Every great B2B marketing strategy includes content. But if you’ve got a lot of it, it’s hard to keep track of what’s working, what isn’t, and what might be collecting dust.
That’s where a content audit comes in. A content audit helps you keep an inventory of all the content on your website. You’ll understand exactly what you need to create, update, rewrite, or delete.
What is a content audit in B2B?
A content audit is the process of collecting and analysing the content on your website. You can use this data to understand what content you already have and what you might need in the future.
With this level of insight, you can make informed decisions about your B2B content marketing without guesswork.
Additionally, a content audit lets you understand whether your content is performing as it should be. For example, are people visiting a landing page or viewing your blogs? If not, it reveals areas you can change to solve the problem.
With this information, you’re better positioned to develop a winning content marketing strategy.
Why should you conduct a content audit?
There are lots of benefits to conducting a content audit. It helps you:
- Obtain data-driven insight into the performance of your content
- Identify opportunities to repurpose content
- Find content that performs well
- Understand what your audience likes and dislikes
- Improve content maintenance over time
- Detect gaps in your content, from personas to marketing lifecycle stages
How to perform a content audit
Even the most experienced marketer might get overwhelmed by a significant content library. So, where do you start?
To make the process straightforward and effective, follow these steps.
1. Set goals
Firstly, think about what you want to achieve from your content audit. Set commercial goals and measurable outcomes.
Is your goal to figure out what to do for your next content campaign? Or is it to identify where you should, or shouldn’t, invest in your next marketing efforts? Or it could be to optimise your content to improve its performance. For example, you could check whether your content follows search engine optimisation (SEO) best practice.
Knowing your goals helps you understand how to organise a content audit and create actionable outcomes. Otherwise, you’re simply collecting a large amount of data without structure or purpose.
2. Export your data
A content audit can tell you a lot about how your content is performing. Some examples of the data you can collect include:
- Sessions
- CTA clicks
- Time per page view
- Bounce rate
- Campaign data
- Publish data, such as when content was last updated
You can manually report on this data and export it into an Excel spreadsheet. However, this can be a time-consuming process. That’s why a content management system (CMS), such as HubSpot, is a useful tool for managing content on your website.
Your chosen CMS will likely have an option to export your data. Or you can use tools like Google Analytics or Screaming Frog. When you’ve done this, you’ll have a spreadsheet of data that you can use to conduct your content audit.
3. Analyse your content
The next step is to analyse your content. There are two types of metrics you can review. These are quantitative metrics and qualitative metrics.
Quantitative metrics
Quantitative metrics are made up of key numbers that tell you how well your content is performing. Quantitative metrics can answer questions like:
- What is your best-performing content?
- What content isn’t working?
- What content needs improvement?
For your website pages, quantitative metrics include the number of sessions, bounce rate, and call to action (CTA) clicks.
For downloadable content, quantitative metrics are the number of downloads, submission rates, and submissions per page view. You can also glean insight into whether submissions are more likely to be new or existing contacts.
Blend recommends: Quantitative metrics only give you half of the picture. It’s beneficial to have someone manually go through and check against your qualitative metrics too.
Qualitative metrics
Qualitative metrics provide insight into factors that you can’t measure with numbers. By including them, you can better understand the quality and effectiveness of your content.
Qualitative metrics can answer questions like:
- Is your content accurate?
- Is your content up to date?
- Does your content align with your current brand tone of voice?
- Does your content follow SEO best practice?
- Is your content user-friendly?
With qualitative metrics you can answer questions like; does your content include keywords, are headings correct, or does it include internal linking to other key pages on your website? These are a few examples of B2B SEO best practice.
Blend recommends: Each piece of content should target a keyword. This makes it more discoverable on search engines. It’s important to check for this in your content audit.
You can also check for consistency. Is your content using your current brand, voice, and style? Is your content up to date with relevant statistics, facts, and current industry thinking?
Additionally, assess the accessibility and user experience (UX) of your content. Question whether it’s easy to read, structured correctly, and includes clear calls to action.
You can now use scoring to organise your findings.
4. Score your metrics
Numerical scoring is a helpful way to organise your qualitative metrics, and it will help you rank your content by its quality. You could write detailed notes about the quality of your content, but notes are difficult to understand at a glance.
Instead, score each piece of content based on your qualitative factors out of five. Five being nothing needs updating, and one being urgent or needs fixing. By doing this, you can work out what needs your attention. For example, if a piece of content contains no keywords, it’ll have a lower score.
Then you can use a combination of your quantitative data and your qualitative data scores to action your metrics.
Blend recommends: A content audit can pinpoint what types of content are working well for your business. To improve lead generation, create new content based on your top performing content.
5. Action your findings
After reviewing your metrics, you should action your findings. You can:
- Create a report of what you need to optimise or update
- Optimise your content for SEO
- Delete outdated content
- Rewrite content that is out of date
- Identify opportunities for new content
- Generate new ideas
6. Review your efforts
To create a great B2B content marketing strategy, you need to continually revisit how your content is performing.
A content audit isn’t a one time task. To get the most value from it, you should review your efforts in a month to see if your actions have had an impact.
Take a look at your key metrics. Have your actions, such as SEO, driven more traffic to your blog posts? Or has creating more relevant content driven more traffic to your website?
You can adjust your actions accordingly or implement new changes based on these insights.
Understand what’s working with a content audit
A content audit will reveal where your content is hard at work, and where it isn’t. It helps you discover what might be driving traffic to your website, what’s relevant to your audience, and what you can improve.
And for B2B companies, continually reviewing your content is important if you want to stay relevant in today’s competitive world, no matter what industry you’re in.
