It’s that time again my friends – the time to kick back and relax…and to start writing your New Year’s resolutions! You may already have dieting, working out, and cutting back on soda on your list (don’t we all) but something you should be considering doing for the coming New Year is a content audit to gauge the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts.

What exactly is a content audit, you ask? A content audit is where you take all your copy on your website and evaluate it. This is different from a “content inventory” where you merely see how much content your website has. The purpose of a content audit is to learn the your strengths and weaknesses of your site. Essentially, you will be building a map of the copy of your site, which will show you where you have a good keyword density and properly optimized pages. This will help reveal areas that you haven’t targeted enough, or at all, and will also help you build your content strategy for 2012!

You can track your audit in whatever way best suits you. My suggestion would be to start a spreadsheet and make columns for each section that you want to monitor. Some good starting points would be:

Now that you have those recorded use your data to tweak your copy. You should be able to see obvious gaps on things that you’ve missed. Maybe you have a strong post but it doesn’t have any keywords in it. Or maybe you just need to add a video, change a sentence, or add your meta data to the page.

Look at your spreadsheet and take the keywords you already have web copy on, then brainstorm some keywords that you may not be optimizing for. The Google Keyword Tool is a great place to get ideas for new keywords or variations of old keyword phrases that you may not have thought of yourself.

A content audit should be done at least once or twice a year. A content audit will ensure that you’re fully optimizing all of your current copy, help you see areas you can improve upon, and make sure to round out your keyword portfolio. Good luck with your content audit, and Happy New Year!

About the author

Aubrey Phelps

Aubrey grew up in a small town and always knew she wanted to achieve...something, and she has. She packed her bags for college but instead of a degree she earned a husband. Bringing four years of SEO experience and expertise, she is an superb account executive who blends her cocktail of knowledge and unparalleled people skills to take on the world. Although Aubrey may love her job, her secret ambition is to become a cat hoarder. She boasts an extraordinarily vast yet entirely useless array of pet facts and also believes she could fight a bear if she had to (she once was bitten by a raccoon...same thing, right?).