Do you know how to conduct an effective website content audit? A review of the entire content of your interface will help in optimizing your content marketing efforts. The process will help in recognizing your strengths and weaknesses and leverage the content to improve your online visibility. Auditing is necessary as it unearths outdated write-ups, duplicate content, and broken links. Let’s say, last year you published a list of the best places to hire a PSD to WordPress developer. This article will automatically become irrelevant this year. Moreover, rankings of this kind change constantly and you need to provide updated information to remain relevant to the audiences. In this article, we are explaining the basic steps involved in performing the content audit on a website.
1. Create An Inventory Of Existing Content
The first step is to make a complete list of all the content you possess. It involves compiling all the URLs of your website into a list. It can be done manually if you have a small interface with very few pages. However, the task can be complicated and cumbersome for old websites with lots of text. Owners of such interfaces must use tools to build their inventory. There are solutions like Screaming Frog which will do the job for you. Users only need to provide a starting URL and the service generates the list of all the associated links. Keep in mind that these solutions can sometimes skip indexable content. It will be pertinent to use additional tools like XML Sitemaps and Google Analytics. This will help you compile a complete inventory of your existing content.
2. Categorize Content And Identify Metrics
It is now time to organize your links into different categories. This will help you identify material which is not performing well. Sort the content according to topic and length. Choose a broad list of topics which help you differentiate between webpage content and blog posts. You must also categorize the material according to relevance, tone, and datedness. Lastly, sort the material according to its SEO value. Once you have organized all the material, it is time to identify the key metrics for measuring performance. Choose criteria like page views, ranking for keywords, time on page, bounce rate, conversions, backlinks, and social shares. Gathering all this data manually will be time-consuming and exhausting. It will be sensible to use solutions to ease the entire process. You can use services like Moz, Ahrefs, ShareTally, etc. to find the metric-related data for each URL. Compile all this data in a spreadsheet and move to the next step.
3. Create An Ideal Reader Profile
Creating an ideal reader profile is an essential part of an effective website content audit. All your efforts are to make the material more readable for your audience. It is, therefore, vital to know what exactly they are interested in. This can be ascertained by researching their demographics like gender, age groups, and education levels. You must also conduct behavioral research to learn their pain points and the topics they are interested in. A psychographic analysis will help in knowing their beliefs, values, and goals. The geographic locations of the target audience also affect their interests. All this information will help you in creating an ideal reader profile. You can use the interest of your ideal reader to find the most relevant topics and keywords. It is now time to create another spreadsheet which will contain all the new keywords and subject ideas.
4. Identify Patterns And Gaps
You are now ready for another important part of the exercise- the gap analysis. Use both the spreadsheets that you have prepared to see whether the existing content matches the audience’s expectations or not. Match the new keywords and content concepts with the current content. This process will have to be done manually and will require lots of time. Note down the topics on which you do not have any material. This will helps you spot the gaps in your present strategy. You must also identify non-performing material by studying the data. See the traffic metric to identify which articles do not generate good views. By the end of the analysis, you will be aware of what should be removed from the website.
5. Recalibrate Your Content Strategy
The whole reviewing exercise will be useless if you do not use the analysis to recalibrate your strategy. Go back to your first spreadsheet and start assigning actions to each URL. For instance, if you have spotted more than one similar type of content on a single topic, you can mark them for merging. The write-ups that enjoy high rankings must be left untouched. The articles that are underperforming must be removed or improved. However, the first task on your list must be to fill the gaps by adding relevant content on new topics. Plan your content calendar according to this input and start work accordingly.
Conclusion
An effective website content audit is a time-consuming initiative but the insight it provides into website performance is worth all the efforts. All website owners must conduct this exercise on a regular basis to spot and fill the gaps in their content marketing strategy.
Brandon Graves is a Sr. WordPress Expert at WPGeeks Ltd – A company that convert website to wordpress in a convenient manner. She is a passionate writer and loves to share WordPress relates tutorials.
