To determine the state of your site’s content, you need to examine your content metrics as a whole. For instance, a page with a lot of traffic but a high bounce rate and low session duration means that your users are interested in your topic, but your content did not provide them what they desired. In this case, try to assess each element of your content to understand why your site has a high bounce rate. Pay attention to calls to action, page load time, and other factors. 

You should also take into account the different stages of the buyer’s journey. Your ‘Awareness’ content may attract more traffic, but have a lower conversion rate. Your ‘Consideration’ content may have less traffic, but generate more leads, and so on.

How to asses your content assets for SEO?

You can use your collected data and metrics to assess each piece of your content according to your goal and assign one of the following strategies:

• Keep: If your content is doing well and attracting relevant traffic, you don’t need to update it. Think about reusing it and add similar content to your current marketing strategy. 

For example:  evergreen content, success stories, FAQs, business information. 

• Update: After conducting a content audit, you know which pages are not performing well. Determine why they are not well optimized and make plans to make them effective. What is more, some outdated content may need to be updated.

For example:  Blog posts with statistics, important articles with outdated information, and low-traffic or low conversion content. 

• Delete: If you are unable to improve a piece of content or an update would take too many resources, removing it from your website is an option. You may also have some old seasonal marketing campaigns that are no longer needed.

For example: Content related to a particular event or activity, information about out-of-stock products, duplicate content, old campaigns.

How to draw up and action plan for SEO?  

Prioritize your actions by considering how achievable your business goals are as well as the effort required. To give an example for improving SEO results: 

• Actions like adding a few links to an article may require very little time and work but may bring great results.
• Actions like creating a long e-book may require a lot of work with poor results.

Create an action plan for each URL

Create an action plan for your content after making a priority list of URLs. Here are some actionable tips to include in your website content audit workflow for individual pages:

• Reuse your content
• Rewrite your content 
• Expand your content 
• Refresh your content 
• Structure your content
• Update your CTAs
• Add videos
• Add images
• Optimize metadata
• Optimize internal linking
•  Use 301 redirect 
• Inform Google

Adjust your content marketing strategy

Keep your long term marketing strategy in mind. With the help of a content audit, you can track what works and what needs improvement. Then you are able to set goals and metrics for better organic results and high traffic. 

Review your content marketing strategy at least once a year to ensure your tactics and activities still align with your company’s goals. If your industry changes frequently, you need to set more frequent review periods, for example, once a month or every quarter. Stay up to date and find innovative ways to keep reaching people and engaging with your audience .