Why and How To Perform a Content Audit For Your E-commerce Business

If you’ve been adding content to your website, you might be thinking that you’re all set and that your SEO rankings will follow. However, have you performed a content audit recently? It’s a practice that is critical to effective content marketing for your e-commerce brand. Making sure that you’re identifying each piece of content, ensuring they are still effectively driving traffic, and coming up with new ideas for future content is needed. In this post, we’ll address the why and how of content audits to help you make the process more effective.

Content Audit: Take Inventory of The Content You Have

One crucial step in perfecting your strategy is performing a content audit. An effective content audit provides an in-depth look at what content you already have on your site. The key reasons, or the why, for a content audit include:

Identifying the pages that are driving revenue to ensure they are the right pages.
Identifying new content that needs to be created in the middle of the funnel to improve the consideration phase.
Identifying new opportunities for top of the funnel of content (some of these opportunities may have been identified while doing keyword research

A content audit is a big part of your content strategy. However, you need to understand that a content audit is a crucial part of your content strategy, but you can’t let it comprise your entire strategy. So, next, we’ll outline the how. Let’s talk about five steps to make your strategy run more smoothly.

1. Take Inventory

The first step in your audit is to take inventory of what content you already have on your site. You can do this by using Google Analytics data or you can look at site crawlers, such as Screaming Frog. This will give you a list of URLs from your site and is a great tool for helping you to get the ball rolling. To do this, start by crawling your entire website for content.

Using ScreamingFrog to Crawl Your Entire Website for Content

Screaming Frog is able to ‘crawl’ an entire website (crawling is a fancy term for ‘pulling all data e.g. – metadata, URLs, the word count of a page, CSS, and other data from a website). Once you’ve crawled your whole site, simply filter the data by HTML pages. Here’s an example of what that looks like:

This will remove all JavaScript, Images, CSS, and other files that you don’t need for your content audit. Then export the data. The exported CSV file will give you a TON of data for each URL. We suggest only worrying about the URL and title tag, which will be used for further analysis.

2. Organize, Tag Your Current Content

Next, take the time to organize your content. Here are some criteria we recommend utilizing when looking over existing content:

Topic

Identify different “topic buckets” that your content might fall in. What is the content about? Does it talk about your products? Does it teach readers about your brand? Create a list of different categories that covers what you talk about within your content. This will help you to get a better handle on what you have a lot of, what you need more of, and what is driving the most traffic. It will work wonders for helping you know where to start with your strategy.

Length

Also, consider the length. So, how long is the piece of content? Does the length have an effect on how it’s viewed? Is it easily shareable? Some audiences prefer long, in-depth pieces of content while others prefer content to be concise and to the point. Where does your audience fall and are you delivering the content that they’re looking for?

Tone

What is the tone of your content? Does it lean toward humor, professionalism, or somewhere in between? Are you effectively reaching your audience with the tone of your content? This is another spot where it’s a good idea to come up with the descriptor buckets to help you more effectively organize your content and see what is producing the most success.

Relevance

Are your content topics directly related to your business and who you serve? Does your content highlight your products and services? Or are you finding that a lot of your content is irrelevant to what you provide and who you’re targeting?

Datedness

You’ll also want to watch out for content that isn’t evergreen. Earlier, we touched on evergreen content and its importance. Evergreen content will not include things such as calendar dates, overly trendy verbiage, statistics that will be outdated quickly, etc. While some content is made to last forever, other content is not. Keep an open mind and understand what content can stay and what other content has served its purpose and can leave. Some content can also be repurposed with some careful editing.

Content Type

Look carefully at your content types. What extra features are included in your content? Do you have images, videos, or maybe some infographics? What speaks most to your audience in terms of these additions? Are you checking off all of your SEO boxes (title tags, headings, meta descriptions, etc.)? Consider all of this when carefully looking over your content to choose what stays and what goes.

Buyer Stages

You’ll also want to pay close attention to the buyer stages. To do this, add a new column in your document and begin to identify the buyer stage. As a refresher, you’ll need to think about the following:

TOFU – Top of Funnel
MOFU – Middle of Funnel
BOFU – Bottom of Funnel

Here’s the category each content type falls into:

TOFU – Blog posts
MOFU – FAQ pages, informational pages (how it works, etc), category pages
BOFU – Product pages

As you do this, you should start to see a pattern of which pages are driving traffic and revenue. TOFU pages should have more traffic, but BOFU should have more revenue. You may also notice that there are not a lot of TOFU pages (blog posts). Keep this all in mind as you go through your content.

3. Analyze The Data

You’ll want to also look for trends in your data so that you can see what is bringing success, as well as what content needs some adjustments. Keep an eye out for gaps in your content, as well. It’s quite possible that the content you need the most, the content that will drive traffic, isn’t on your site yet. This is where your inspiration will come when it’s time to start brainstorming new content. Be mindful of duplicates–so, for example, do you have 12 posts about getting ready for back to school? It’s time to consider how you can condense those down. This is why analyzing your data is such an important step in the process.

Once these groups are separated out you can start to understand the traffic and revenue impacts of each URL. After you’ve analyzed how each URL influences potential customers at each stage of the journey you should have a massive content audit spreadsheet that looks something like what we did for Stryde:

When all of the content is tagged, you should do an inventory based on the buying personas and stages in relation to the number of resources that correlate. Filter your large content audit spreadsheet by persona first and then by each buyer stage to get an idea of how much content you have for each individual. As you work your way through each persona you should build out an additional spreadsheet to connect the number of content pieces you have to the stages of the buyer’s journey. This will give you a quick snapshot of where you are. Here is an example of what this looks like for Stryde:

You can quickly tell which parts of the buyer’s journey are not being addressed. By creating content for these holes we can create a more fluid journey and eventually give customers all the information they need when buying the products you offer.

4. Competitive Content Audit

It’s a good idea to look at competitors in the space to see what you might be missing. You don’t need to go as in-depth with the audit you do for competitors but it will help you understand your company or product’s place in the market. You should identify why competitive pages are performing well in search, on social media platforms, hits a target persona, answers questions, etc. Mostly, you need to identify what need it is filling within the buying cycle. This is perhaps the most important step in the competition audit because it helps you understand how and why the competition is successful.

The content audit process is key to your success. By taking the time to really research owned and competitive content, you can develop a holistic content strategy. Content marketing is one of the most useful tactics to leverage for a successful online presence. Your customers are looking for information online, usually via blogs and other content resources, to help them make an educated decision on what products to purchase. By utilizing a content audit process you can develop content ideas that will add to your current visibility and truly make an impact on your potential customers.

Once you have all of this insight, you need to figure out what your content voice, style, and guidelines are going to be. That way you can align internal and external resources to keep content consistent with the brand voice.

Line Up Your Brand with Your Style

One major part of your strategy is going to be nailing down how you can line up your brand, style, and voice. It’s a good idea to document all of this so that you can refer back to it over time.

Make sure everyone on your team is in the loop on these details. Depending on how big your team is, you might consider creating a resource that reminds your writers which parts of your brand need to be capitalized on. Include personas, guidance on what tone to use, and even some advanced copy editing guidelines to ensure that everyone is on the same page on how your content should be created.

Keep in mind that you don’t want to go overboard with these guidelines. It’s important to find the balance between describing what your tone and style are and giving your writers the ability to freely create. Find the points that matter most to your company, such as AP style guidelines, and include those in your guide.

Here are a few things to consider with a branding guide:

Branding Guidelines:

Brand name
Positioning
Color Scheme
Fonts

Tone/Voice:

Tone/Style of voice
Descriptive Words for the Brand
Language
Formatting

Content Style:

Blog Post Length
Advice on Writing
Title/Meat Data Structure
Content Structure

Brand Imagery:

Image Style
Image Format/Guidelines
Poor imagery examples
Good imagery examples

Carefully following these four steps, and keeping in mind that some content will stay, some will go, and some will need to be repurposed is very important. Doing this can help you to create more content for different parts of your funnel and weed out outdated items that might be holding your brand back. It’s also a great way to gather new ideas and look at the big picture. If you’re still feeling like you might need some help, set up a consultation with our team. We’d love to see if we’d be a good fit for your brand and marketing needs.

Looking for more content marketing tips to help you grow your e-commerce business? Check out these posts:

Greg Shuey

Greg is the founder and CEO of Stryde and a seasoned digital marketer who has worked with thousands of businesses, large and small, to generate more revenue via online marketing strategy and execution. Greg has written hundreds of blog posts as well as spoken at many events about online marketing strategy. You can follow Greg on Twitter and connect with him on LinkedIn.

Why and How To Perform a Content Audit For Your E-commerce Business