Content is everything in this digital day and age where you need to put your point across in an authoritative way that commands the respect of search engines and audiences alike.
An effective content strategy and effective content can be the only deciding factors between online business success and failure and that is why it is very important that we pay attention to content.
However, content might not always perform the way you want it to and sometimes it might not yield the results that you are expecting from the content.
You might find that your content has weaknesses that are making it underperform in certain areas and there is only one solution to checking out content effectiveness.
Content auditing.
Research by Ahrefs has found that auditing 20% of top pages with the best organic traffic can ensure 80% of the results, the 80/20 rule.
So, how do you perform content audits of entire websites and what is the best approach to do it? We are going to find out all about it in this blog and much more.
This blog will help you understand the entire concept of content auditing and its benefits and why you should definitely do it right now.
Let us start by understanding what is a content audit.
What Is Content Auditing?
A content audit is the entire systematic evaluation and review as well as analysis of the content of a website whether it is content on the UI level of the website or whether it is content within the content management system.
A content review is a systematic examination of understanding the effectiveness of content whether it is the evaluation of the information richness of the content of the relevance or even the quality of the content on the website.
It is the systemic process of evaluating multiple important metrics of the content and it will help you understand content gaps within the website and it will also pave the way for SEO improvement and content performance improvement.
However, a content audit is not just about SEO performance, it is also about ensuring that the content is in line with the objectives of the brand.
This Is How You Can Perform a Content Audit
Set Your Goals
The first step in your process of conducting a complete content audit is to understand your requirements and basically what you need for the website.
One of the things you can do is simply set traffic metrics. This is the kind of traffic requirements you might need to establish for the website and it is something that the website is probably not getting. You can utilise various tools to set these metrics and understand your requirements.
In addition to that you can also set other important metrics such as conversion metrics and find out if your website is reaching them and if not then you can set them as goals.
The primary reason why you should set and define your goals is that it will simply help with clearly understanding the requirements because if you have a milestone then you can move towards it.
Your goals should also contain other important details such as the level of SEO you need and you can also set other requirements such as updating older content and outdated content.
The best approach is to create a checklist of goals and move towards them.
Organise Content Inventory
After you know what to do and what changes to make it is time for you to look at the existing content that you have.
This is just as simple as creating a spreadsheet of all content URLs so that they can be organised in a single place. You can divide the spreadsheet into multiple types of content and you can even divide the spreadsheet into the different web pages with its individual content and we think that is the better option.
You can also use other parameters to segregate and organise this content in the form of the date of publication (which is important if you want to update the content), the person who has published the content and even the content type.
You can utilise automated tools to create a content inventory with the help of popular tools like SEMrush etc.
If you do this right then you will not only find it easy to analyse the content but also update the content or modify the content and change the content.
Perform Content Analysis
Now is the time to analyse the content and collect performance data for the content in order to find out what kind of metrics it is producing.
There are different parameters you can look for when it comes to the collection of performance data in the form of organic traffic metrics, bounce rate metrics, backlinks, SEO rank etc.
You can utilise tools such as Google Analytics to do it and this is where the goal creation process will come in handy because you can then compare the performance data through the set metric goals and simply see if the existing content is matching the expected metrics.
Once you do that, you can move on to analyse content quality and this is the most complicated process of the entire content audit exercise because you need to evaluate every piece of content.
You need to find out if your content is outdated or if your content has broken links and you must also and sure if the content has optimised images or if the image quality is slowing down page speed.
However, the longest assessment time should be dedicated to text content and this is where you are going to find out if the content is maintaining structure in the form of headings and subheadings as well as grammar and correct format and even spelling. Everything counts when it comes to improving the performance of your website.
Note Content Gaps
Simply having high-quality content is just not enough because there might be content gaps in the form of topic gaps where you are simply missing on topics and there might be content gaps in the form of keyword gaps that are just not present in the content and is not even letting search engines rank it in that category.
In the topic of keywords, there is a lot to do because you need to keep a few things in mind. You should never force keywords and you should also ensure that you are only using the most updated and the best-performing keywords.
In addition to that you can also find content gaps in the form of title tags as well as header tags and meta descriptions. You must also not forget the image alt text.
These are the kinds of content that often get overlooked but they might be one of the primary reasons for the underperforming of your existing content.
In the process of identifying content gaps, you must also create separate spreadsheets of content that you do not think is relevant enough today and this might be dated content and it might be content about topics that are simply just not relevant or about topics that your brand is simply not working on presently.
You can then decide to remove that kind of content.
Create Action Plan
Now that you have all the data you are ever going to need for a complete content audit and now that the audit is complete and you know what to make of it and the changes you need to bring, it is time to do something after the audit.
It is time to create an action plan that will include all the changes that you plan on making to the content whether it is including keywords in certain sections, improving content quality and also designating people for individual types of content.
You can create an action plan and try to take care of the content in any order you want but the best order would be to first touch the most effective kind of content that brings in the best traffic. Once you have dealt with that kind of content, you can then move on to the less traffic-intensive content.
This plan should include everything from repurposing content and it should also include the plan for removing content wherever you feel necessary or replacing content.
The last step is to implement the changes that you have made and to keep on monitoring the content’s effectiveness regularly.
Benefits Of a Content Audit
Better Content Strategy
If you have a plan for auditing the content of your website in place then it will ensure that you always have a better content strategy.
This is because a content audit will make sure that older ineffective content is always removed and replaced with content that performs well.
A content audit will help you focus on new topics and new trends and will also give you the legroom to implement these changes instead of staying with existing content.
The most important aspect of effective content is always keeping content dynamic and replacing older content with new more relevant content.
Improved SEO
Search engine rankings are everything and if you want to improve the search engine situation of your website and improve brand authority then the best way to do it is to revise content and perform a content audit.
A content audit will ensure the best kind of search engine optimisation because, in the process of auditing content, you are also identifying missing keywords and replacing them with effective keywords and also filling up content gaps and doing much more.
This will have a direct impact on the effectiveness of your content and will ensure that you can expect a better ranking from your website.
Better Return on Investment (ROI)
If you want the best bang for your buck and you want to ensure the best level of returns for the investments you make in content then content audit is the best way to do it.
Auditing content is done to make sure that you are not only investing in content but are also taking care of that investment and making sure that investment is bringing reasonable returns.
That is why auditing content is a way to protect your investment in content because investing in content is relatively easy as you simply have to spend on high-quality content but if you want the best value out of that investment then you need to keep on investing in content and protecting that investment with audits.
Improved User Experience
The best approach to content and the best approach to creating a website and ensuring the best organic performance of a website is to always keep user experience at the top of the priority list.
When you audit content, you are basically looking into what people like and what people do not like about your website regarding content.
That is why when you make a content audit and make suitable changes to that content you are basically trying to improve the user experience which is the best organic method of improving website performance.
This will ensure improved audience engagement and retention because if people have a better user experience on your website then it will dramatically improve the traffic situation of your website and encourage audiences to stay more on the website and engage more with the content.
We hope this blog will help you understand the importance of a content audit and how it can transform the performance of your website and make it much more effective.
However, we also understand the fact that auditing content is complicated and it is a lengthy process that needs careful attention. Things get the most complicated when it comes to text content where you need to ensure not only the best level of syntax but also keyword effectiveness and much more.
That is where we would love to help you because we are Ghostwriting India and we are one of the fastest-growing and most renowned names when it comes to content writing in India.
We specifically provide content auditing services that ensure the complete content audit of your website in order to ensure better content performance.
Our seasoned team of content experts will not only ensure a complete overhaul of your website’s content but we will also make sure it practically performs better.
We welcome you to visit our website and check out everything we do because we provide every kind of ghostwriting and content writing service whether it is traditional ghostwriting or online web content writing and much more.
