WHAT A WEBSITE CONTENT AUDIT CAN DO FOR YOU!

We probably don’t have to tell you twice how important it is to make sure you’re providing quality content if you want to rank your website in Google’s organic search. But did you know that you could perform a simple website content audit and know EXACTLY what you need to do to help improve your rankings?

Without a content audit, you could be missing out on key opportunities to improve your rankings. If you want to find out how to perform a DIY content audit read on, and if you don’t have time to dig into it yourself then let us help with your website’s SEO audit.

WHAT GOES INTO A WEBSITE CONTENT AUDIT

Getting a content audit means looking at everything on your site that is indexed, including lead-generation landing pages, blog posts, articles, white papers, ebooks, checklists, FAQs, videos, presentations, infographics, tools, and more.

In addition to content quality, search engine optimization (SEO), conversion optimization, and strategy alignment, your content audit should include an assessment of strategic alignment. The audit provides insight into the actions necessary to address existing content. In other words, what content needs to be improved, merged, deleted, or left as it is?

In addition to helping you understand how your content assets fit into your digital marketing strategy, a content audit will help you determine what types of new content to produce in the future.

WHY YOU NEED TO DO A CONTENT AUDIT

The purpose of a content audit is to deliver an outstanding user experience and improve your ranking on Google. Poor content affects your ranking on Google, so you don’t want your users to discover it. Google covers this in its Helpful Content Update that’s designed to reduce the visibility of low-quality content.

Insights like these allow you to improve your content strategy and strengthen your content portfolio. Utilizing the data, you can enhance quality, improve performance, and strengthen your content portfolio.

AMP UP YOUR CONTENT QUALITY

In order to deliver the best results, it is important to organize, categorize, and streamline content creation. Your content should be optimized for search engine rankings, increase conversion rates, and create a seamless user experience while aligning with your business objectives.

All you have to do is ask yourself:

• Am I answering the search query from my website visitor?
• Is this content relevant to my industry and audiences?
• Does this content establish strong topical authority?
• Are we building trust with relatable content for readers?
• Are we leaving questions unanswered?

IDENTIFY COMPETITIVE GAPS

A content audit does more than spotlight holes in the buying journey. It also reveals crucial competitive gaps in your content marketing strategy where your online rivals hold more organic search market share. In order to identify your competitive gaps, consider the following questions during the audit process.

• What topics do your competitors cover that you don’t?
• Do you have content tailored to your target audience segments?
• Does your content have a key gap at points in the funnel?
• Are your competitors ranking for topics you aren’t ranking for?
• Where are your competitors missing the mark? Can you capitalize?

For example, if your competitor is consistently using a table of contents widget or some other unique feature in their content and they routinely rank content above yours then maybe it would benefit your content strategy to include those features as well. Look for patterns to help you identify gaps you could take advantage of as well to close the gap they may have on your content.

HOW WE WOULD PERFORM A CONTENT AUDIT

The format you choose and the data you collect will depend on your content goals and overall strategy. However, it’s handy to have a content audit guide handy to make sure you’re checking off the right boxes so feel free to bookmark this page and come back to it later or reach out to us for help with your content audit.

DETERMINE CONTENT AUDIT GOALS

Be sure to establish specific marketing KPIs and SEO metrics to measure performance and determine success for your content audit goals. They could be any of the following or you could come up with your own!

• Organic rankings
• Google search traffic
• Brand awareness
• Content engagement
• Newsletter subscriptions
• Backlinks and social shares
• Leads for services or products

IDENTIFY HOW YOU WILL MEASURE RESULTS

We tend to focus on SEO metrics for our content audit tracking method. There are several ways you can identify how your audit helped you but we will focus on mainly keyword data and backlinking data.

What are they searching for and what is the search intent behind that search query? This can give you some insight into the target keywords. Target keyword monthly search volume lets you research keywords with sufficient searches. You can also target long-tail keywords to lower the competition you’re up against. Tracking target keyword rankings is a critical SEO metric. They offer early warnings that your SEO strategy is working.

A high number of high-quality backlinks from relevant domains will boost the domain authority of your website. Backlinks and referring domains are one of Google’s most important ranking factors. There, however, is a stronger effect of links from domains that have not previously linked to you than additional links from sites that have already linked to you.

ORGANIZE YOUR TRACKING DOCUMENT

Make an audit spreadsheet in Google Sheets or Excel based on what you’d like to audit. Specify the type of content on every page you’re auditing. You’ll need columns for basic content info, SEO data, analytics, and finally content strategy.

You can also use different software packages to help with your content audit. We tend to run our reports in a standardized output format using a program called SEO Powersuite. We can conduct detailed On-Page and Off-Page reports that provide us with the information we need to assess the content changes we may want to implement.

OTHER FREE TOOLS YOU CAN USE FOR AUDITS

There is a great deal of data that needs to be examined. Luckily, there are comprehensive website content audit tools as well as analytics tools at your disposal to make the process more efficient:

Screaming Frog

Besides page title tags and meta descriptions, it can also extract SEO audit data such as average time on the page, backlink authority scores, and internal links.

Google Analytics

Understand your users to improve your marketing, content, and products.

Google Search Console

Analyze your site’s impressions, clicks, and position in Google Search.

FINALLY, LET’S TWEAK OUR CONTENT

Using your goals and metrics, analyze your content. Create an “Action” column to determine the next steps for each piece of content on your site. Keep Google’s advice in mind as you analyze your content.

Remove and redirect

If you find low-quality pages on your site that don’t target keywords or provide little value to your audience, remove them! Consider improving page quality and optimizing old content for unique search terms instead. Conversely, if improving content might cannibalize traffic from other pages, you should remove the low-quality fluff pages and redirect them to the most relevant pages.

Don’t forget to include the redirect so you don’t lead your users to a dead page from other links you have already created!

Update

The content may already be good and just needs some additional information, context, or on Page-SEO updates. If that is the case just focus on making changes to the content! That’s the beauty of web content, it can always be updated and changed over time.

Leave it alone

If the content is already performing really well then just leave it alone and don’t touch it! Sometimes you can unknowingly affect your rankings by trying to add something you think the content needs if it’s already doing really well.

CONCLUSION

A content audit is an important step that you need to take if you want to improve your SEO results. As a result, you will be able to identify any issues with your content, and you will be able to fix them. Moreover, this will help you to improve your overall SEO strategy, and you will be able to see better results in the long run as a result. Contact us today if you need help with your SEO website audit!