“Content is King” – Bill Gates
We live in a world of content. To become successful, you have to create content for digital platforms. But how does your content achieve results? How will you measure that? A content audit can tell you how well your content is performing.
What is a Content Audit?
A content audit involves studying the contents of a website to see how it is performing. It helps you judge the strengths and weaknesses of your website. With a good content audit, you can optimise your strategy for the best results.
You would like to replicate the strategies working well for your website. But content which is not performing would have to be updated or deleted.
Benefits of Content Audit
Here are some of the advantages of content audit:
- A content audit will tell you which content is driving traffic to your website. Leverage the best-performing content on your website for maximum results.
- Figure out which content needs to be fixed. After analysis, you can decide to improve or delete such content.
- Replicate the strategies working well for your website and avoid those which are not working.
- You can identify the keywords which generate the best results and draw the most traffic.
How to Do a Content Audit?
You can follow these steps to do a proper content audit:
1. Lay Down Your Objectives
What do you intend to achieve with your content strategy? Here are some typical objectives you could pursue:
- Enhance SEO Rankings: You can search for keywords relevant to the content on your website and check how high or low your content ranks on Search.
- Increase Traffic: You can leverage keywords and content which bring the maximum traffic to your website.
- Building Brand Awareness: You want more people to know about you via your content.
- Increasing Conversion: Use data to analyse the achievement of goals such as lead generation and sales.
2. Identify Which Content Has to be Audited
You need to prioritise the content which has to be audited. You can use SEO tools to identify the pages for content tracking. After that, create a spreadsheet with the following information:
- URLs
- Organic traffic
- Current ranking
- Backlinks
- Category the page belongs to, for example, blog, news, product etc.
- Publishing and last updated date
- Primary and secondary keywords used
- Use of audio, video, images etc.
3. Collect and Interpret Data
You have prioritised the content which you want to audit. But which yardsticks will you use to evaluate them?
You can collect data across factors such as SEO performance, lead generation, click-through rate, and traffic volume.
Here is a sample of questions which you need to find the answer to:
- Which pages generate the most and least traffic?
- Are people clicking on the hyperlinks?
- Do pages with a CTA perform better than those without it?
- Which pages are outdated?
- Do I need to put a comment section?
- What is the bounce rate?
- Is my content optimised for viewing on the phone?
- Which drives more engagement: text or multimedia?
If you want to measure your SEO performance, you can use the following metrics:
- Organic traffic: It indicates the unpaid traffic coming to your pages.
- Keyword performance: When a page targets a primary keyword, you need to evaluate how high it ranks when someone searches for that keyword.
- Backlinks: A backlink is a hyperlink from an external website to your page. Search engines use it to evaluate the importance of a page. Backlinks from high domain authority websites can increase the ranking of a page in search results.
On-page SEO: You can check the following to judge your on-page performance:
- Meta title and meta description
- Headers such as H1, H2, H3, etc.
- Keyword incorporation
- URL slug
Technical SEO: it involves checking the technical and user experience of your website. Some of the things to check are:
- Dysfunctional internal links
- Optimisation for smartphone usage
- SSL certificate (HTTPs)
- The speed at which the website loads
4. Plan and Take Decisive Measures
After the content review, you need to formulate a plan. Here are the key decisions you will have to take:
-
Keep
If a page performs well, you can keep it as it is. You can judge performance according to measures like its rankings on search results, the time people spend on it, and the traffic it gets.
-
Update and Rewrite
You will update and rewrite a page in the following cases:
- If it has some outdated material, like outdated statistics.
- The page is getting traffic and ranking, but there is scope for improvement. For example, you can target more keywords or include more relevant information.
iii. The readability of the page has to be improved.
-
Remove
You can remove underperforming pages. A page can be deleted if it gets no traffic, has poor backlinks, or is poorly written and optimised. You should constantly try to improve your content architecture.
5. Merging Pages to Avoid Duplication
Your website may have multiple pages on the same topic. If the content overlaps, you are essentially competing with yourself. To get the maximum results, consolidate your content.
Look for the page with the maximum traffic and ranking, and incorporate the best of other pages in it.
6. Re-Audit Your Content
Once you have taken decisive measures, you need to again measure your results. While there is no fixed period within which you should audit your content, it will be good to audit your content every 4 to 5 months.
A content audit is one of the pillars of successful content creation. It will tell you how well you are doing and how far you have to go to achieve your goals. As a competitor, you will know your competence only after a content audit.