A well executed content audit on an annual or a biannual basis can be quite powerful in delivering insights into a website’s blog. Yet, because of its complexity or the lengthy process it has got a lot of content marketers to underestimate its benefits. If you want your content to perform better then running a content edit periodically is the best practice. This blog talks about how to do a content audit because even though it is time consuming, the results are eventually rewarding.
Content audit is done to perform a qualitative analysis of the content on a website. It is analysed to measure effectiveness of SEO activities. Content audit boosts content marketing efforts by allowing website owners to improve content and bring better performance, more quality, better rankings and conversions. Also read about the 8 steps to do a better SEO audit, in our blog: 8 STEPS TO A BETTER TECHNICAL SEO AUDIT.
The purpose of A content audit
A content audit is usually done for SEO purposes or for content marketing purposes. When the content audit is done for SEO purposes, it helps website owners to pinpoint any weak areas in the site’s Search Engine Optimisation. The main purpose of a content audit for SEO is to improve quality, domain rank, and optimising ranking factors. Content audit may also be done to measure the effectiveness of the content marketing efforts. This allows you to understand how the audience interacts with the content and will help you to alter content to improve performance. Thus, it is very important for businesses to invest in good content writing techniques. Read and know how integral is content marketing in advertising, in our blog: HOW INTEGRAL IS CONTENT MARKETING IN ADVERTISING?
How to do a content audit for SEO
Mentioned below is the step by step guide for Search Engine Optimisation content audit:
- Crawling URLs: The first step is to crawl all indexable URLs. It is advised to not just rely on a crawler as it might miss some URLs from the audit. So, collect URLs from internal database, Google analytics, XML sitemaps, etc. After doing this, filter out those URLs which you think do not need to be audited.
- Measuring metrics: Crawlers like screaming frog will give you metric like titles, descriptions, word count and meta tags. Consider more metrics like organic traffic, internal and external links, conversions, dwell time, mobile friendliness, page load speed, etc.
- Create and work on dashboard: Once you have gathered all the data, which is necessary for a content audit, organise your information on a dashboard. If you have a small website then you can do it manually. If you have a large one, you can use tools to automatically generate a list of the URLs. Analyse this data and check which content can cause penalties, look for thin content, etc. Then see if content should be rewritten, improved, left the same or pruned. Create a column named actions and enter what you want to do for each URL there.
- Measure actions: Measure the quantity of each action along with organic traffic and conversions. This will allow you to find and work on the pages which need immediate action.
- Create a report: Create a report having analysis of the website and recommendations on what kind of actions need to be taken.
Content audits are shaped by the purpose and goals of the audit. Therefore, it is a good idea to decide why you are doing the audit. Hopefully, you now know how to do a content audit for SEO. Remember to concentrate on the metrics which are relevant and carefully assess data. This will help you to make informed content marketing decisions which will improve your overall ROI and conversion rates.
