How to Conduct a Simple Blog Audit to Improve Your Content Performance

Your blog is a digital hub for the valuable, educational, and entertaining content you create for your target persona. Its goal is to increase awareness, drive traffic to your site, generate leads, and establish authority – leading to profitable customer action.  

But running a successful blog is a challenge for some businesses, and it requires constant analysis to ensure your current content strategy is effective. This can be done by reviewing the content you’ve created, assessing what worked or didn’t work, and creating a plan of action to improve going forward. Or in other words, conducting a blog audit.  

This process can help you uncover what content resonates most with your ideal prospects, and in turn, guide your content strategy and increase your awareness, engagement, and even conversions. It gives you a high-level view of how well your blog is (or isn’t) performing, and identifies gaps and opportunities in your blog strategy.  

The good news: it’s not as complicated as it sounds. And if you’re wondering where to start, what to evaluate or how to apply your findings, we’ve created a simple system to help you evaluate your own blog and begin seeing real results from your content. 

Before the Blog Audit: What You Will Need 

Before we take a look at how to conduct a blog audit, we should discuss what you’ll need to make sure it’s successful. Here are three things that will help you effectively carry out your blog audit: 

Access to website analytics: This data will provide clear insight into how your blog is performing. Whether you use Google Analytics or the built-in analytics in your content management system (CMS), be sure to gain access to site analytics from the past year before conducting your audit. 

Data collection tool: As you pull data and score your blog, you’ll need somewhere to store it and keep it organized. This can be as simple as using an Excel sheet or a tool like Airtable. The key is to ensure the insights are properly managed and accessible to your entire content team.  

Time for analysis and development: It’s not enough to gather this information. You also need to apply it to your blog strategy. Once you audit your blog, schedule time to analyze your results and make the necessary adjustments to your current strategy. Skipping this step will cause you to miss out on opportunities to grow your blog – and your business. 

Conducting a Blog Audit: 4 Key Elements to Evaluate 

Below are a few key areas to review when conducting a simple blog audit. Each area includes questions to ask yourself and your team to pull the necessary data and information. 

1. Strategy

Every business should have a documented content strategy that outlines goals, content topics, publishing schedule, and more. This section will help you identify areas you can improve in terms of blogging. 

1. Do you have specific content goals? 
2. What topics do you cover on your blog? 
3. How frequently do you publish a blog post? 
4. Are you publishing content on a consistent basis? 
5. What channels do you use to distribute your blog content? 

2. Traffic

Understanding your site traffic, as well as your traffic sources, gives you an idea of what’s working for your business. Is email driving the bulk of your traffic? Allocate more resources to email marketing. Do posts on a specific topic receive the most traffic? Create more content on that topic. 

1. What is your average monthly site traffic? 
2. What are your top traffic sources (email, social media, organic search, etc.)? 
3. Are there any notable spikes or dips in site traffic? 
4. Which blog posts received the most traffic? 

3. Engagement

Blog engagement can include views, comments, clicks, shares, and more. These metrics help you identify which content is resonating most with your target persona. The key is to optimize your blog to increase engagement (i.e., point E), and then repurpose or create new content based on posts that receive the most engagement. 

1. On average, how many views do your blog posts receive? 
2. Do you receive comments on your posts? If so, how many on average? 
3. Does your blog content get social media shares (or do you have social share buttons on your blog)? 
4. Do you list related posts at the end of every post? 
5. Does your blog contain an opt-in form with a single call-to-action (CTA)? 

4. Content Quality

The quality of blog content plays a critical role in the success of your blog. The following questions can help you quickly assess whether you’re creating quality content and where to make the necessary improvements. 

1. Is your content correct, relevant, and up-to-date? 
2. Is your content scannable, easy to read, and free of spelling and grammar errors? 
3. Is your content optimized for on-page SEO? 
4. Does each piece of content provide value to your target persona? 

Your blog is designed to support broader business objectives, so it’s essential to make sure it’s driving desired results. To accomplish this, the first step is to conduct a simple blog audit. Using the questions above, you can accurately assess your blog, identify your strengths and areas of improvement, and adjust your strategy accordingly.  

Have you successfully audited your blog? If so, what were your results?