What do you get out of a content audit?

A straight read on where you stand, the gap between how you are perceived and how you want to be, what you should be known for, and a realistic sense of what it would take. If content is not your bottleneck you get told that instead, which is worth more than a plan you should not follow.

Do I need existing content to have one done?

No. Starting from nothing is a normal starting point and in some ways a cleaner one, because there is no accumulated positioning to unpick. The audit then focuses on the market, the competitors and what you would be the obvious answer to.

Is a content audit a sales call?

It is a genuine assessment, and if the honest conclusion is that you should fix your offer or handle your existing workload before touching content, that is what you will hear. An agency that has never told a prospect not to hire them is not being careful with you.

What it is

What is a content audit, and what do you actually get?

Q: What is a content audit?

A content audit is a structured look at what your market currently sees when it looks for someone like you. It covers where you appear now, what competitors are publishing, what your existing content is and is not doing, and whether content is actually the thing holding the business back.

I offer one, so here is exactly what it involves rather than a vague promise of insights. If you read this and decide to do it yourself, everything below is the method.

The short answer

A straight look at what your market currently sees

Not an audit of your posting schedule. An audit of the gap between how you are perceived and how you need to be perceived for the work you want to arrive on its own.

The most valuable outcome is sometimes that content is not your problem. That conclusion costs me a client and saves you a year, so it is the one I lead with when it is true.

What gets looked at

Four things, in this order

The business first

What you sell, who to, where leads come from now, and whether you could handle more of them. This decides whether the rest of the audit is worth doing at all.

Where you currently appear

What someone finds when they search for you or for what you do. Often the gap is not that the content is bad, it is that nothing exists to be found.

What your market is publishing

Not to copy it. To find the ground nobody is holding, which is usually the specific, opinionated ground everyone is avoiding.

What you should be known for

Narrowing to a small number of subjects you can talk about indefinitely and that a buyer actually cares about. This is the part that changes results.

What you walk away with

The output

→A clear read on where you stand relative to the people winning the work you want.
→The subjects you should own, and the ones to stop touching.
→A realistic view of effort and timeline, not a promised number by a promised date.
→An honest answer on whether to do it yourself, hire someone, or fix something else first.

If content is not the bottleneck, more content makes the real problem louder. That is the finding worth paying attention to.

If you want to do it yourself

The version you can run in an afternoon

Search for what you sell the way a buyer would, and write down who appears. Look at the top few and note what they are actually claiming to be known for. Then write one sentence: when someone in my market needs this, I want them to think of me because of X.

If you cannot finish that sentence specifically, that is your finding, and no amount of posting fixes it until it is answered. Related reading: what to post about and how to find a content strategist.

Want one done properly?

Book a content audit. No pitch attached, and if the answer is that you should not spend money on this yet, I will tell you.

Book a content audit See documented results