How to do a content audit for your blog - my simple process
It takes a lot of work to keep evolving your website content and consistently adding new blog posts. In the seemingly never-ending race to catch, overtake and keep in front of your competitors content-wise, it is all too easy to focus on continuing to produce new blogs and forget about updating all the existing blog posts on your website.
If your blog is relatively new (less than 12 months), then of course you’ll want to stick to a plan of regularly adding new content to both help your site to rank for your chosen keywords and to demonstrate to prospective customers that you know your onions.
For an established website with a comprehensive library of blogs, if you’ve never carried out a content audit of you blog posts, now is the time to shift your focus towards reviewing old content and updating it where possible. You need a plan of attack to do this efficiently and there are several things you should investigate which will show you which pieces of old content to update first.
In this blog I will run through how to carry out a simple content audit of your blog posts and what analysis you should do to make this process as effective as possible.
Before you audit your existing blog content, stop creating new blog posts
Before we get started on analysing existing blog content, let’s step back for a moment and think about the content that is currently being created and added to your website.
Just as it’s easy to overlook updating old blog posts, it’s also easy to create content for content’s sake. If you’ve been blindly blogging away, focussed on getting something out every week (or day!) - STOP!
It’s amazing that you are able to write so much content but if it’s not aligned with your business goals, it’s wasted effort. For every new piece of content you dream up creating for your website, you must think about and document its purpose before you sit down to write it.
I recommend using a marketing brief to write down the objectives of the blog, the intended audience and key messages.
It’s now time to carry out your blog content audit
Before you write any new blogs using my blog brief template, pause to complete a content audit. The audit doesn’t have to be onerous or too time-consuming. I’m recommending a streamlined process here which should enable you to carry out a content audit of your blog in an afternoon (or morning!).
Need some convincing on why you should run a blog content audit?
Here are some benefits of carrying out a content audit of your blog:
You’ll find gaps in your content. Perhaps you have some gaping holes in your content that are crying out to be filled by keyword-rich blogs that will drive more traffic to your website.
You’ll find outdated pages. Combing through your old blogs will likely turn up out-of-date content which doesn’t really align with your business anymore. Time to weed out these old blog posts!
You’ll discover which blogs are performing well. You likely check Google Analytics regularly so you may have an idea of what your best-performing blog post is. However, there could be other gems from way back when which with a little updating could become the new top page for organic traffic.
You’ll learn more about what’s working for your website. This process is a deep dive into your blog content which will give you a better understanding of where your website content is at and what you need to focus on in the future. No more blind blogging!
Get started with your blog content audit
For my version of pared-down, simple blog content audit, we are going to analyse two metrics:
Page views
Backlinks
If you want to go deeper and analyse more performance criteria, the processes I’ve outlined below will yield a lot of data which you can go into if you wish. In this article, I will simply explain how to get page views and backlinks into a spreadsheet with your list of blog posts to enable you to start making some informed decisions about what content to update and what you might want to delete altogether.
First thing’s first - you need to make a spreadsheet of all of your blog posts. Don’t worry - you don’t need to go through your blog posts one by one and copy and paste the titles! There is some software available online which will do the legwork for you.
I used Screaming Frog to get a list of all my blog post URLs. It’s free for crawling less than 500 URLs so will suit most small websites.
Here’s what you need to do to get a list of all your blog posts into a spreadsheet:
Download and install the SEO Spider from Screaming Frog.
Open up the app and put in your blog URL.
Click the Start button.
Once the Spider has reached 100% crawl, click the Export button to get your Excel file containing the list of all of your blog pages. NOTE: if you are using the free version, you’ll also have all of your blog images, some JavaScript and CSS indexed in this list. You can deselect these types of files in the paid version. If you order your spreadsheet A-Z in the Content column, you can easily select all the rows that aren’t blog post URLs and delete them.
Now you have your spreadsheet of blog posts, the next step is to add some traffic data from Google Analytics. Follow these steps to get the information to add to your spreadsheet:
Log in to Google Analytics.
Choose the timeframe you want to analyse. This might be from the date you last did a content audit or if this is your first time, perhaps choose the last 6 or 12 months.
Go to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages
Filter those pages that are your blog posts by clicking on ‘advanced’ and telling Analytics to include pages that begin with your blog URL
5. Scroll down and change the max number of rows to 5000 so you can be sure all the pages are listed.
6. Scroll back to the top and Export the data as an Excel file.
7. Go to your Screaming Frog spreadsheet containing the blog post URLs and create a new tab.
8. Copy and paste the exported Google Analytics data into this tab.
Next we are going to collect backlink data for your blog posts. There are many tools (SEMrush, Majestic etc) that you can use for this. I use Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest because I think it’s awesome and it’s free!
Here’s what you need to do to get a list of backlinks pointing to your blog posts:
Go to Ubersuggest and put your blog URL into the search bar.
Press search
Click on Backlinks (note: you will need to log in with Google to get the full list).
Export to CSV.
Tidy up the CSV file by removing any links that are images.
Add a new tab to your master Excel spreadsheet and paste this data over.
Now you have all your data captured by Screaming Frog, Google Analytics and Ubersuggest in one place. If you’re good with Excel you can work some formula magic to make the tabs talk to each other to display the data in whatever format makes it easy for you to digest.
Congratulations - the data capture phase is complete! Here’s what you need to do with all this data in the next stage of your blog content audit.
Which pieces of blog content should you update?
Here’s a clue: which blog posts are most popular? Look for your top-performing blog posts in terms of traffic and re-visit these to see if they need a content refresh. If the post was written a while ago, what can you add to it to bring it up to date?
Ask yourself: does the blog deliver on your current key message? The direction or focus of your business may have changed since the blog post was originally written. Read it again with this in mind and update where needed.
Check for any broken links within the blog post and update these.
What is the branding like on this page? Do images need an update to be inline with where your brand is at now?
Can you add in a lead generation form? If you are promoting your mailing list or a particular download, add it to these popular blogs to ensure these posts with high traffic are being taken advantage of when it comes to lead generation.
How to spot decaying blog content
The idea is to repeat this content audit every 60-90 days and become able to spot which blog posts are getting less traffic over time. Tackle these blog posts next with a view to updating to try and rescue that decrease in traffic.
Your spreadsheets become your record of blog post performance and you can track page views and compare results over time. This will help you to continue to grow your website traffic and it lets you see how effective your content updating is.
Look at which blog posts have the most backlinks
Backlinks are an incredibly important factor in being successful at website SEO. Those blog posts which do have backlinks should be treated as a priority when it comes to making updates. Start with the most-linked post and work your way down the list.
As well as using the number of backlinks to help you to prioritise making updates, you can also use this to show you which pieces of content are most popular with other website owners and take these blogs to other possible websites which might link back to them.
Delete old blog posts that aren’t helping with SEO
This might feel counterintuitive but hear me out. Sometimes it can benefit your website SEO to delete outdated, unpopular content. Are some of your blog posts getting barely any page views? Do they have very few or zero backlinks? Is the content far away from your current marketing message or offering? Is the bounce rate high? If yes, these posts might be a contender for removing from your website altogether.
If you have outdated posts with backlinks that you aren’t realistically able to update (as the content is just so far off what you talk about nowadays) you can redirect the page to one similar instead of deleting it.
Conclusion
It’s time to take a break from the hamster wheel of writing new blog posts and look back over your blog content with a view to making the most of what you already have.
There’s gold in those old blog posts and it may only take some small tweaks and updates to copy to give your web traffic a renewed boost through existing content.
Before writing your next new blog post, carry out a simple blog content audit and turn your efforts towards your blog library.
There’s a LOT of data you can capture about your blog content and if you have time, take a deep dive into this and see what insights come out. However, for many small businesses, a simple blog content audit will give you enough information to action change and see results in web traffic.
Start by listing all you blog post URLs in a spreadsheet, add in a layer of Google Analytics data and backlinks and you can prioritise which blog posts to update first.
If you carry out a blog content audit, I’d love to hear what you find. Leave a comment below.
