do great as well but didn’t hit the first-page jackpot. Still, you managed to get a decent flow of traffic from them over time. Others didn’t do very well, and, over time, many of your best-performing pieces of content started dropping in rankings because they were up against better-optimized content.

And that leads us to our target for today—the content audit.

A content audit involves taking stock of your existing content assets and reviewing them to uncover insights about how to do your content marketing better. In this article, you’ll learn why you need to audit your content, how project management helps you, and why you need a project management tool.

Why is content audit important in a marketing team

Content audits are important in the content marketing process since they help every marketer:

• reveal trends, patterns, and insights in your content strategy,
• uncover content gaps and any room for improvement,
• update existing content to enhance meaning, context, and drive better outcomes,
• evaluate and leverage growth opportunities.

How to execute a content audit—in four steps

Here’s where the rubber hits the road. With a crystal clear understanding of where a content audit sits in your content strategy and how it’ll help you get better results out of your content marketing efforts, you’re probably asking; “now, how do I do it?”

The content auditing process takes you all the way from taking stock of your content assets to grouping them so you can make sense of all the data they represent. Project tracking software with the help of the kanban board can ease you in tracking your content audit better.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to running a successful content audit.

1. Record all your content

The first step of the content auditing process is taking stock of all the content you’ve created. Use a tool like Screaming Frog, Moz, or SEMrush to gather the URLs of your published content pieces and export them to a spreadsheet.

2. Group your content

What is the first step of making sense of complicated data? Categorizing it.

After you’ve collected data on all your published content assets, the next step is to start grouping them so you can judge based on those data points.

Traffic, published date, author, content types, and genre, are just a few of the data points you can use to section your data.

3. Analyze your assets

When you’ve grouped all your content assets into different categories and under specific data points, here’s where the real work starts. You start to read between the lines. Here’s where you start asking questions:

• What content type has consistently performed best? It might be a pointer to the content format your audience wants to consume often.
• What content types are recording low-performance stats? This might be a sign this sub-topic you’re venturing into doesn’t solve a problem for your users.
• What content has become outdated and needs to be updated to stay relevant, or concise for the needs of your audience?
• What type of content don’t we have, or have we been publishing too little of?

The analysis stage is where you take a look at all the data you’ve grouped, reading between the lines to see the patterns in how your content assets are behaving.

4. Create an action plan to execute on your data

The aim of data is to show you where you sit in today’s world so you can take actions that’ll put you where you want to sit tomorrow. Analyzing your content assets shows you your strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities to grow your reach by creating great content that appeals to your readers. But knowing what to do is not enough.

You have to get down to work by making those trends and insights you’ve uncovered from your audit a part of your planning going forward. Maybe you’ve discovered a particular type of content always does spectacularly well but you always publish a few pieces in a month? Set a target to publish more often weekly to leverage the opportunity.

Or perhaps you’ve consistently churned out a particular content type with only substandard results to show? Easy. Make a not to publish less of that particular content format and refocus your efforts on more productive parts of your content strategy. The content audit shows you where your content strategy needs to change so you can hit your content goals. You can use a content use content strategy plan template.

Here’s where you change parts of your strategy that you’ve proven are not working, and refine them to deliver better outcomes.

How to choose a tool for your content audits

Knowing how to run a content audit is half the battle. The more important question is, what tools do you need to run a content audit?

So, what tool should you use for your content audit?

Choosing project management templates for your content audits require that you outline all the features you’ll need to carry out your content audit and then choose carefully a tool that meets all those criteria.

Ideally, a tool for creating content audits should intersect with the steps we outlined above to empower you to:

• record your content assets,
• groups your content assets,
• analyze each asset individually, and
• refine each content asset to bring out its value.

Project boards: the ideal tool to manage content audits

Based on the process we already outlined, a project management software delivers all that you need to run content audits and ensure your content marketing is getting better over time.

Project boards are designed as powerful data organization tools that empower you:

• record huge volumes of data,
• group the data you’ve stored to read meaning into it, and,
• store even more information under each record so you can expand and get more detail on each piece of data.

Put all that together and you have a marketing project management software that empowers you to collect information about your content assets, manage it, and chart a course forward.

Using a project management software offers empowers you to:

• communicate with teammates with comments, @mentions, and  notifications,
• manage work with your entire team with tasks — assign and track as they’re completed,
• remove the guesswork from your workflow — see where everyone’s at in realtime,
• conduct comprehensive content audits so you can see where you’re at, how your content is performing, and what to change to get better results.

No matter the platform — social or search content — you’re trying to audit and get better outcomes from, using a tool like Kissflow Project gives you a leg up so you can manage all your assets and improve them with ease.

Take Kissflow Project for a spin here.