Have you been blogging for a while but you’re struggling to get results? If your posts barely bring in any traffic or it’s rare they lead to enquiries, a blog post audit may help you work out how relevant, valuable and effective your content is.
I know a content audit might seem like a waste of time initially. You might be thinking: “why spend ages trawling through our back catalogue when we could just create new stuff?” Believe it or not, a content audit could actually help to save you time and money.
Rather than creating new content that you might not even need – or worse, could impact the success of existing content, you can figure out exactly what will drive your business forward and what you can ignore.
By identifying room for improvement and spending a bit of time updating existing posts, you can signal to Google that you’ve got a website to be trusted and plenty of value to offer.
Here are 10 questions to ask when auditing old blog posts.
What are your KPIs?
Are you measuring the success of your content based on the amount of traffic it gets? The number of social shares? The number of client enquiries? Once you’ve decided how you’ll measure your success, you can use analytics tools to asses your blog content’s performance.
Which content currently performs best?
Do you have any blog posts that are doing what you want them to do? If not, are any even close? Once you’ve figured out which content performs the best, you can look for similarities between them. Let’s imagine you have a post called ‘inheritance tax considerations for unmarried couples’ that does really well. From there you can create spin-off articles that offer more information on topics covered in that popular piece.
Which content is underperforming?
Next, identify which blog posts are falling short. Which posts attract little to no traffic? Which posts have a high bounce rate?
You could use your high performing blog posts to prioritise which low performing posts to improve first. For example, let’s imagine your most popular post is about cash ISAs.
If you have some underperforming posts about cash ISAs, you could try to improve these before you do anything else.
Something you need to consider, though, is that your posts might be affected by an SEO issue known as cannibalisation. Cannibalisation occurs when you have several blog posts or pages that talk about the same thing and targets the same keywords. It’s thought that this can confuse search engines, making it harder for them to determine which posts or pages to rank. I’d recommend taking a look at this keyword cannibalisation guide from Ahrefs before taking action here.
Once you’ve analysed how successful your content as a whole is, it’s time to go through each post and start auditing. Here are some more questions to ask…
Who is this content for?
The best blog posts are written with a specific audience in mind. You can’t be everything to everybody and if you try to please everyone in one blog post, you run the risk of watering down your message. When auditing each blog post, ask yourself who you want to attract and whether your content is effective in targeting those people.
What do I want this content to achieve?
Look back at your KPIs and ask yourself whether this blog post is doing enough to get you to where you want to be. Is your goal to build your email list? Add opt-in forms and lead magnets to attract people to the post. Want to encourage enquiries? Talk about how your service can help the reader solve their problems.
Is the information up to date and relevant?
You don’t need me to tell you just how quickly the world of finance changes. A post about pensions that was written five years ago might not be as accurate to day, so you need to come up with a system to ensure each blog post is up to date.
Are there any spelling mistakes or grammatical errors?
Everyone makes mistakes, but these are best avoided if you want to build trust and present yourself as a leader in your field.
Is the content SEO optimised?
Do your blog posts have:
- Keywords in the title, meta description and headings?
- Keywords throughout the post, but only if they fit naturally
- Alt-tags in images
- Internal links
If not, it’s worth taking some time to tweak each post to make it more Google-friendly.
How can I make this more engaging?
The more engaging your blog posts are, the better they’re going to perform. From adding quotes from influential people to embedding relevant tweets to break up big paragraphs, there are countless ways to make your posts more engaging.
Can we repurpose this content?
You may find that you have blog posts that can be re-purposed into other types of content. Could you rewrite a blog post for LinkedIn? Could you share the key points in a Twitter thread? Or maybe you could turn it into a newsletter.