free website audit

As a content marketing agency, we produce a plethora of diverse content each month. In any given month, we’re typically writing dozens of downloadable offers, several hundred blog posts, CTAs and Landing Pages, as well as supporting emails to go with each. That’s a great deal of content to keep organized, and our clients expect us to not only do this with great attention to detail, with thought to brand and voice and with compelling driving actions in mind. Add to that the fact that we need to make sure each of these clients older offers are still up to date and fresh, and you can imagine that we are always drowning in words on pages.

I’m not saying this to complain, certainly. We are storytellers and we love this type of work. It’s fulfilling to know that something you wrote is being read by thousands, and that your words have prompted them to act. However, it means juggling a great deal of disparate content pieces, and aligning them to a bigger strategy, and that can be an organizational nightmare if you don’t stay on top of it.

For this reason, we do regular content audits for each client. Today we’re going to walk through the process of a standard content audit.

A content audit is not a one time thing. It’s ongoing, and necessary to make sure you’re not sending emails to folks that are repetitive, or that don’t support ongoing initiatives. The audit doesn’t take a great deal of time, assuming you do it often. Where you find a content audit is extremely time consuming is when it’s not done regularly. Monthly content audits rarely find more than a few issues per client. Quarterly content audits will obviously take longer, becuase you’re going to find a great deal more problems with processes, emails and landing pages. We do monthly content audits for this reason.

Define the Goals of the Audit

Now, our monthly content audits are not designed to find ranking opportunities or to find out our top performing posts. We can see all of that in Hubspot’s dashboards, so there’s no need for us to spend time with many disparate free content audit tools. If you don’t use a comprehensive blogging platform like this, you will need to add that part to your audit (but not monthly, thank goodness!). Buffer’s blog has some tips for those types of content audits.

For our purposes, we’re merely looking for flow inconsistencies, ensuring all content is up to date and making sure that we continue to align to the brand’s voice and current priorities. Our audit is going to be very simple, for this reason. Below are the primary issues we are looking to address:

  • Landing Pages have appropriate Thank You Pages, and conform to our naming structure

  • All Thank You Pages push the lead further down the sales funnel

  • All forms are notifying the right person on submit

  • There are no SEO errors on pages or blog posts

  • All blog posts, landing pages and content offers are up to date, aligned with brand/voice

Landing Pages


landing pages matched thank you

First, we’re going to take a look at our landing pages. By sorting by Publish Date, I’m able to more effectively group them for a quick look. In a Google doc that we continually use for this purpose, I match Landing Pages (LP) to Thank You Pages (TY), noting any naming structures that need to be changed. We’re human, and sometimes we forget what naming structure works best for each client.
Once I’ve made any naming changes, at a glance, I can see if we are missing any thank you pages. Next, I open all pages to look for out of date copy, images that could be better and note the CTA on each thank you page to ensure it is still valid and makes sense in that workflow. Every now and then I will notice that we’ve forgotten to push the lead further into the sales cycle with another compelling offer. I’ll make those changes as I go.

setting up thank you page

In most cases, this is just a formality. Because we do this every month, we don’t typically find alot of misalignment of offers or other problems. But, we do usually note a few changes that should be made across each client’s LPs, so it’s a worthwhile exercise.

Forms and Email Responses


setting up form notifications

In this step I’m just ensuring that our forms are doing their job to notify us when a lead submits and that the emails that the lead receives is still appropriate. By navigating to Landing Pages, and then Manage Forms, I can see all of our forms. I open each one and check for notification emails.

using ctas

Finally, I open up my CTA editor and check all CTAs. Here I’m looking for any CTAs that are out of date, and I’m making sure the landing page they are leading to is the right one. I also take this opportunity to add more image-based CTAs for our top performing CTAs.

SEO Checkup


how is my marketing strategy working?

This part is super easy for our Hubspot customers as well. I can see all errors at a glance, by navigating to the Reports area, and selecting Page Performance. Here we can see every page on the site, and at a glance see any SEO problems associated with these pages. When I’m in a hurry, I can choose to only see the ones created this month (choose that option in the drop down). However, most of the time I do check every page.

Brand and Voice Alignment

My last step takes the longest, but it’s probably the most important. In order to make sure all blog posts, landing pages and content offers are up to date, aligned with brand/voice, I need to read through all pages. Again, some months I only do this for items posted this month, but at least quarterly we do read everything on the site. Now, for sites that have over a few thousand articles, this is daunting, but we will divy up the work amongst several staffers, so it’s not all that terrible. In the comprehensive overview, we always find ways to improve site performance, update CTAs that are more useful/better performing and increase longtail traffic, so it’s worth it.


So there you have it – our guide to a monthly content audit, designed to optimize performance and increase lead generation efficiency. I know the process sounds daunting, but it’s absolutely vital to making sure your prospects have a consistent and expected walk through your site.

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