You must have spent a great deal of money and time on your website.
You may have worked through the weekend or until the wee hours of the night to get it done. It was hard work. It’s worth it when visitors to your site feel that they have to purchase your product.
After a certain time, some websites may start to feel old. When that happens, users may no longer feel the same connection to your website, and they might not stay long enough to convert to customers or clients.
What is a Content Audit?
You can conduct a content audit by assessing the relative strengths of each page on your website. The results will then be used to guide future marketing. It would be best if you did a content review at least once a year.
A content audit, according to Nielsen Norman Group (known for its global leadership in user experience), examines and evaluates your content’s quality, depth, and scope.
It is impossible to conduct a content audit if you have not completed a content inventory
It would be best if you didn’t ignore the content inventory, as it is an essential part of your content audit. You wouldn’t start baking a cake without checking if you had all the ingredients.
Nielsen Norman Group: “A content Inventory lists all the digital content that you own and includes such aspects as the name of each piece, the format, the URL, the creation date, the author, and the metadata. The content audit is used to determine the quality of content and whether or not it should be updated.
The content inventory can reveal the breadth and depth of your content but cannot tell you how to improve the quality. Audits are for this purpose. You should always perform an inventory before you do an audit.
You can’t have a successful marketing or SEO campaign if you don’t combine both.
Benefits of a content audit
Content audits will help you determine the success of your marketing and SEO efforts and what you should do next.
What content is performing well?
What topics are of interest to your audience?
What posts can hurt your efforts and should be removed?
Your SEO has some weak points.
How to improve organic search performance.
What to include in future content marketing.
How to improve lead generation, sales, and marketing.
This information can be used to improve your efforts or, even better, your website.
You may have spent time and money on your website, hired someone to write it for you, or done both. An annual content audit will inform your marketing and SEO strategies and help you avoid wasting time, money, and effort.
This is what a content review looks like
It may seem not very sensible to you if you don’t have any experience. There’s some useful information there. Let me explain.
We can see the information about each page that I extracted using ScreamingFrog (an important SEO tool that helps me analyze the data in Google Analytics and Google Search Console). Then, we see the information I extracted from each page using ScreamingFrog. This is an important tool that helps me analyze data in Google Analytics.
Your content is generating backlinks
You can also see if you have any backlinks, which are other sites that link to your content. They all contribute to a thing called domain authority, which is how trustworthy search engines find your site. The more quality links that you receive from other sites, the higher your domain authority and the more likely your site will appear in the search engine results.
Your content serves a basic structural purpose
Internal page links can be interesting. Internal page links are interesting.
These pages are often referred to as ‘assets.’ This includes pages such as contact or customer service, which are essential to the overall experience of users.
Your content attracts organic traffic
Another thing to watch out for is high Google Analytics (GA) users or entrances, as this refers to organic traffic, the kind of free traffic that we’re looking for.
Let’s check to see if any of your content is not compatible with your website and should be removed.
How to determine if you should remove your content
It is important to remove content that doesn’t generate any traffic or converts. Keep it, and you could end up with a bloated index. This will impact how well the search engines like your site. Being found less in searches means that fewer people will visit your website.
Index bloat occurs when Google indexes a large number of ‘low quality’ pages from your site, pages that do not serve your visitors.
Search engine crawlers spend too much time on unnecessary pages. This slows down your website and wastes your crawl budget. Search engines will only index the pages that you want visitors to see if your site is clean.
Each page of your website should have a specific purpose and provide value to your visitors.
To do this, you must remove all low-quality content. This task is not easy because determining what low-quality content looks like can be subjective.
Sometimes, the data shows that a content piece needs to be tweaked a little bit in order to improve it.
Is your content in need of improvement?
You will be able to see if you need to improve any content by conducting a content audit.
You may have a page with a lot of traffic but little engagement and few (if any) if, conversions. A high bounce rate is often indicative of low concentration. It means that people find your site and visit it, but they don’t take the desired action. For example, making a booking or purchase.
It’s great that so many people visit your website. You don’t want that to change. Just tweak the content to get them to do what you want.
Look at the page and consider what you could change or improve in order to get those conversions. Does the copy seem dull or too wordy? Are the images turning people away? Are the photos confusing?
It can be difficult to know what changes you should make. Making those small changes could mean the difference between “See you later” and a sale.
