What Is A Content Audit?
An SEO content audit is the process of analysing and improving the SEO performance of a website's content pages. A content audit helps you to determine what’s working and what’s not working on your website, what’s engaging your visitors and what's not.
Content auditing will let you know what you and your team should be optimizing, changing, and working on to generate more traffic, leads and sales.
What Is The Purpose Of A Content Audit?
A content audit is important because it allows you to identify the strengths and weaknesses in your SEO strategy. It can be used to discover a range of things:
- Low quality content that needs editing for improvement
- Content that needs to be merged due to duplication
- Content gaps to fill
- Poor content that needs removing
- Content that is currently ranking for certain keywords and whether it’s right for you
- Your best performing web pages
- Your conversion rate
Types of Content Audit
There are a few different types of content audit that you can conduct to discover the above.
1. Competitive Website Audit
This kind of audit allows you to discover and analyse what your competitor’s SEO strategies look like. Websites can then evaluate how effective their competitor’s strategies are, and tweak their own in response.
2. SEO Technical Audit
A technical audit allows websites to zone in on any technical issues that are prohibiting crawlers from crawling your website correctly, and amend the issues.
3. SEO Content Audit
This allows websites to assess the quality and relevancy of their content, and enhance it if it is poor quality.
4. SEO Link Audit
Conducting a link audit can help a website identify if it has links that are undermining its ability to rank, for example any broken or bad links.
5. Local SEO Audit
This is especially important for local businesses, and allows them to see whether or not they are optimised to target the right audience.
How To Conduct A Content Audit
A content audit is not a simple or easy process, but it’s one that will pay off!
1. Outline Your Aims
First you need to identify what element of your SEO you want to audit and transform, be that conversions, engagement, or ranking.
Then, when you have decided you need to collect the metrics you will measure - these come in four forms:
- Sales
- SEO
- Engagement
- End user behaviour
2. Collate Your Content in an Inventory
Bring together all of your web page URLs, and categorise the content of the URLs into different groups. For example, looking at the number of words, the meta data, the format of the content and the date of the last time you made changes to the web page.
Use a spreadsheet to organise all of this data, it will make things easier.
All of this can be done manually or through a content auditing tool.
3. Analyse The Data
After you’ve gone through the mammoth task of collecting and organising your data, you need to analyse it.
There are a wide range of tools that can help you with this. These include
Once these tools have given you insight into your data, you need to decide how you are going to act.
Does your content need editing? Is it not adding any value? Then you should delete it.
4. Create a Plan
Once you have assessed what you need to do, you should spring into action. This might be adding visual elements to entice your users, or optimising your meta data.
Any holes that your audit may have exposed need to be fixed and worked up to ensure the ongoing optimisation of your website.
Content Audit Tools
Content audit is very important to your SEO strategy. Let’s see some of the popular content audit tools that you can use to understand your website content’s strong points and weaknesses.
How Can We Help?
Need someone to step in and do your site’s content audit? Give us a call and we can set you up with a team to do just that.
If you’ve already got a team, why not hook them up with our training courses where they can get the latest marketing practises for your business to improve everything SEO.
