Every website has at least one type of content – textual, visual, video, or audio. Content includes any element related to your main product or service, helping with its representation and promotion. Web content is the basis of traffic generation on the website. It should be original, engaging, valuable, and easy to find by your Clients.
You need to perform a content audit to understand how your content performs in all these aspects. This audit’s report will guide how to improve the content quality, what topics are valued more, and whether the content is well-structured.
The originality can be checked separately by many free tools even before publishing the content, as search engines ban websites with non-original content.
What Is a Content Audit?
A content audit analyzes all information (content) published on the website, including product, blog, and landing pages, to improve Clients’ experience by re-writing, re-structuring, and changing the subject of the existing material.
In addition, the content audit helps to find weaknesses and strengths of your web content, providing you with development opportunities. These audits help develop your content strategy and benefit all websites of all company sizes. Audits should be performed regularly to analyze the results of your actions.
Importance of Content Audit
To understand clearly why a content audit is vital for any website, you need to understand its primary purposes. A content audit is typically part of an on-page SEO audit (Search Engine Optimization).
The purposes of a content audit are:
- Find places on the website where your content needs to be appropriately optimized and structured for search engines. If search engines understand your website, they index it more accurately.
- Provide working and accurate suggestions for optimization.
- Check internal links if some are broken.
- Improve comprehension of your content.
- Find topics that need to be understood or readable and are subject to update or deletion.
- Identify the most popular content to include in the website promotion.
- To understand better the preferences of your Clients.
As a result of the audit, you receive the report with the detailed status of all web pages, including recommendations for keywords, their relevance and current presence in the text, and suggested main text optimization parameters.
So, a content audit has multiple tasks, and if performed using proper templates, it provides significant profit to the website owner in the long run. You can regularly perform content analysis and ensure your website has a high SERP rank(search engine result page).
Some Tips for Conducting a Content Audit
The audit complexity depends on your budget and the size of your website. However, you can find many Internet resources that offer simple free-of-charge audits and complete paid ones. In this article, we describe tips for the complete audit.
- The action list of all audits should consist of the following steps: determine goals, define the webpages for audit, analyze the results (metrics) using spreadsheets, and create action items. You can define metrics that should be included in the audit, for example – new or returning users, pages per session, time on page, social shares, comments, top keyword ranking, and many others.
- Several tools can perform the content audit. You can combine free and paid resources. There should surely be dedicated tools for SEO analysis like Screaming frog, SEMrush, or Casted. But free platforms like Google Analytics can also provide valuable content audit input. It shows whether your traffic is rising and which pages are more popular. Tools like Grammarly and Hemingway (content quality tools) help improve your posts’ quality, check for typos and mistakes, decrease sentences in passive voice, and simplify constructions. Tools like Airtable, Google Sheets, or Excel help to organize the report and analyze metrics.
- The proper helper in the content audit of your specific website type is audit templates (MaadMob, GoInflow, Spears Marketing, etc.). They are available for free and help to determine metrics for analysis. WordPress (popular content management system (CMS) has a built-in plugin – WordPress Content Audit plugin that creates a list in Google sheets.
- Do not limit the content audit only to your website; check the competitor’s as well. You can’t perform the complete audit as you do not have access to the system administrator account, but you can check and compare the average time on page, conversion, and bounce rate to your results. Comparing in such a way, you can see how in some cases, to do better and how Clients appreciate that.
- The content audit should become part of your content strategy. Your marketing schedule should consist of different posts – creating brand awareness, brand trust, educating the audience, generating demands, generating sales, supporting the launch of new products, increasing subscribed audience, etc.). It is also recommended to have all these types of posts before the audit, to understand how your subscribers read them.
Conclusion
A content audit is definitely one of the goals of your profit. They should be performed at least once per quarter, and some metrics (for internal links and keyword analysis even more often). Pay attention to other SEO analyses, as only a well-optimized website with all parameters receives a high ranking.
If your web pages download slowly and with errors and need more promotion from social media or professional blogs, Google (or other search engines) does not trust such resources. Only well-known brands familiar to potential users take high SERP. Even though the content audit is the core audit, still other parameters are essential.
Most audit tools are affordable and have a trial or free versions. Also, you should create a list of actions after audit reports, which type of posts to publish, and which to delete and change, do not neglect this.
At last, please do not rely on standard schemes for ages; search engine algorithms change at least once per year, and becoming a member of the marketing community or reading blogs to be alert is recommended. Web content management is crucial to launch the website successfully.
