How do you organise your content? You probably do keyword research and are looking for future titles. But, do you know what content is popular? Which content do your users like best? If you don’t have a good way to keep track of information like this, an SEO audit may work wonders for your content marketing strategy. In addition, a content audit is a great way to plan your future content.
What is a content audit?
First of all, what exactly is a content audit? It is the process of analysing and collecting a website’s assets. These assets are things like blog posts or landing pages. A content audit helps you to make an inventory of your website and gives you insight into which content you should update, create more of, re-write, or delete.
Why have a content audit?
So, why do organisations have content audits? What’s the goal? A content audit may boost your traffic and improve your readers’ experience. This is because a content audit helps you notice the areas of your website that aren’t well-optimised for SEO rank. For example, maybe you’ve recently started using meta descriptions in your blog posts. So, if any blogs are missing a meta description, doing a content audit will help you identify those posts and boost your ranking.
A content audit can also help you find new opportunities to implement SEO around your site. Did you know that it’s a good idea to add keywords to the headings on your site, for instance? This tells search engines more about your website.
Running a content audit is simply a chance to boost the cohesion of your site. Now that the search engines have more knowledge about your website’s content, they’ll be better able to recommend your webpage to users. This will not only help people find what they’re looking for but will also boost your SEO.
Auditing your content also means you can help future users navigate your site. You may not know that a link or button isn’t working on your site, for example. After your content audit, you’ll learn all about this problem and any others.
What are the SEO benefits of a content audit?
So, it’s clear that a content audit can improve your website’s rank and help you find problems with your content and make your website error-free and more accessible for users to navigate. But what else can a content audit do?
A content audit may help you better understand what your audience likes and dislikes. You’ll be able to see which content it responds to, and you will be able to plan more for future content. You will also be able to get insights into which content performs best. You can then use your marketing materials in this content.
What about less popular content? Yes, doing your content audit will help you track this down. You can then repurpose or update this content once you’ve identified it. A content audit also means you can get data-driven insight into how well your content performs. So you can make more informed decisions on what to do in the future.
How do I do a content audit?
Content auditing can seem daunting, especially if you’ve never done it before. But thankfully, there are countless templates and guides out there to make this task that bit easier. Simply paste your page’s URL, type in your canonical tags, and add the page’s title. Then, with just a little information, you can get feedback about your headings, images, links, and everything else integral to attaining a good SEO score.
One good content audit tool is this free SEO audit tool from HubSpot. Just fill in a little information, and within minutes, you’ll have your report back. Of course, you also get all sorts of SEO strategy tools included.
Identify your goals
The first step in any content audit is to identify your goals. This way, you’ll know how to categorise your audit later. So, what do you want to accomplish? The main thing a content audit does is identify the best content for your audience while also uncovering some information on SEO or conversion rates.
Your goal may be to find out which of your pages needs optimising. Or, you may prefer to discover which content performs best – you can then use that content in your newsletters or on your homepage.
Your content audit will help bookkeep and improve your content strategy tactics when you know your company’s goals.
Organise your content
Now that you’ve decided what you’re going to do, which content will you apply these rules to? Typical content to audit is usually blog posts, product descriptions, multimedia content, or other publications. Choose what you’ll audit and gather it all together.
You’ll need to gather the URLs for the pages you want to audit. With small websites, this is easy – just visit each page and copy and paste the URLs into a spreadsheet. Larger sites, however, may require tools like HubSpot or Screaming Frog to speed up the process.
Sort your content
When you receive your audit, you’ll need to categorise your information on your spreadsheet. This will keep you organised so that your content audit does what you want. Excellent online tools can sort your data, but it’s still possible to do it manually.
Think of some categories that are useful to you. For example, content format, publication date, author, and content type are some categories that are generally used, but you can use ones more suited to your purpose.
You’ll also need to get your metrics. Again, many online tools find these for you. But if not, Google Analytics can provide these.
Your spreadsheet is now coming together with content URLs, categories, metadata, or metric data!
Analyse your content
Now that you’ve got everything together, it’s time to take a good look at it. Which pieces of content aren’t performing as well as you’d like? What will you do – revamp it or delete it? What has your audience expressed interest in that you don’t yet have to offer? And, which content has performed the best in the past?
When you’ve found all this out, it’s time to organise the results in your spreadsheet. First, assign different colours to each category, and highlight the whole row with these colours. This way, you’ll know which category takes up the most of your content.
Choose what to act on
For the final step in your content audit, it’s time to decide what to do with your content. For example, take the less popular blog posts, and rewrite them or update them?
As well as this which actions take your priority? Now is the time to include this too.
