With so much content being produced and published, how can B2B companies ensure their content is effective, engaging, and driving results?
The answer lies in conducting regular B2B content audits.
A content audit ensures compliance with current search engine optimization guidelines.
A well-executed content audit can revolutionize your content marketing strategy, boost engagement, improve SEO, and ultimately generate more leads.
Let's dive into the world of B2B content audits, exploring their importance, benefits, key components, and best practices.
At its core, a B2B content audit is a thorough analysis and evaluation of all the content assets a company has created, including blog posts, whitepapers, case studies, videos, and more. It involves taking stock of your existing content, assessing its performance, and identifying areas for improvement.
The importance of regular content audits cannot be overstated. In fact, a recent study by Semrush found that 61% of the companies that did best with their content marketing ran content audits at least twice a year.
Content audits are particularly crucial in the B2B space, where the buying cycle is longer, and decision-makers rely heavily on informative, trustworthy content to guide their purchasing decisions.
Reguarly ensuring your content is up-to-date, relevant, and optimized for both users and search engines, means you can establish your brand as a thought leader in your industry.
Conducting a content audit offers benefits that can significantly improve your content marketing ROI.
Here are some of the key advantages:
Identifying your top-performing content and understanding what resonates with your audience lets you create more targeted, engaging content in the future.
Content audits help you identify SEO opportunities, such as optimizing content for relevant keywords, fixing broken links, and improving internal linking structure.
Content audits have proven to be effective, with Backlinko reporting on how a single content audiot boosted a site's search engine traffic by almost 34%.
Auditing your content helps you categorize and structure your content assets, making it easier for users to navigate and find the information they need.
Analyzing your content landscape allows you to uncover gaps in your content strategy and identify new topics to cover in your next blog post.
A content audit provides valuable insights into what content resonates with the audience.
To conduct a comprehensive B2B content audit, there are several key components you should focus on:
Start by creating a complete list of all your content assets, including URLs, titles, content types, and publication dates.
Assess the performance of each piece of content using metrics like traffic, engagement, bounce rate, and conversions. Identify your top-performing content and understand what makes it successful. Collecting data points is crucial to measure content performance effectively.
Evaluate your content’s SEO health, including keyword optimization, meta descriptions, header tags, and internal linking. Identify opportunities to improve your content’s search engine visibility. Using relevant performance metrics is essential to measure content performance for SEO purposes.
Assess the relevance and accuracy of your content. Identify outdated or irrelevant content that needs to be updated or removed.
Analyze your content landscape to identify gaps in your coverage. Look for topics your audience is interested in but you haven’t covered adequately. This will give you a wide range of ideas for future content creation.
Evaluate your competitors’ content strategies to identify opportunities to differentiate your brand and fill content gaps.
According to a Semrush study, the primary goals of a content audit include identifying top-performing content, uncovering poor performers, understanding content relevance, generating better content ideas, improving organic search performance, and discovering lead generation opportunities.
Maintaining a consistent brand voice throughout your content is also crucial. A content audit can help you assess whether your content aligns with your brand’s tone, style, and messaging guidelines.
Implementing a B2B content audit can seem daunting, but breaking it down into manageable steps can make the process more efficient and effective. Here’s a step-by-step guide to conducting a content audit.
Tip: Check out our Workflows tutorial so you can create a comprehensive, repeatable workflow that lets you easily audit your content regularly.
Before diving into the audit, clearly define your goals.
What do you want to achieve with your content audit? Are you looking to improve SEO, increase engagement, generate more leads, or all of the above?
Having specific goals will guide your analysis and help you prioritize action items.
Create a comprehensive list of all your content assets.
Use an AI platform and connect it with Google Analytics, your content management system, and spreadsheets to compile your content inventory. (You can integrate Copy.ai with thousands of different tools.)
Include relevant details like URLs, titles, content types, publication dates, and performance metrics.
With the help of AI, dig into your content performance data to identify your top-performing and underperforming content.
Look at metrics like traffic, engagement, bounce rate, time on page, and conversions. Use this data to understand what content resonates with your audience and drives results.
Assess the relevance and quality of your content.
Is your content still accurate and up-to-date? Does it align with your current business goals and target audience?
Identify content that needs to be updated, consolidated, or removed. AI can help you here, taking a lot of manual work off your hands.
Evaluate your content's SEO health.
Check for keyword optimization, meta descriptions, header tags, and internal linking. Use tools like Google Search Console and SEMrush to identify SEO opportunities and make necessary optimizations.
Analyze your content landscape to identify gaps in your coverage.
Use AI to identify topics your audience is interested in but you haven't covered adequately. Use keyword research and competitor analysis to uncover new content opportunities.
You can use Copy.ai (the world's first GTM AI) to create engaging product descriptions at scale and to carry out bulk content creation.
Based on your analysis, create an actionable plan to optimize your content. Include steps to improve content to enhance search rankings.
Prioritize action items based on their potential impact and feasibility. Assign tasks to team members and set deadlines to ensure accountability.
Put your action plan into motion. Update, consolidate, or remove content as needed, using workflows to help you keep everything streamined.
Create new content to fill identified gaps. Monitor your content performance regularly to track progress and make data-driven decisions.
Ready to take your B2B content audit to the next level?
Copy.ai is the perfect place to start. As a powerful GTM AI platform and AI for sales, Copy.ai's Workflows feature allows you to automate all kinds of go-to-market functions, achieving true GTM velocity along with marketing and sales alignment.
Rather than tackling tiny one-off tasks with AI like writing a one-off LinkedIn post, Copy.ai enables you to automate entire processes with workflows.
Workflows are automated systems set up to handle routine or complex tasks on their own. Here's a closer look at how you can use different workflows within Copy.ai.
Copy.ai Workflows can pull insights from various data sources and suggest content ideas that are more likely to resonate with your target audience.
You can create a workflow to research, create SEO-friendly briefs, and turn those briefs into high-quality content. (We have pre-built workflow to help with all of this, such as our Create SEO Optimized Content Brief workflow.)
You could even set up a workflow to refresh existing content, ensuring your content is always up-to-date and optimized.
Workflows are also a fantastiv way to automate analysis of your content performance.
Copy.ai's workflows let you bring in data from various sources, so you can identify top-performing content, and provide actionable insights to optimize your content strategy.
Workflows can automatically categorize your content assets based on predefined criteria, making it easier to organize and analyze your content inventory.
Another great option is to set up a workflow that can continually analyze your content landscape and compare it to industry benchmarks and competitor strategies.
Workflows can identify content gaps and suggest new topics to cover.
Workflows can evaluate your content's SEO health, suggest optimizations, and even automatically implement changes to improve your search engine visibility.
Regularly evaluating and optimizing your content means you can improve your content marketing ROI, drive more engagement, and establish your brand as a thought leader in your industry.
Conducting a comprehensive content audit involves several key components, including content inventory, performance analysis, SEO evaluation, relevance assessment, gap identification, and competitor analysis.
When you follow the step-by-step process above and make use of AI tools like Copy.ai, you can streamline your content audit process and make data-driven decisions to optimize your content strategy.
Copy.ai doesn't stop there, of course. It has the potential to transform every aspect of your sales and marketing strategy, with outbound sales automation, data enrichment, and much more.
Don't let your valuable content assets go to waste. Book a free demo so you can start your B2B content audit today and unlock the full potential of your content marketing efforts.
Still got questions about carrying out your content audit? Here are answers to some of the most common questions we get.
How often should I conduct a content audit?
It's a good idea to conduct a comprehensive content audit at least once a year. However, you may want to perform more frequent, smaller-scale audits to stay on top of your content performance and make continuous improvements.
Workflows let you carry out continuous audits, monitoring your content in real-time if you want to. Or, you could run your workflow at set intervals, such as every 3 or 6 months.
What tools can I use to conduct a content audit?
There are several tools you can use to streamline your content audit process. Using Copy.ai is a great way to bring these all together as part of your GTM tech stack (while avoiding GTM bloat).
The other tools you might use include Google Analytics, SEMrush, Ahrefs, Screaming Frog, and Content Square. These tools can help you gather data, analyze content performance, and identify SEO opportunities.
How do I prioritize action items from my content audit?
Prioritize action items based on their potential impact and feasibility. Focus on optimizations that can drive the most significant results, such as updating your top-performing content, fixing critical SEO issues, and creating new content to fill high-priority gaps.
How can I measure the success of my B2B content audit?
Measure the success of your content audit by tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) like organic traffic, engagement rates, conversion rates, and lead generation. Compare your content performance before and after implementing optimizations to assess the impact of your efforts.
Can AI tools really help with B2B content audits?
Absolutely! AI tools like Copy.ai's Workflows can significantly streamline your B2B content audit process by automating data gathering, content analysis, and optimization tasks.
These tools provide data-driven insights and recommendations, enabling you to make more informed decisions and improve your content strategy efficiently.
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