Assessing your content by different sections (e.g. blog, success stories page, knowledge base) is important to understand which channels on your site are performing best in terms of traffic, engagement and other metrics. This information can be valuable for improving your marketing funnel and defining the right goals for each channel.
Sometimes you may also need to analyze a set of pages you’ve published as part of a specific campaign to understand how it performed and compare it to similar projects. Checking each URL manually is quite time consuming, but the Content Audit can help facilitate the process.
How can this be done?
- Set up a Content Audit for your domain.
- Connect Google Analytics and Google Search Console if you want to track user behavior metrics (sessions, bounce rate, etc.) and search queries your article is ranking for.
- Create a customized content set in the “Content Sets” tab by clicking on the “Add Set” button. You can manually define a name for this set.
- Choose the subfolders you need to audit.
- Determine additional parameters by which you want to group your set of pages, if necessary. For example, if you want to find the best guides in terms of social media shares: select the subfolder /guide, then define the required number of shares in the list of metrics.
- Hit “Apply Changes” and Semrush will find the content in the subfolder you have selected and based on the metrics you picked.
Next Steps
Further steps depend on which subfolders you were auditing:
- If you looked into your blog you might find articles to update, rewrite or optimize. You can also sort the audit results by different performance criteria to find top articles, headlines or authors.
- For a Knowledge Base, the most important metric is the last update (if you are a SaaS product, it’s absolutely crucial to review all the articles at least every 6 months).
- If you were looking at the News section, there might be old items that are still driving a lot of traffic and social shares, so you should consider repurposing this content (for example, by turning them into blog articles).
And of course you can always find articles no one remembers that are still on your website. If this content is not relevant for users and has no growth potential in terms of your business metrics, then it’s time to take out the rubbish.