Top Tips for Efficiently Auditing Your Website Content

Top Tips for Efficiently Auditing Your Website Content

If you write content for your website, you need a strategy in place. Perhaps you had a strategy in place when you started out, including the topics you would post on, the keywords you would use, and the frequency you would write new content. But things can get forgotten over time, especially as business picks up and you have less time to work on your content.

You may have stopped updating your site as frequently as you had planned, or gone off-topic with your blogs, posting about your company rather than subjects that interest your customers. If so, carrying out a content audit is a very good idea.

What Is a Content Audit?

A content audit is where you create a list of all the content on your site and work out how effective each piece is. You can use a range of metrics to analyze each piece of content, focusing on aspects such as the overall quality of the content and the number of visits each page generates.

The aim of doing this is to improve any future content you create. For example, you may find that the blog posts you thought were the most popular are actually receiving less traffic than other posts. A detailed audit can also highlight ways that you can improve your content, boost your SEO, and enhance the user experience.

How to Carry Out a Content Audit

There are different factors that you may want to focus on when you carry out an audit, so it is a good idea to decide on your purpose before you start. For example, you may want SEO to be the focus, in which case you may want to look at elements such as the ranking of each page of content, the keywords targeted, non-optimized pages, and duplicate content.

Or you may want to improve your content marketing by analyzing the amount of engagement each page receives, the amount of traffic it gets, and identifying outdated content.

Create a List of All the Pages on Your Site

Start by creating a list of your URLs. If you have a small site without too much content, you can do this manually. Alternatively, you can use a tool like Screaming Frog to do it for you. For each page, gather the information that you want to check, which could include:

• The number of visits to the content in the last month or year.
• The number of bounce rates.
• How many conversions each page has generated.
• The amount of social shares.
• The number of comments received.
• Quality issues like very short content and duplicate content.
• Where the traffic is coming from, such as social and organic search.
• The topic of the content, such as product review, industry news, tips, etc.
• Whether the content is relevant.
• Broken links in the content.
• Internal links and whether they are appropriate.

Tools to Make the Audit More Efficient

While you can decide on the topic of each page of content and whether it is relevant yourself, you may need to use various tools to help you with other metrics. Some of these include:

Open Site Explorer: This is a tool from Moz that will show the back links that each page has generated.

Screaming Frog: This is one of the most popular tools. It creates a crawl report for the site and takes the URLs and the page titles, word count, and other data so you don’t have to collect it all manually.

Google Analytics: Find out which pages generate the most traffic using the Content Reports feature.

SEMRush: Find out the pages that rank for your keywords, which can help you assess your SEO.

Analyze the Data

The more information you can collect during your audit, the better. This will help you to effectively analyze the information and come up with a plan of action. For example, you may find that a certain type of blog post is attracting more visitors, getting more shares, ranking higher in the search engines, or generating more conversions. You may also be able to see which types of content are less effective, and the results may surprise you.

This can help you to decide which new content needs to be created, and which content updated. You may even consider hiring a web content specialist to get your content into shape.

Carry Out a Content Audit Today

Content audits are a way for you to find out what is working and what is not working with your content. With content playing such an important role online, it makes sense to ensure yours is performing as well as it can be. By carrying out a simple content audit once or twice a year, you can get a much better idea of how your content is performing, allowing you to make constant improvements to your website.

V K Rajagopalan has over 30 years of experience in the field of Information Technology. He has worked with multinational companies like KLM, Siemens and Wipro. He holds a Masters Degree in Business Administration and is a SAP Consultant certified from SAP, Germany. He is a Director in Paduka Consultants Private Limited that he established in 2006. Over the years, he has become an expert in all aspects of SEO, both online and offline. He utilizes this expertise for his own business as well as his clients. He currently resides in New Delhi, India with his wife and 2 sons.