What Is a Content Audit?
A content audit is the process of methodically reviewing and evaluating all of your website’s content. The end goal is to fine-tune your content plan to your current marketing objectives by highlighting the areas of strength and weakness in your content strategy and content generation process. This is useful for businesses of all sizes.
Website traffic may increase and reader satisfaction can be enhanced by conducting a content audit.
When doing a content audit, you may first identify the sections of your site that aren’t optimized for search engine rankings. For example, you may include meta descriptions in your blog articles as part of your strategy, but if that wasn’t always the case, a content audit might reveal which pieces need to be modified to conform to your current standards.
Auditing your content may also help you find fresh SEO improvements to make to your site. Did you know, for instance, that including keywords in your headers helps search engines better understand the content of your web page?
Search engines will provide more accurate page recommendations to users if they have as much information as possible about the content of your website.
If you’re looking to improve your website’s readability, an audit is a great opportunity to make some changes. A content audit might serve as a helpful reminder to fix things like broken links on one of your product pages. Now, we’ll go over a few more advantages.
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Benefits of Content Audits
An effective content audit may help you update your material, boost your website’s page rank, and simplify and clean up your content so that it is more user-friendly and error-free for your audience. Content audits, meanwhile, entail:
- Providing data-driven insight into the success of your content, allowing you to make educated choices based on facts rather than assumptions.
- Figure out where your rankings are low so you may repurpose or update your material.
- Find the most successful content and use it in your promotional efforts.
- Gain a deeper appreciation for the tastes of your target market.
- When you know what you’re selling, it’s easy to maintain your content.
Setting aside sufficient time to finish a website content audit is essential for its success. You don’t have to go through a content audit blindly, however; there are lots of templates available to help.
Basic Steps of a Content Audit
A content audit is the only method to comprehend your material from the bottom up. A content audit may help you understand what you have, what you need, what you don’t need, and what steps you can take to ensure your content ecosystem supports your objectives.
There’s no ideal method to conduct a content audit. Your audit depends on the sort of information you’re reviewing and your aims. Adjust your content audit to fit your site and plan.
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Think of Your Goals
To begin, consider your end goals. In order to properly organize your audit, you need to first have a clear understanding of what you want to achieve.
An audit of your content’s SEO and conversion rates will help you determine what kinds of material will most interest your target audience. Finding out which of your pages need optimization for search engines might be a goal. Instead, you may consider highlighting your website’s most engaging and successful content on the front page or in a regular newsletter.
In order for your content audit to be beneficial for evaluating and changing your plan with improved methods, you must first determine what your objectives are. Once this is done, you may start gathering your material.
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Gather Your Content
Which content are you going to audit? Reviews of product descriptions, blogs, multimedia, and print publications are the most common kinds of audits. Determine this, and collect the collected material in the queue.
In order to do this, you must first compile a list of the URLs for the pages you want to examine. This may be done manually with a tiny website by using a spreadsheet. A number of websites, like SEMrush, Screaming Frog, AHREFs, Moz and HubSpot, provide automated solutions for websites with pages numbering 100+.
Using your sitemap as a starting point, tools like SEMrush, AHREFs and Screaming Frog will provide this data. For no cost at all, you may make a sitemap that contains every page on your website.
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Categorize Your Content
Audit information received should be entered into the appropriate columns of the spreadsheet. Although automated internet tools exist to assist with this process, it is possible to do it manually as well. The categories will help you stay organized so that your content audit matches your requirements.
Type of material, authors, date published, and format of content are all good candidates for classification. Come up with groups of information that would be helpful to know from various sources. For instance, while doing a blog post audit, it is crucial to collect data on the post’s date of publication or modification, its author, the post’s genre, and any relevant metadata (Such as the title and description).
Metrics are another essential area. Google Analytics can extract data for you, and some online tools can even include them in the audit. Metrics may supplement your study with additional data.
Your content’s URLs, categories, metadata (if any), and metric data should now be in your spreadsheet.
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Analyze Your Data
Examine your information with a critical eye now. At this stage, you should have a very clear idea of how your material is doing. Here are some things to keep in mind when assessing your data:
- What information have you neglected to provide for your readers?
- Poorly performing content – What kinds of material are failing to attract the audience size you need?
- Inadequate optimization due to out-of-date information; should previously published material be revised or replaced?
- Home run content — Content that has performed extremely well.
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Create a spreadsheet based on your audit findings and arrange the data accordingly. In order to distinguish between various categories and see which ones make up the bulk of your content collection, you may color-code the rows depending on your analysis.
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Create Action Items
You will conclude and tidy up your audit in this phase. Having completed the analysis, you are now able to proceed. You should consider which blog entries need to be removed, revised, or reorganized.
Add one more column to the spreadsheet to keep track of these objects, preferably one that is prominently displayed towards the front. The appropriate next step for a given URL is shown in this column. Are you going to retain, update, remove, or rewrite that blog article?
This is also the opportunity to mention any prioritization or timetable you have for this audit. Not all businesses need content calendars. Considering your content audit’s objectives and the order in which certain tasks make the most sense to be completed can help you create a prioritized schedule that works well.
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How to Interpret Your Content Audit Data
To get an accurate view of your site’s content, you should look at all of your content metrics together.
An excessive number of visitors may nevertheless leave within a short time if, for instance, your website’s bounce rate is high and visitors seldom stay for more than a few seconds throughout each session. Users are interested in your subject, but they didn’t find what they were looking for in the material. If this is the case, you need to analyze various parts of your material to find out why people are abandoning your website. Titles, calls to action, and page load times may not be connecting with your content in the way you’d want, in which case, you may have to look at more than the content on your site but the web design of the site itself. You will need to figure out if the site is customer-friendly or not.
Think about the customers’ journey and how you can best serve them at each step. There’s a chance that your posts that are informative attract more attention but don’t lead to conversions. While, the posts that are made to lead customers through the conversion funnel, actually generate leads, but have less traffic. You will have to consider quantity over quality and vice versa, in order to get a good content balance.
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