Do you want to manage your website and retain your visitors? A content audit can help you fulfil your dreams. Even the most experienced marketers label the content auditing practice as one of the most critical for brands. If it is done wrong, or not done at all, then it can turn into nightmares and can torture your business.
It can deliver big insights into your content marketing strategy and blog writing views. Also, a content audit can help you to better serve the needs of your customers and manage your website. But still, not all companies are aware of the importance and usefulness of the content audit.
Common Mistake Made By Marketers
The most common mistake that content marketers and strategists make is to never go back to their content. They just forget what they put into their website 3 months ago. To outshine the competition, you have to do what others are not doing and the best practice is to go back to your content. You should make sure that your website must not look like a refrigerator that was cleaned a year ago. You should serve fresh and beautiful dishes to your visitors.
What do you understand by the term content audit?
In content auditing, you analyze and assess all the content on your website. It is an activity in any content strategy where the inventory and posted content are analyzed. You must not confuse content audit with content strategy. A content audit can tell you how well you are doing your content marketing role. Here, you gather and analyze content elements against the criteria of the performance of a website. With the help of a content audit, you can fill the content gaps, identify trends, speed up page downloads, reduce emissions and improve accessibility. There are many more benefits of content auditing such as SEO improvements, more conversion rate, etc. You will also come to know what strengths, weaknesses your content strategy has.
After Auditing The Content, You Should Be Able To Know-
- What type of content is performing the best for your website?
- The topic choice of your audience
- The type of content which has become rinky-dink
Also Read: How To Perform An SEO Audit In 8 Steps?
Steps To Effectively Audit Your Content
Step 1: Know Your Goals
Starting the journey without any destination is not what wise men do. As discussed above, content auditing is a big and time-consuming task that must be done with care and awareness of trends. If you are not aware of the goals and metrics then the aim wouldn’t be able to execute the content audit well. So, the first thing that should be kept first- thinking about your business goals. What do you want to gain from this and what results you are expecting from content auditing.
By talking to many well-reputed and experienced content marketers, we have come across that there are 4 major goals of content auditing.
1. Improvement in SEO Results
You can-
- Understand what content you want to remove or update in your website
- Analyze if all the internal linking is done right here
- Find out highly potential pages
2. Hike In Audience Engagement
- Come to know what your readers want you to write
- Find out what content on your website is generating the highest engagement
- Identify what is the best content for your targeted audience
3. Improvement In Conversion Rate
- Identifying the most lead-generating content on your website
- Well-formulated pages that are creating the best user experience
- Dividing the type of content as per the buyer’s journey
4. Finding Errors
There might be dangling modifiers, some grammatical errors, or some issues that are to be fixed. You can spot them while auditing your content. Also, the broken links can be found out which are to be fixed without any delays. All in all, you have to fix everything that is hindering the reader’s experience.
Step 2: Collect all content in one spreadsheet
Yes, you have to first calm your mind to do this step. It is one of the steps that seem cumbersome to even marketers. Gather the content on your website and place it in the spreadsheet. The web pages of the site should also be collected. For that, you can try both of the main approaches.
Crawling Tool: Many effective and time-saving crawling tools will help you to identify every URL that resides on your website. You can download the data in the form of a CSV file. Then get it ready to use it.
Manual Entry: If you have a website that uses only a few numbers of pages then you can go with manual entry. It is recommended to use this approach when you have 1000 URLs or less. If you are using WordPress, then you can go for it.
No, you don’t have to collect every URL that is sitting on your website. To make it easier, use a website content audit template. You can get them for free, the internet is so helpful. If you are finding it a difficult task, you can ask us for help. Digital Brain Tech is a reliable platform where experts work to take brands to the next level. You don’t have to worry about anything, we will take care of even the minute things and show you the results. Our content writing services are available at the most reasonable prices.
Step 3: Put Your Content Into Different Categories
The next step is to find the content that you should really analyze from the audit. It is called populating the spreadsheet with asset data. The type of information will depend on audit goals. In the spreadsheet, cover page title, meta description, target keywords, inbound links, ALT tags, page visits page bounce rate, broken links, average user time of the user on the page. Also, if you want to see a boost in your SEO results, then SEO technical audits will help you. We have a team of SEO geeks who would realize your dream of ruling on the first page of Google. For SEO purposes, collect word count, assigned categories, tabs, type of content, CTAs, conversion data, mobile or desktop access.
Step 4: Analyze Your Data
Till this step, you have gathered all the required information, content. Now it is time to put on your critical eyes. The current state of the content is analyzed. But the vision can be different and data observations will also vary. You can analyze many factors such as missing content, underperforming content, and successful content.
Missing content means missing such type of content that seems interesting to the audience. Content that is not able to perform well falls under underperforming content. Successful content is the one that every writer dream of. If the measurement of successful content is larger than other types of content, then congratulations, you are on the right path. But you must work on the outdated content. Your website should have content that is more relevant as compared to other competitors.
Brushing Up The Content
This is the main time where you have to put all your efforts to improve your existing as well as future content. Assess your content assets, and decide your action- keep, update and delete. You should keep evergreen content, FAQs, success stories, general information.
The content you should delete can be related to a certain activity, old seasonal marketing campaigns, duplicate content, out-of-stock products, and old campaigns. Quickly review the pages that are seen more than 150 times in a month. Spot poor content, update and remove the content that was published more than 24 months ago. Also, use 301 redirects for web pages.
Step 5: Reworking on Content Marketing Strategy
Now, as you have worked on all the points, it is time to implement them. Steer your content strategy and bring some changes to your content marketing strategy. Expand upon it and review your strategy at least one time a year. If you are among those fast-changing domains, then you might have to work more frequently. You might have to review your content marketing strategy monthly, quarterly, etc.
Also Read: How To Customize Your Blog Posts With Your Search Engine
The Bottom Line
What works today might not seem relevant for tomorrow. You can perform a content audit twice a year and it will help you focus on your business. Competition is at its peak. You have to take big steps in order to succeed. So, rather than thinking that time is in our hands, it is better to change our mentality. With the outbreak of coronavirus, we have realized many things that time is the king. Business and content audits are important factors that are to be taken care of. We hope that the above steps will help you in auditing the content on your website. In case you feel any block, we are there to help you. Digital Brain Tech is a platform that is proficient in doing content writing, SEO services, backlinking and more. Take the first step, if you need help, we will back you with our support and experience.
Also Read: Most Commonly Asked SEO Questions
