Harnessing the power of SEO is crucial for your business’ online presence, but it isn’t just about producing new content. A steady flow of fresh and engaging content forms the backbone of a successful digital strategy. But it’s equally important to unlock the potential in your existing content.

This is where the concept of the ‘content audit’ comes in. Every piece of content on your website, no matter how old, is a potential ambassador for your brand. Yet, over time, even well-crafted blog posts and articles get tired. They slip in SEO rankings, the information gets outdated, or they no longer cater to your audiences’ changing needs.

A considered content audit is a process that can breathe new life into older content. By understanding your goals and selecting the right pieces to refresh or retire, you could see up to an 118% increase in organic traffic.

That’s why a regular and thorough content audit is a vital component of your ongoing SEO strategy.

Preparing for a Content Audit

Any business asset requires regular maintenance to function optimally. The same is true of the content you publish.

The key to an effective content audit lies in its universal application. Regardless of the content’s current performance or format, audits can reveal hidden opportunities and areas for improvement.

Reasons for a Content Audit

As marketers we all need to make sure we're squeezing as much juice as possible from our budget. A two pronged attack makes the most of your current inventory and stops outdated content putting a drag on your performance, giving your new stuff a better chance at success.

Here are some reasons content audits are essential:

Your content is struggling. This is the most obvious reason people look into an audit. If you’re investing your resources in producing content, you need to improve its performance.
If you have a consistently over-performing piece and you need to stay on top of it. A minor tweak in the algorithm or a fresh blog from a competitor can undermine your success overnight. It’s harder to retake pole position than to defend it.
You have a new product or service. An audit will help you uncover older assets that could and should be directing people to your latest offerings.
The company is conducting a site migration. Migrations are a great excuse to check your content because they almost always involve technical issues.
The brand has a new voice or tone. With company growth, new management, and fresh learnings from audience research, your editorial style may have evolved. An audit can ensure consistency to make sure your older content doesn’t feel disjointed.

Finding the Balance in Your Time and Budget

How should you balance your time and budget for an optimal strategy?

Consider factors like how much of a backlog you have, how recent the last audit was, and the urgency of the project. Supporting a site migration is likely more urgent than optimising a few underperforming posts.

Experts recommend striking a 50/50 balance in the allocation of your team’s resources between publishing new content and revising old posts. This won’t work for everyone, but use this as a starting point, track the data, and adjust accordingly.

What about the budget? One benefit to revisiting old content is that it should save you money in the long run. However, don’t shortchange your old performers. If the data tells you a piece it is worth investing in, it can be worth spending some money.

Making Strategic Auditing Choices

Strategic decision-making lies at the heart of a content audit, empowering your brand to align its marketing goals with actionable insights.

During the auditing process, you'll encounter different scenarios that require careful consideration and choices to optimise your content's performance. By making strategic auditing choices, you can proactively address SEO issues, boost conversion rates, and unlock untapped opportunities for revenue and growth.

Addressing Content Decay
Over time, your content experiences a gradual decline in performance. Content decay can seriously undermine your stats if left unchecked.

Make time to analyse month-on-month statistics and to flag pages with diminishing returns. With a comprehensive update, you can turn the tide and reignite their relevance and impact.

Marketing Synergy

Look at your company-wide marketing calendar for the next several months and revise content relevant to your other marketing efforts. Supporting a big campaign is a top priority for choosing where to start on your audit strategy.

For example, if you have a webinar series for a big product launch coming up, now is a great time to go punch up all your old content on related topics. You can use this revitalised material in the promotion for the webinar, as a part of your follow-up materials, or as a point of reference during the webinar itself.

Picking Low-Hanging Fruit

Some content might have solid foundations but fails to deliver the desired results. In such cases, minor updates and proper promotion could revitalise their performance.

Look for pieces of content that have the potential for quick wins. These may require simple touch-ups that can yield immediate performance enhancements. Make the tweaks, then share them with your social media and email marketing teams to get them some extra juice.

Enhance Shareability
Some content may already perform well in search, but lack the shareability or virality that could send it stratospheric.

In these cases, consider investing in major changes that can boost the content's appeal and make it more likely to be shared across social media platforms. This could involve adding engaging visuals, incorporating interactive elements, or creating compelling headlines. For example, you might choose to invest in a branded video tutorial or interactive infographic to explain the key concepts of an article.

Aligning Traffic and Conversion Rates

Examine the relationship between website traffic and conversion rates to identify areas that require attention.

Have a high-traffic page that doesn't contribute to your bottom line? Investigate why.

The inverse is also true. Pages with minimal page views but high conversion rates indicate an underlying SEO issue. By optimising such pages for search, you can unlock their revenue-generating potential.

Content Audit Tools

There are plenty of third party platforms that will help you examine performance data and decide on your audit priorities.

At 1827 Marketing, our pick is Semrush. Semrush offers a Content Audit Tool we use for ourselves and for our clients. Not only will it pick out posts that need a refresh, it will usually be able to pinpoint what work needs to be done. This is a great first line of defence.

You can choose all the paths on your sitemap that need an audit, or separate them into different projects. It focuses on everything from the number of backlinks, the metadata, the Google Analytics user experience metrics, and more.

The tool breaks pages down into five buckets:

Rewrite or remove: these pages either need a complete overhaul or should be deleted.
Need to update: pages will require significant revisions, but the bones are still good.
Quick review: these pages need small edits like updated URLs, copy edits, and so on.
Poor content: pages are too weak to make a verdict. Add helpful content and review for other SEO best practices to get these pages up to snuff.
No audit needed: these pages are good to go.

Refresh or Retire?

Sometimes when a piece of content just isn’t working, you have a hard decision to make: do you rewrite or retire?

Not all content will stand the test of time. If you come across outdated or underperforming pieces, it may be time to retire them from your website.

Ask yourself, are you willing to put more resources into this piece? Don’t fall for the sunk cost fallacy - the false idea because you’ve already invested so much time or money into a project that you have to keep going. Every piece of content on your site deserves a fair shake, but if your optimisation efforts have made no notable improvements in the metrics, it’s okay to let it go.

If the page doesn’t produce any notable metrics for your brand, it might be time to call the time of death. Just to be safe, document it in a drive offline to revisit in the future.

It’s also important to identify suitable replacements to maintain a comprehensive and valuable content library. Assess your audience's evolving needs and craft fresh content that addresses their current pain points

Finally, don’t forget that if you retire a page, you should set up a redirect. A 404 page is always bad for SEO, even if deleting it was the right call. Find similar or relevant content and redirect users to that experience instead.

How to Refresh Old Content on Your Site

Each piece of content will have different needs, but here are the top-level changes you don’t want to miss.

Optimise Word Count for Better SEO

Pages with low word counts may not be fully optimised for search engines. By supplementing them with relevant and informative copy, you can significantly enhance their visibility and ranking potential.

Ensure your updates don’t lead to any rambling or repetitive paragraphs. All noise and no substance helps no-one.

Focus on Keywords

You can use a variety of tools, including Semrush and Google Search Console, to find relevant keywords for the content you’re updating.

Perhaps the keywords the piece initially targeted have had a dip in search volume. Maybe you want to attract visitors with a different search intent.

This is your chance to discover new keywords and phrases that will meet your customers where they are now.

Update the Data

Check that the information on the page is still accurate and relevant. Update the statistics themselves, and see if that merits changing the surrounding content of the piece.

Also look for “common sense” data. These are references to things that are so obviously true at the time of publication that you take them for granted, but that doesn’t mean they’re evergreen.

One recent example of “common sense” reference points is the COVID-19 pandemic. Maybe your content during the first year of the pandemic referenced things like “our new normal” and “unprecedented times.” People reading that now will lack the context of the moment.

Build Internal Links

Focus on your link building. Hyperlink to your updated sources and relevant internal pages, then check that old links remain reputable and relevant. Not only will a proper link network keep users on your site for longer, it will build brand authority as you prove expertise in a wide swath of topics.

Strong content architecture also helps search engines to crawl and index your site. Think of it as a “rising tide lifts all boats” mentality. If you prove your expertise on a few key pages, search engines will crawl the related ones and rank you higher for more and more pages. It will also improve your user experience, helping people navigate your content for related information.

Technical SEO

Even if the content is strong, off-screen SEO elements could hold you back from a thriving piece of content. Examples of technical SEO work include:

Page metadata
Page structure (Title tags, H2s, H3s, etc.)
URL structure
Page load time
Image file sizes and metadata
Working links

Enhance the Experience

Once you have reviewed your on- and off- page SEO, consider the customer experience. How can you enhance the reader’s time on the page?

Use internal backlinks, beautifully designed infographics, and brand images. Embed relevant YouTube videos or add an interactive quiz. There are many other opportunities to get the reader to stay longer and learn more. These things nurture your relationship with the prospect.

Don’t overwhelm a piece of content with new resources. If you have several multimedia assets you could add, perhaps start with just the most important and impactful ones.

Ensure You Don’t Damage Strong Performance

You might not need to overhaul content that is performing well, but equally you don’t want to neglect it. However, rebuilding without thinking things through could compromise the components the search engines liked about it.

Always remember that Google is looking for helpful content. It rates content on its E-E-A-T guidelines, examining experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.

Consider focusing on experience when updating old content. What have you learned? How have things changed? What should readers know now that the writer didn’t know at the time?

If you approach your updates with those questions in mind, you should minimise the risk to your overall performance.

Should I Update the Publication Date?

Many brands struggle with how to reflect that piece of content has been updated. Do you change the publication date or just make the revisions and leave the rest of the work?

If your web layout has a place for the publication date and a slot to say when it was most recently updated, you might not have to think about it.

If your website doesn’t have that functionality, it will be a judgment call. If changes were low-impact, changing the publication date might be unnecessary. Search engines will appreciate the changes, and that’s good enough.

If you completely changed the piece, you’ll usually want to veer on the side of a new publication date. For example, if you link to 2023 data, you don’t want readers to assume it’s outdated because of the date on your page. If you’re in an industry where legal ramifications are a concern, add a disclaimer at the bottom that explains, “This post was originally published on x date.”

Tracking Success

You need to measure specific data points to make sure the effort you put into your content audits and revisions is worthwhile.

Pageviews: Are more people getting to the page? If so, you’ve already won.
Time on page: Is the supplement content encouraging people to engage for longer?
Pages per session: Are more people clicking through to the internal links of supporting content?
First-time visitors: Improved rankings on search engines work to draw in more and more people that weren’t familiar with your brand before.
Returning visitors: As you create a better user experience, your brand will become top-of-mind for readers online. Over time, expect to see returning visitors to your site increase. This result will take longer than the increase in new visitors.
Conversions: A streamlined user experience will ultimately result in higher conversion rates and revenue.

If you’re not seeing the results you want, don’t give up. No matter how you slice it, auditing and updating old content is a part of content marketing. Something may be misaligned in your strategy. Perhaps you’re making the wrong revisions, choosing the wrong pieces, or have an SEO component broken on the back end.

A Good Audit Can Also Build a Roadmap

Auditing your content can certainly sound like a lot of work. You have to pick the right pieces for an audit. You have to make strategic changes to the piece, and then track analytics week over week and month over month to make sure your changes are worthwhile. And while some content updates are simple SEO edits, others require real work and budget.

However, if you stick with it not only will you reap the benefits and streamline your workflow, you’ll end up with a better roadmap for how to move forward in your content strategy. You will have identified gaps in your content, topics for which your brand is a trusted authority, and what else your readers are clamoring for.

Whether you’re looking to the past for where to revise content or to the future for what to develop, it helps to get real experts on your team. 1827 Marketing can will help ensure your content marketing achieves your marketing goals. Contact us for expert audits and insights, campaign planning, and fresh content for your blog and beyond.

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Revive, Refresh, Renew: How to Breathe New Life Into Your Content