In a content audit, all the content on your website is analyzed for strengths and weaknesses. As part of your audit, you'll examine your website's content, including blog posts, landing pages, and multimedia. The goal is to improve the site's performance by identifying pages that can be rewritten, reposted, or deleted.
Anyway, motivation comes from benefits. In order to carry out a thorough website content audit effectively, you must understand its true purpose.
A Content Audit: Is It the Right Step for Your Business?
No matter what type of business you have, you should conduct a content audit if you have a website. Content audits are beneficial for both existing companies and startups.
Businesses that have been around for quite a while and whose websites have been around for even longer may have a large amount of outdated or irrelevant content. Doing a content audit will help you focus on what matters. Getting rid of the contents that slow down your website's functionality and blur your company's goal is an opportunity to improve your website's functionality.
A content audit can offer you guidance and help you strategically build out the content on your website if you have a brand new website with barely any content. For example, your website may currently only have a home page, a services page, an about us page, and a contact page.
A content audit can reveal whether you should add a blog, FAQ page, or meet the team page to your website.
What Are the Benefits of Doing This, Though?
You can benefit from conducting a comprehensive content audit in the following ways:
1. Increase organic traffic.
Finding those small changes that will have a significant impact is easier with a content audit. For example, optimizing just a few pages of a site can result in significant traffic increases.
2. Relevance is the key to your content.
Your content audit will review every article you have ever published on your website to ensure it remains relevant for your current audience. Maybe the industry is going through a change. There could also be a lack of use of some of the tactics or tools you published. By performing a content audit, you can update and improve old content and stay on top of industry trends.
Performing content audits and reviewing content assets can help you identify areas where your content performs poorly. The user interface can also be improved, broken links can be fixed, and the overall user experience can be improved by fixing broken links. Your articles must have a catchy title, an informational body, and relevant information.
3. Avoid content cannibalization.
If your website has multiple pieces of similar content, it is a case of content cannibalization. Because internal URLs will compete against each other, this could negatively affect your ranking on search engines. When you perform a content audit, you will be able to spot this mistake. If you're not, you can ensure that your content calendar does not include posts similar to those already on the website.
Consider a personal finance website where you have three separate posts all focused on "how to check your credit score." Conducting a content audit can prevent problems like this from occurring.
4. Decide what new content to create.
Content audits help you determine what topics your audience is most interested in (and least interested in). Your future content strategy can be shaped by finding out which pages drive the most traffic.
5. Building a more accessible and structured website.
You might have good content on your website, but it is hard to find and not easily accessible.
A good website's structure makes it stand out. Besides producing tons of content regularly, your users and search engines should locate them quickly. To do this, you can use SEO tools.
6. Maximize Conversion Rate.
This is perhaps the most important reason to perform a content audit. Audits need to look at the top landing pages in addition to their design, content, and calls-to-action to make sure they maximize conversions. However, this is not an easy task.
ROI (return on investment) is an important goal every business wants to achieve with a website. Therefore, a company must ensure its content is optimized through strategic planning and analysis.
7. Enhanced Usability.
To provide your website visitors with the best experience possible, determine your website's content structure and functionalities.
Uncertain site purposes and inaccessible pages are only a few reasons people leave a website and never come back. These areas can be identified and corrected with a content audit.
8. Find the gaps in your content.
A content audit is not only a way to document the information on a website, but it also shows areas where there are information gaps.
- This could be valuable information for the audience. Finding the website's content gaps will assist you in creating new content that will be relevant for both the site and the brand.
- Discovering new topics may expand the target audience. It's easier to convert traffic into sales when you appeal to a larger audience. You can use content audit tools to see where information gaps are.
- A website with no structure will make it impossible to tell if visitors are in the right place to find the information they are looking for.
9. Improve Your SEO.
Over the past few years, there has been a significant shift in search engine optimization, and this shift has been positive. Each year, Google makes approximately 500 changes to its search engine algorithm.
Likely, today's best practices will not hold true next year or even next month. Good SEO aims to provide the ideal user experience first and satisfy search engines second. You can maintain your SEO consistency when you focus primarily on users. Users expect Google to provide the very best websites when they run a search.
- Users won't return to your site if they have a bad experience with it, so you're wasting your time, and that is what Google will use against you.
- An audit of your website will assess both how your SEO compares to the overall user experience and how you can strike a balance that makes both Google and users happy. Content audit tools will help you catalog and optimize tags, images, and word counts associated with all the content assets on the website and then compare them against the rank of each asset. By doing so, it will be possible to determine what changes need to be made to improve the natural search performance of the blog or website.
Conclusion
After learning about the benefits of content audits and how to conduct one, we hope that you'll feel confident enough to apply them to your website. An audit should not be something that happens once in a blue moon.
It should instead be a continuous process that you utilize regularly on your website and other marketing channels. As a result, the subsequent audits aren't time-consuming or too difficult to complete, and you can quickly achieve your content marketing goals.
