You regularly visit the doctor for checkups, even if you aren’t sick. You go to the doctor to PREVENT you from getting sick. By keeping up with these visits, the doctor can give you a status report on your health and catch any issues while they’re still minor and easy to solve.
Without those checkups, you might not receive medical care until an issue has begun wreaking complete havoc on your system and causing irreparable damage to your body.
Your website also needs regular checkups, which marketers call content audits. They are a crucial website health checkup that gives you the status of your website’s performance while also alerting you to any issues before they cause more significant problems.
Without a content audit, you’ll miss out on vital health updates and won’t know there are issues until your site shows severe damage, such as a drop in traffic or conversions. It also alerts you to what’s performing well and new opportunities to continue growing your site.
Let’s unlock the secrets of the content audit through this guide so you can begin giving your site its much-needed regular checkups.
What Is a Website Content Audit?
A content audit is a complete check of your content. Content includes all the assets on your website, such as blog posts, landing pages, and web pages. Leave no page overlooked.
Yes, that does sound like it takes time. That’s why most people perform these at least once annually. About 61% of marketers perform content audits two or more times in a year.
But, it’s not a task you want to skim over as you may miss crucial signs of issues or new opportunites.
What exactly are you looking for? Here are a few signs of issues:
- Errors
- Outdated content
- Repetitive content
- Poor content
As you perform a content audit, you will decide what needs fixing, updating, or deletion.
Ultimately, you’ll create a more positive user experience as readers encounter fewer errors and confusing or outdated content. The regular updates also keep your content relevant and running smoothly, boosting your search engine ranking.
Why a Website Content Audit Is a Must
Could you run a website without a content audit? Technically speaking, yes, you could. But that would be like living in a house without ever cleaning it. The house might remain standing, but the dust buildup and grime will scare away visitors and even cost you your health.
A content audit keeps your website looking updated, active, and valuable to your target audience so they feel welcome and eager to explore further.
Here are the top benefits of conducting regular content audits:
- Performance Insights: You’ll gain insights into your content performance. If you want a successful website that attracts monthly traffic, you need to create content with high-performance rates. Reviewing your analytics during your audit builds a clear picture of your topics and formats that generate the most traffic, engagement, and conversions.
- Audience Understanding: Knowing your audience drives your content, and your final goal is to connect and convert that audience. You want to understand their interests, pain points, motivating factors, and life changes. Understanding what content your audience engages with gives you glimpses into those details and what they might find most valuable.
- Improved Ranking: When you refresh and update content, it becomes more appealing to both your audience and Google. High-quality, valuable content ranks higher in search results, boosting organic traffic.
These benefits offset the time and effort you invest in content audits. You’ll see better traffic, higher search engine ranking, and improved visitor impressions. One SEMrush report found that about half of those who regularly updated their content saw higher engagement and ranking.
How to Do a Content Audit to Maximize Your SEO
Are you excited to start enjoying those benefits on your website?
Dive into the five steps of performing an SEO content audit to get you started. Because of the time a content audit takes, we highly recommend scheduling it in your calendar so you have enough time blocked out to dive into your content performance and make the most of your findings.
If you’re a small site, a day may be enough. Larger sites will require several days to fully analyze.
1. Define Your Goals
Before you invest a single dime or hour in your content audit, you need to answer the why behind the audit. Your goals will provide context to your audit and focus on what you hope to accomplish. Without goals, your audit would easily take several weeks rather than days because of reading through hundreds of articles and pages.
You don’t need to read through everything. Just the data that’s most relevant to your goal.
Some ideas to inspire you include:
- Improving your SEO
- Fixing technical errors
- Identifying missing content
- Understanding website visitors
- Boosting engagement
- Increasing conversions
Once you have set one or more goals, you will also know what metrics to focus on so you don’t drown in all the data you’ll uncover during your audit.
2. Take Inventory of Your Site’s Content
It’s time to roll up your sleeves and begin the hard work.
To truly understand your content and its performance, you’ll want to inventory what content currently lives on your website. It’s the only way to ensure you review every page for quality, value, and optimization.
The longer you have had a site with regularly published content, the longer this step will take.
We use spreadsheets to keep your content organized. You can detail the key points you want to track on the sheet and easily share it with relevant parties.
Start by adding these columns to your spreadsheet:
- URL
- Date audited
- Title
- Description
- Content type
- Keywords
- Alt tags
- Last updated
- Internal links
Some other columns you might add, depending on your goal, include:
- Shares
- Comments
- Word count
- Content goal
While you can type this information manually, we highly recommend exporting as much as possible. If you work with HubSpot, it can export much of your website content for you, and then you can manually enter any details it didn’t add that you would like to know. Google Analytics is another valuable tool for exporting a page list under your site content tab.
3. Begin Analyzing Your Data
Now that you have a complete list of all your content, you can begin reviewing and comparing what you have. If you don’t already, we recommend creating and referencing a standardized guidebook outlining quality content.
At Express Writers, we have guidelines that detail our grammar rules, internal linking rules, external links, quality standards, and SEO process. It may seem extreme initially, but it helps keep our content consistent and helps us define what quality content is.
You will also want to compare your content to Google’s standards to improve your search engine ranking.
Here are a few areas you’ll spend the most time analyzing:
- Keywords: Does the content contain a focus and secondary keywords? Are those keywords still ranking in Google?
- URL and Page Title: Do both feature your page’s focus keyword? Is the title unique and descriptive?
- Meta Description: Does your description accurately depict what your page’s content is about in less than 155 characters? Does it contain your keyword?
- Content: Is your content valuable to readers? Is it well-written and free of grammatical, spelling, or factual errors? Is there any information that you need to update?
- SEO: Does the content have the focus keyword strategically placed throughout, such as in the intro, title, and subheadings?
- Linking: Does the page contain both internal and external links? Are all the links still functional?
While you’re reviewing your content, take notes. You’ll want to note your top-performing content and your poorest-performing content. Each group will have several articles under it to give you a good idea of what performs best and what needs work. It can also provide insights into the type of content your audience wants the most.
As you review your content, note any gaps. These are topics in your industry you haven’t covered much or at all. You will use these topics to fill in your content calendar. If you are performing your content audit near the start of the year, you have a win-win situation: refreshed website and free content ideas!
4. Map Out Your Next Action Steps
Once you have identified what is working well and where your content might need help, you can begin marking your content spreadsheet with follow-up actions.
You will mark all pages on your site, including landing pages and blog posts.
We have simplified this process considerably by using only three actions for all content: Keep, Update, Delete. We added a column to our spreadsheet to enter the most relevant action.
- Keep: This content performs well and has checked all the boxes. You don’t need to do anything further for this content. It’s relevant, quality, and optimized content. You might further divide this group by marketing some of the best-performing content to repurpose in emails, social media, and other marketing campaigns.
- Update: It needs an update if your content is missing details, like a keyword or internal links. You’ll also add most of your content over two years old to this category, as that’s when evergreen content begins to lose its value, so you can give it a little spring cleaning to keep it relevant. As you update content, check statistics, links, and SEO.
- Delete: Not all content will last forever. Some content will no longer serve a purpose. It might discuss a service you no longer offer, cover an outdated technology, or simply does not resonate with your target audience. Keeping that content clogs up your archive and may prevent readers from finding relevant content. You can also boost your site’s speed by deleting any content that takes up space and speed.
Once you have these categories, you’ll want to prioritize the actions, especially for the update group. Cornerstone content and website pages will need to be higher in your refresh queue than other content to ensure you can keep your site running smoothly. Outsourcing your content updates will help you knock out those crucial items first.
5. Optional: Invest in Tools to Assist with Your Audit
If you have a large site, you’re probably looking at this process and beginning to panic. I know, it seems like a lot.
Thankfully, several tools available can help with many of these stages. Here are some of our favorite tools.
Google Analytics can help you dig into those engagement metrics and data to more accurately rank your content and identify where visitors stop.
Screamingfrog is one of the leading tools for downloading URLs and other vital details you’ll need for your audit to save you hours of manually entering those details.
SEMrush allows you to pull a complete content audit. This audit details performance data and identifies technical issues such as broken links and slow page load speed.
BuzzSumo will help you with your next steps. Once you save your content in the categories, you can search those topics in Buzzsumo to see what’s receiving the most engagement to help you know how best to update your content to boost engagement.
Content Strategies from Express Writers complement your audit. Our strategist helps you dig deeper into your data, understanding how it impacts performance and providing a roadmap forward.
We Can Help with Your Content Audit
As you’re conducting your website content audit, you’re sure to find plenty of needed updates. It might be older content or newer content that never quite reached those content goals.
Rather than investing all your time and energy only in new content, let’s take another look at your past content. We can help you update them, improving their quality and performance so you have less to tackle with your annual content audit.
Do you want to take your audit a step further?
Our content strategist can review the data and conduct more research on your site. Then, the strategist can present new opportunities, including keyword gaps.
Contact us to get started with updating your content and learning more about our content strategist services.