Are you stuck trying to find new topics for your blog? Want to turn your past content into an ebook? Or do you want to expand your content marketing into video and podcasts, but not sure what topics to go with? If so, then a content audit is a good place to start. Your goal for the content audit is to find the best content you have created in the past in order to refresh or repurpose it for future content marketing success.

You may have heard content audits are complicated, but they can actually be quite easy with the right tools. Use the following tools to quickly determine what content on your site has been a hit based on traffic, backlinks, and social popularity:

Google Analytics

Google Analytics can help you discover what content on your website is most popular in terms of traffic. Just visit the Content section and look at All Pages under Site Content. Filter the results for your desired time period (the last year for example) and then sort the data by pageviews.

 

Google Webmaster Tools

Assuming you don’t have a more powerful SEO tool for link research like Open Site Explorer, CognitiveSEO, MajesticSEO, etc., you can use Google Webmaster Tools to find the content on your website with the most links. Once you’ve set up GWT, you can look under Traffic to find Links to Your Site. There, you will find the pages (and content) with the most backlinks, or outside sites linking to your page.

You can also look under Search Queries and change the tab to Top pages to find the content that gets the most search impressions, clicks, and highest CTR (click-through-rate).

 

This can help you determine what content gets the most coverage (links) and does the best in search. As an added bonus, if you were to refresh a post with a ton of backlinks or create another piece of content off of that post topic, such as a video, you could contact some of the best sites linking to the original post to see if they would be interested in covering your new content to spread your reach.

Social Metrics Pro

Unlike the above two tools, Social Metrics Pro is not a freebie (a one time cost of US $27 for one site, $47 for multiple sites), but can provide some great insights. This is a premium WordPress plugin that can help you quickly discover the most socially shared content on your website.

 

You can sort the posts by most shares on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, StumbleUpon, Digg, or LinkedIn. As an added bonus, if you were to create a new piece of content based on something popular on Twitter, you could use Topsy to determine who the key influencers on that topic are and tweet your new content at them.

What you can do with this information

Now that you’ve discovered your best content, what can you do with it? Update and repurpose, of course!

You can refresh posts that are out-of-date and republish them on your blog. You can compile a series of popular blog posts and turn them into an ebook. You can take your most popular blog topics and use those as a base for your videos and podcasts. You can even transform blog posts into infographics, presentations, and much more. Make some of these tools a regular part of your blog management and you’re bound to see an increase in traffic and engagement with your content.

What tools do you use to audit your content, and how have you used an audit to find new content ideas? Share your tools in the comments section below.