How to Audit Your Website Content

How to Audit Your Website Content

4 min read

Have you been blogging for a few years now?

Or conducting webinars and podcasts? Or writing whitepapers?

But is your website visitor converting to a customer yet?

Quality content is imperative to attract people to your website. It also contributes to the success of your SEO campaigns and draws profitable results.

However, if your content efforts bring dull results, you need a content audit. Content audits help you discover the underperforming content and fix it before it hurts your sales funnel.

The word “audit” sounds daunting but doing one can help you produce new and better leads.

What Is a Content Audit?

A content audit is a thorough review of your website to make sure that everything is current, exact and, most importantly, enlightening. It also includes reviewing all the content on your website to assess strengths and weaknesses.

Moreover, a content audit helps you prioritize your future marketing strategy and effectively grow your website.

Why Do You Need a Content Audit?

There existed only one website in the year 1991. As of January 2019, there are over 1.94 billion websites on the Internet (source). A year over year comparison will tell you that approximately 9 to 10 websites are added per minute!

With colossal data being added every minute, websites can easily lose their relevance. Content audits will help you identify irrelevant content and hence either update or discard it.

To conduct an effective website content audit, follow these steps:

How to Audit Your Website Content?

#1 Clarify Your Goals

Before you do anything else, question yourself what you expect to get out of your content audit. Most content audits will have numerous goals. You can work towards increasing audience engagement, improving your SEO results, or improving conversion rates.

Whatever your specific preferences may be, it’s helpful to take the time to define your goals during your content audit. The goal will help you be focused and get the desired results from the audit. Or you will end up wasting both your time and energy.

#2 Collect All Your Data

The primary step in a website audit is to list everything existing on your website.

Collect and organize all your data into a spreadsheet or use a content audit tool that automatically gathers data according to your goals and metrics. A content audit isn’t possible without website analytics data.

Seeing all the data related to your website in a single document gives an outlook to understand web pages with strong data and other areas in need of development.

You can also categorize your content, by distinguishing landing pages, blog posts, manuals, or product descriptions. Every piece of content must serve a particular purpose on your website. Categorizing them will help you get an exact overview of what each piece contributes.

#3 Evaluate Your Content’s Performance

You have got all the data, now it’s time to review it. Try to evaluate every part of content according to your goals and assign one of the following statuses:

• Keep: If your content works well and remains relevant, you don’t need to update it. Consider reusing this content as part of your current Content Marketing strategy.
• Update: The content audit may discover web pages that are not doing well. Review such content and find out how you can make it more useful. You may also find some content with old data that needs to be updated.
• Delete: If you are not able to change a piece of content or an update would take too much energy, it is better to eliminate it from your website. Also, you may have a few articles or landing pages created for seasonal marketing that you no longer need.

#4 Analyze Your Competitors

Learning how to improve website content wouldn’t be perfect without competitor analysis.

Your competitors can be very helpful when auditing your website content. You can observe what topics your competitors cover on their blog or what landing pages they’ve built. Comparing this to your website will highlight important gaps.

Competitors are an excellent source of ideas for new content and improvements to existing content. Remember that when it comes to content marketing, a competitor is anyone chasing the same audience as you.

#5 Create an Action Plan

After assessing your content, you need a list of activities to improve it. Turn all the data you’ve gathered into a clear action plan.

Assign each task to someone on your team (the writer, designer, editor, or content marketer) and start working up a list of realistic deadlines.

Here are some actionable tips to include in your content audit checklist:

• Minor edits and changes, like renaming a page, optimizing meta description, or fixing broken links
• Rewriting content significantly
• Blending content from two or more pages
• Adding images, videos, or other forms of multimedia
• Republishing a piece of content in a different form. For example, a blog can be a checklist or a series of blogs can be an ebook
• Removing unnecessary, outdated, or inappropriate pages

Conclusion

A useful content marketing strategy isn’t constant. It changes, regularly adjusts to meet its target audience’s requirements, and satisfies major SEO updates.
But your strategy won’t get better if you never conduct a content audit. By doing a website audit, you can assure that your site remains relevant and rises to the top in search engine rankings.