Online Content Audit: The Quality Standard in Digital Strategy 2025

If you think that a “content strategy” is simply the regular creation of new material, you are deeply mistaken! When thinking about future projects, it is essential to remember past experience. For this purpose, it is necessary to track the effectiveness of already created content and make adjustments to old materials. At DriveFoxCopy, we approach the analysis of our clients’ content thoroughly: both previously created and written by us.

A content audit is a reliable way to improve previous articles post-factum in order to increase traffic and conversions!

Auditing previously created materials significantly improves your website’s performance if conducted regularly. If you do not know how this is done, then you have come to the right place!

We offer you a detailed guide for conducting an online content audit of your website, which will certainly be very useful and help improve your resource.

Online Content Analysis: What It Is and What It Is Used For

A content audit involves tracking all the materials previously uploaded to your website, as well as making certain improvements to them for optimization.

Here is an example that clearly shows the importance of this process:

If you imagine your website as a plant, you will surely see healthy and strong branches, as well as dry and diseased ones. If you do not prune the bad branches, the problem may spread to the entire plant, and then it may simply die!

It is necessary to clearly separate empty, outdated material from the one you want to keep on your website.

Use Exploding Topics to find the most popular content:

If we conditionally divide all the material uploaded to the site into “successful” and “unsuccessful,” we see the following picture.

“Successful” is the content that:

• generates the most traffic;
• more often leads to conversions;
• is the most popular among users.

“Unsuccessful” shows below-average results and does not pay back the investment.

Only a thoroughly conducted content analysis will help find the problem and effectively eliminate it.

Tasks for the Audit: What Needs to Be Done to Optimize Content

Although the improvement procedure consists of only a few stages, for beginners it may seem quite labor-intensive and complicated, although the result is always worth it.

Of course, you can always use the services of professionals and save your energy for other purposes!

So, let’s outline the sequential tasks, the solution of which will increase the success of your resource.

1. Determine the Goal Pursued by Specific Content

With the help of content, you can plan to achieve the following four key performance indicators (KPI):

• Traffic.
• Conversions.
• Backlinks.
• Social media shares.

Since each of your articles must contribute to at least one of the KPIs, a complete lack of indicators makes the material “unsuccessful.”

An exception can be made for required pages (for example, “About Us,” “Contacts,” and others) that can also be improved but are not the main object of content analysis.

2. Organize the Content Into a General Table

Next, you will need to create a so-called database of your web resource by extracting content from the backend or site map. Then create an Excel table with the following columns:

1. Page URL.
2. Article title.
3. Content type (web page, blog, and so on).
4. Indicators:

• monthly traffic;
• backlinks;
• shares;
• conversions.

This step may take some time, but as a result, you will have a valuable database that you can use many times in the future.

3. Conduct an Analysis of Content Success

Next, you must actually measure how well each of the resource pages works and find the source of conversions for the last year.

Using Exploding Topics, you can find out which pages are popular on social media, as well as find and monitor backlinks to your content.

Use Google Analytics to analyze traffic for individual URLs. To do this, go to: Behavior > Site Content > Landing pages report for this task:

Google Analytics will provide optimal data for each indicator, and by calculating the average value in the Excel table, you will see results for all pages of the site. In this way, you can create a ranking of articles for each indicator. If the values are below average or equal to zero, the content can be classified as “unsuccessful.”

4. Improve the Content

The final task before you will be to improve those pages that need it. You can also add relevance to “successful” content if some of its information has become outdated.

Of course, most of your time will need to be spent on “unsuccessful” material. There are several ways to improve it. For example, for a page created for traffic, you can add to the content:

• additional keywords;
• several outbound links;
• another section with keywords.

You can link to one of your most effective pages, which will also help optimize “unsuccessful” articles.

If the content is so bad that all analytical indicators are zero, then it is better to simply delete it!

Remember one thing: there should be no neutral pages on your site. All the material uploaded to the resource should benefit your business. The more high-value pages your site has, the better it will rank in Google. Accordingly, you will get more traffic and conversions.

Regular Content Audit – The Key to Your Business Success

Content analysis for effectiveness and material optimization must be carried out at least once a year. Only in this case can it be said that the website serves you to its full potential.

Another advantage will be the ready database of your articles, which can be used again in the future. You will only need to update it and complete subsequent tasks.

Be sure that over time the website will start bringing better results since each such audit adds perfection, which, as we know, has no limits. This will also be reflected in the very approach to content creation, as a result of which there will be fewer “unsuccessful” materials, and the investments in their creation will pay off faster.