How to do a content marketing audit in 8-steps (plus, best practices for fixing your content)

It’s the 80/20 rule of content marketing: 80% of results come from 20% of content. This is true for every website and for every content marketing audit I’ve ever done. A handful of articles pull in the largest percentage of traffic and conversions. Just look at your own data. A report of your top posts by traffic probably looks something like this. A few posts bring in a lot of traffic, while most articles drive little or no traffic.   If you calculate the conversion rate for each piece of content, you’ll see a similar curve. A few articles convert visitors at a high rate, while most articles convert few or no visitors.   A Content Audit for Finding the Top Performers If it’s true that 20% of articles create 80% of the results, then why aren’t we focused more on these performers? The problem is that we usually don’t know which articles are the real heroes. To find out, we need to do an audit. Here’s our content audit checklist. Use the links below to skip to the sections you want. ✪ Advanced Readers: Skip down to section seven for the deeper analysis. FINDING TRAFFIC CHAMPIONS 1. SEO: Content that attracts visitors from search 2. SEO: Content with declining search traffic 3. SEO: Content that has search ranking potential 4. Email: Campaigns that attract visitors 5. Email: Measuring the engagement of visitors from email campaigns 6. Social: Content that gets the shared the most FINDING CONVERSION CHAMPIONS 7. Content that converts visitors into leads at the greatest rate ACTIONS 8. What to do now that you know the strengths and weaknesses of each piece of content. This is a step-by-step guide for auditing content marketing [...]