Content is the most important ingredient of a great website. The content you serve plays a decisive role in inviting the website traffic and making people believe you. But how do you know if your content is helping you make your website more engaging?
How do you ensure that the content you are serving is up to the mark and delivering value? Content Audit is the answer here. Content Audit is the process of analyzing every piece of content on your website.
Content Audit is one of the most reliable ways to figure out the strengths & weaknesses of the content on your website. Most website owners tend to avoid focusing on content and thus their website ends up not achieving success at all.
Understanding the Content Audit
Content Audit is an integral part of an SEO strategy. Missing out on Content Audit might mean missing out on an important factor. A content audit gives you a deep insight into what content is working for you, the content you need to replace, update, or even take out of your website.
Content Audit primarily highlights the drawbacks and success of existing content on the website. By figuring out what’s not working on your website, you can eliminate the same and go with the content that actually works.
Why is Content Audit Important?
Content Audit comes with immense importance and is an integral part of an SEO strategy as mentioned. Sadly, many digital marketers ignore content audits that don’t allow their websites to achieve success. Check out some important factors making the content audit an important strategy below.
1. Devising Strategies: When you get an insight into what worked well in the past, it becomes easy for you to devise content strategies for your future. Content Audit exactly does the same. It gives you details about what worked well in the past, and what didn’t. Thus, you can eliminate the things which didn’t work well and advance with the strategies which worked well.
SEO is a long-term marketing strategy. You can’t expect results quickly. You might have to tweak your strategies every now and then. Content Audit allows you to do the same. Integrating it with your SEO strategy means you won’t miss out on a vital & decisive factor of SEO success.
2. Improves Content Quality: You might doubt us a bit here. Let’s get one thing clear, what defines the content quality? Is it using those complex words representing the writer’s great vocabulary? No. The content is deemed as high-quality content if it delivers value. Good quality content is simple to read & follow and always caters to the needs of the audience. This is where content audit helps you.
As you can filter out the content which didn’t work for you, your content will be more specific. Also, the next time you write content, you will be concerned about the things that didn’t work last time and thus write accordingly. It will automatically improve your content quality. Improvement in your content quality is a big positive for both, your website and thus your business.
3. Increases Engagement: Content Audit allows you to focus on the topics and the content that your audience likes. As you publish the content your audience wants, it also increases the engagement on your website to a considerable extent. An increase in overall engagement means your website achieving success in the long term.
4. Helps Conversion: Another major benefit of Content Audit is that it helps you to achieve your goals i.e., increase conversions. As you know what content your audience love does, your conversions are likely to be increased. A great deal, isn’t it? Thus, if you aren’t getting many conversions, or if you are seeking a way to increase them, just try content auditing.
5. Helps to Keep Content Updated: You might find loopholes in your existing content which you might want to overcome. However, it might not be possible for you to write the content from scratch. You can simply replace low quality content with one that delivers value. Thus, rather than writing your content from scratch, a content audit makes it possible for you to keep the content updated and thus saving your time and energy.
6. Assists to Improve SEO: The number of SEO factors deciding the ranking of your website is immense. Content Audit allows you to figure out and overcome the issues like duplicate content, broken links, etc. It will help both, your On-Page & Off-Page SEO.
How to Perform Content Audit?
If you decide to perform a content audit, be ready to invest some time and effort in the same. But, with the results the content audit delivers, some investment of time and effort is absolutely worth it. Check out the step-by-step guide for performing the content audit below.
1) Analyze Your Goals: The first step to perform the content audit, analyze your goals. Being clear with your goals ensures figuring out the flow of your content audit. The more you are clear about your goals, the more are the chances that you will be achieving some fruitful results from your content audit.
2) Collecting Content: Next, what is the content you wish to audit? Just collect the URL of the content you wish to audit. You can also use a spreadsheet to do so, however, the large content amount will make it difficult for you to do it manually. Alternatively, you can also use tools to do so.
3) Categorizing the Content: Now is the time to categorize your content. You can use various tools to do so, or even you can do it manually. Some examples of content categories are publication date, content type, etc. You can also use Google Analytics to categorize your content.
4) Analyze Information: Once you are done categorizing the content, now is the time to analyze it. This step makes you check the results a content piece is delivering. Be it engagement, conversions, outdated content, underperforming content, this step revolves around analyzing everything. This is the most important step of your content auditing process and thus be ready to invest a considerable amount of time here.
5) Taking a Final Action: The final and the most important step of content audit, deciding whether you need to re-purpose, remove, modify, or add any content. You can also use a content calendar to figure out the action you need to take on a specific URL. You can also use a spreadsheet to do so.
Top Content Audit Tools
So, what are the efficient content audit tools you can use to ensure that you perform the entire content auditing process with ease? Check them out below.
1) Google Analytics: Google Analytics is easily the best tool to perform a content audit. The tool gives you a clear idea about the behaviour of the visitors. Also, you get an idea about the time visitors are seeing the webpages, and thus formulate your content audit.
2) Ahrefs: Ahrefs gives you a clear idea about certain SEO factors like page analysis, backlink information, and even rank tracking. Also, you can find information about “Content Gap” which allows you to figure out the keywords for which your competitors rank, and you don’t.
3) Screaming Frog: It is another popular and great tool when it comes to content audit. You just need to submit the website URL; you will be getting the customized report. You can also connect to the Google Analytics account. After you connect it with Google Analytics, you can get information like sitemaps, posts engagement, etc. Screaming Frog is one of the best tools to devise an efficient content strategy.
4) Ubersuggest: Ubersuggest is the easiest and the most efficient tool to perform the content audit. Just submit the URL and click Site Audit. As soon as you click the option, you will see a detailed report. Using this tool is quick, easy, and at the same time, reliable.
5) Grammarly: Forget tactical aspects, ensuring that your content is grammatically up to the mark, and doesn’t incorporate any typos is also important. Grammarly exactly does the same. No matter if you are a Grammar Nazi, or if you are quite attentive, keeping an eye on every word of the content is difficult. And typing mistakes are quite common too. This is where this tool comes into the picture. Just install the plugin in your browser and avoid any sort of mistakes in your content at all.
You now have every insight about Content Audit. As mentioned, a Content Audit is extremely important to ensure the overall SEO success of your website. If you are facing any troubles in Content Audit, or if you wish to devise an efficient SEO strategy for your online presence, Pat’s Marketing – a prominent SEO Agency in Toronto can help. Reach out to us by calling us at 888-488-7287 (toll-free). Let’s connect to boost your online presence now!
