What is a Content Audit?
At its core, a content audit is a qualitative analysis on all indexable content on your website. Most definitions include the purpose as to audit your search engine optimization (SEO) to find ways to improve your perceived trust and your domain quality to optimize your search rankings.
Your audit will be dependent upon your goals. While many feel that they’re done mostly for SEO, I believe that an audit could be done not just to improve SEO, but to improve the over content you’re presenting and improve the user experience (UX).
An audit can give you the opportunity to get a full picture of all the content on your site, what it says about your company, your brand, and understand if it’s valuable. It puts you in control of your brand image essentially. Pushing out content on your website over the years means it’s easy to lose track of what you have. Some content may be evergreen, but often it’s not and ends up dated. A content audit gives you the chance to re-evaluate your content and decide what stays, goes or is edited.
Evergreen content discusses topics that will stay relevant and valuable for a longer period of time with only minor updates related to data or dates. Hubspot
A content audit can help you make the most out of your website and improve performance – be it sales, traffic or SEO.
Why Conduct a Content Audit?
First, it’s important to understand the value of quality content for your website. Once you realize the value of quality content, you’ll be more inclined to take a look around your own site. Content audits can be done for many reasons. They may be done to help improve ranking in search engines, understand what your audience is paying most attention to or to get a grasp on content that may have taken on a life of its own over the years.
10 Reasons for a Content Audit
- Identify what content is ranking for target key words
- Find out what content could be ranking for certain key words
- Locate content that needs to be consolidated
- Find opportunities for SEO
- Understand the strongest pages on your site
- Find outdated information that needs to be deleted, updated or repurposed if applicable
- Pinpoint gaps in information so that you can address them as needed
- Find problems in content like broken links, poor titles and missing tags
- Identify needs for content restructuring
- Determine if it answers your audiences questions
There are other reasons that a content audit is important that can go much deeper than understanding SEO, key words, site performance. These reasons deal with your brand image and business model.
Additional Reasons for a Content Audit
- Re-evaluate the tone and voice of your content – is it on target with what might be happening in the world presently? Could it be adjusted, edited? Is it consistent throughout the site?
- Determine the relevancy of your content.
- Address any business model changes that you may have had to make during a crisis such as COVID-19.
- Show your customers and potential customers that you’re there for them and adding value, especially if you’ve made a significant business model shift.
Where to Start
- Identify your main goal
What do you want the audit to achieve? - Inventory your content
This is done by crawling all indexable URLs. There are many tools out there to help you do this, free and paid. You may need to use more than one tool. - Determine what you want to analyze
This will be dependent upon your goals and even the type of website you have. Here are some metrics you might want to consider.- Indexed or not
- Keywords
- Content uniqueness
- Content type
- Publish date
- Traffic from organic searches
- Internal and external links
- Social shares
- Redundant, outdated or trivial (ROT)
- Author
- Buyer’s persona
- Buying stage
- Theme
- Buyer- or product-centric
- Product line
- Blog category
- Analyze your metrics and content
What’s the bounce rate, what are the landing and exit pages, are people completing a transaction, what key words are they using?
Things to Consider
Once you’ve had your content audit completed and your metrics analyzed, you need to then figure out what to do with all of that information. Delete pages? Add pages? Change navigation? When making these decisions, it’s not just about what the metrics look like. Take a look at the big picture and your goals for your website.
Just because someone isn’t reading a particular page, that doesn’t mean it’s not valuable content. It could be that they simply can’t find the page. Also, people may be dropping off of a page because of the layout itself – too busy, too noisy … Too Long. Didn’t Read. That can be easily corrected with some design elements. Also, the content might be great, or maybe it needs some minor editing to make it better than great. This is how a content audit can be helpful.
You may also discover that you’re lacking some important pieces of content. Once you can identify those pieces or topics, you can then get busy creating them. This will show your audience that you’re working to provide valuable, relevant information, helping to answer any questions. Don’t make your audience work to find the information they need. They’re busy, they’ll bail and they’ll search elsewhere.
Even if you don’t do a full-fledged, deep-dive content audit, take some time to click around your website, re-evaluate navigation, read through blog posts or product descriptions. Take a look at your site from the perspective of your target audience as well. Is the information relevant, valuable, easy to find? How could it be improved? Small changes may make a huge difference!