When it comes to reaching the objectives of your content marketing, the initial reaction might be to produce and share fresh material.
The issue is that this kind of material is frequently hidden and barely looked at or used again. This is sad news for certain people, as refreshing and employing existing content can be one of the most effective techniques in content marketing.
Carrying out systematic and orderly content evaluations can assist you in distinguishing content that has to be enhanced, or can be adapted into different formats.
What Is a Content Audit
A content audit involves a thorough examination and evaluation of all the material on your website. The ultimate goal is to identify the strong and weak points of your content strategy and content creation procedure, and adjust your content plan to comply with your present marketing objectives. Any organization, from a small business to a large corporation, can reap advantages from it.
Why Does My Website Need a Content Audit?
It is essential to allot time to evaluate the content you have created to identify any deficits and start producing improved content.
Why should you do a content audit? A content audit can assist in improving the performance of your website for various reasons.
A content audit offers a heap of benefits. These include:
- Analyzing the performance of your content to help you make data-backed decisions about which pages to improve.
- Highlighting pages on your site that aren’t optimized for SEO. Some pages may be missing metadata or have a poor heading structure, for instance.
- Identifying SEO opportunities and content gaps that you can fill with new content.
- Improving the quality of content on your site to upgrade the reader experience.
- Identifying content you can repurpose.
- Creating a complete inventory of content that makes managing your content strategy easier in the future.
- Improving your content’s accessibility and inclusivity.
It is not necessary to judge the usefulness of carrying out a content audit, yet there are specific moments when it is necessary to analyze your website’s content. Consider running a content audit if:
- Your website is a few years old and you’ve never run an audit.
- There’s no clear strategy or you’ve inherited a content marketing strategy from another team.
- You’re redesigning your website.
- You think you’ve created content on every possible topic in your niche.
Determine Your Content Audit’s Purpose
The manner in which you go about conducting a content audit depends on what objectives you are attempting to accomplish. A content audit can provide the advantages stated earlier, but the results will be more noticeable if you specifically pick out only one or two objectives to concentrate on.
An example of using a content audit to enhance SEO is analyzing and pinpointing sections with no metadata or knowledge gaps. This means paying close attention to the SEO optimization of each page.
Content Audit Tools
Software programs are needed for the content audit procedure. Rather than inspecting your website by hand and making lists of each problem, you can utilize these tools to streamline much of the process.
Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is necessary if you are running a review of your material to increase your SEO. Running a site audit is easy. Put in the website address in the box, press the “Search” button, then click “Site Audit” on the left side. Consider this as a speedy, no-cost general examination of how your website is functioning.
You will receive a quick overview of the principal search engine optimization issues impacting your website as well as how severe they are.
Google Analytics
Do you wish to measure how your pages stack up against each other? Substitute the following: Then employ Google Analytics to acquire traffic information for each page.NB: Recognize that Google is ending Universal Analytics on July 1, 2023, and is substituting it with Google Analytics 4. It would be a good idea for you to transition to the GA4 platform before undertaking your content analysis. The sooner you change, the more past data you will accumulate and the simpler it will be to utilize your content survey in the days to come.
Broken Link Checkers
When considering your content, it is best to identify and repair any broken links. You can use Integrity, Ahrefs, and Dead Link Checker to accomplish what you need.
Content Inventory
It would be a lot of work to get all the content associated with your website by hand, and it would take too long and you could miss something. Instead of trying other methods, you may want to utilize a content inventory program such as Screaming Frog or DynoMapper.
Website Content Audit Steps
It may appear that a lot of labor is required for designing a content audit. Breaking it into small, easily achievable steps makes it simple.
Step 1: Define Your Goals and Metrics
It is imperative to start with specific objectives if you want to have an effective content audit, since it is an arduous and prolonged process.
Start off by contemplating what you want to achieve with your business. What benefits can you gain from a content audit? What are the results you want to achieve?
Here are some examples of goals you can set for your website content audit:
Goal 1: Improve Your SEO Results
- Look for web pages with the best chances of appearing in the uppermost 10 search engine rankings.
- Figure out what material you need to modify or take away from your website.
- Check and optimize your internal linking.
Goal 2: Increase Audience Engagement
- Discover what kind of content is the most attractive to your audience.
- Figure out topics your visitors are interested in; and
- Figure out what type of content produces the most interaction on social media.
Goal 3: Improve Conversion Rate
- Determine which webpages provide the most positive experience for those viewing them.
- Find the content that generates the most leads; and
- What are the most effective types of content for each step of the customer’s journey?
Step 2: Take an Inventory of Your Content
Prior to making a checklist of web addresses and measurements, it is essential to figure out what type of material you are going to analyze. You can look into the content of your own website, with things such as blogs, reports, learning materials, item descriptions, and landing pages, as well as any material you have published outside of your website. You can also evaluate different sorts of material, for example film, PDF, or interactive experiences, for instance examinations, issues, and games.
The emphasis here is on how to assess the written material posted on your website.
Here are a few things to look for, in particular:
- Duplicate Content: Search engines prioritize fresh content. If you have a lot of duplicate content living on different pages or posts, you’ll want to remove or rewrite those pages.
- Outdated Content: People don’t want to read outdated content, and search engines overlook it too. Update it wherever possible.
- Content Gaps: What’s missing in your content? Are there topics you haven’t addressed yet? Target markets you haven’t spoken to? Being able to look at everything at once can help you find the gaps and fill them in.
- Target Keyword: Does the content asset target a particular keyword and include it in the copy?
- Metadata: Have you written metadata descriptions for all pages? This spreadsheet is going to help you see which ones need to be written and which ones are repetitive and should be updated.
- Image Data: Does every image have a descriptive title and alt tag? This will ensure your images are SEO-optimized and accessibility-friendly.
- Word Count: Do your pages and posts have enough words to optimize for SEO? Or are they too short? Check that word count to see if pages need to be updated or edited down.
Make a note next to each asset explaining the reasons why it should be improved. You can separate your spreadsheet by color according to the type of optimization you’re doing, however it could get complex if a singular asset has multiple issues to deal with.
Step 3: Collect and Analyze Data
Data collection is a complex and lengthy process. Typically, you need to acquire information from numerous locations and include it manually in your worksheet. If you’re looking to save time, consider utilizing a content audit tool that gathers data in line with your objectives and criteria automatically.
Step 4: Draw Up an Action Plan
Once you have evaluated your content, develop a plan to enhance it. Your plan of action should reflect the objectives you have set for yourself and the results that have come from your evaluation.
It’s not possible for you to do everything simultaneously, so prioritize your content issues now. Begin the process with the items at the top of the list by organizing them in numerical order. Clumping all the optimization issues together and dealing with them all at one time is another option. For example, you could change the information contained within each page, followed by fixing any issues concerning pictures, and so on.
Prioritize Your Actions
Prior to constructing a strategy to execute for each website address, recall the objectives you identified in the first step. Every content strategy initiative taken should be connected to a business objective.
Rank your activities in order of importance based on the amount of work associated with them and how attainable your business objectives are. To give an example for improving SEO results:
- Putting a couple of hyperlinks in an article may not take a lot of effort, yet it could have a significant impact.
- Constructing a substantial electronic book may necessitate a great deal of effort, but could lead to unsatisfactory outcomes.
Create an Action Plan for Each URL
Once your priorities are organized, form a strategy for addressing each content item. Here are some actionable tips to include in your website content audit workflow for individual pages:
- Utilize your existing material: See if you can mix different bits of content to make an entirely new one or publish it in a different form (such as an e-book, infographic, slides, and so on).
- If a couple of your blog posts have failed to meet expectations, try revising them with fresh examples, advice, and concrete details.
- Explore the possibilities of your writing: Think about increasing the information included in your current posts. Our research indicates that articles with a minimum of 3000 words garner 3 times as much traffic, 4 times more shares, and 3.5 times more backlinks compared to articles of the standard length.
- Revamp your material: You don’t always have to start entirely from scratch; you can update the post with more relevant content (e.g., fresh figures and trends or specifics about a fresh product).
- Organize your material: Utilize relevant H2 and H3 headings to build a logical and clear organization of your content; this will assist both users and bots in understanding your work better, resulting in an increase in your website’s visitors. Articles that are constructed properly are more likely to be featured in a search engine result.
Step 5: Adjust Your Content Marketing Strategy
When doing a review of the content on a website, you should remember to consider your overall promotional plan for the future. By recording your results and outcomes, you can alter your content approach to speak to your target viewers in dissimilar ways, modify assets to reach a larger audience, and increase transformation rates.
Take note of what works and expand upon it. Examine the material that hasn’t proven to be as productive for you, and peruse the successful content similar to that of your competitors to evaluate what you could do to step up your game.
Taking a look at your content marketing plan is a necessity at least annually to verify that your methods and undertakings still align with your company’s ambitions. If your sector undergoes frequent alterations, it would be wise to assess circumstances more often, such as on a monthly or quarterly basis. You must stay abreast of developments and devise new methods to continue connecting with and captivating your target audiences.
It is necessary to stay flexible and make changes as needed since what may be effective now may not be successful in the future. That’s why staying open to potential adjustments should be a priority. It is beneficial to run assessments on the content of your website, services, and products at least twice each year. This can help you decide if the changes you have made and the focus of your enterprise have impact.
Conclusion
A content audit may feel overwhelming at first glance. But don’t let that stop you.
Initiating a website material examination is an exceptional move to upgrade your content advertising methodology. Gathering all of your belongings in one area makes it simpler to identify what needs to be enhanced and which assets have yet to be acquired. It also facilitates the process of determining which issues require immediate attention and resolution.
Once you have done a thorough review of your content, it will be easy to maintain and manage your materials in the future. It won’t be difficult to elevate your content marketing initiatives.
