How to Do a Content Audit of Your Website – A Step-by-Step Guide
Let’s look at a hypothetical: you’ve had a website for a while and though it used to perform decently, it’s suddenly not yielding the traffic you’ve come to expect. Your first instinct might be to panic, but that’s not a productive response. Jumping into targeted action and doing a website content audit is a better option.
It’s sometimes difficult to know how to improve your website. But there is a solution. Performing a full content audit will reveal precisely what’s working and what’s not currently. And from there, you can implement a plan of action to elevate those aspects of your site that are doing well right now and eliminate or improve those that aren’t cutting it.
Here, we’ll walk you through the process of performing a full content audit of your site. From identifying goals to data collection, analysis, and improvement. However, we’ll be spending most of our time discussing how to figure out what type of data you need to collect in the first place as that is the part most people struggle with.
Identify Your Primary Goal
Before you do anything else, you need to figure out what the purpose of doing a content audit on your website will be. What information are you trying to figure out? And what do you want to do with that information once you’ve collected it?
Without a goal, you’ll just be collecting data with no purpose. In fact, having a goal could actually save you some time. You might not need certain bits of information for what you’re trying to achieve, and to collect it would spell a waste of time.
Potential Goals
Of course, you can also pick more than one goal or analyze several aspects of your content. With a few goal ideas in mind, let’s now talk about what you need to have on hand to start your website content audit.
What Is a Content Audit?
A content audit is the process of assessing and analyzing the performance of all your website’s content. The aim is to create a content audit report that empowers you to improve your content marketing strategy — and as a result, rank higher in search engine result pages (SERPs), improve audience engagement and raise conversion rates.
Depending on your marketing goals, many different metrics and KPIs (key performance indicators) can be used to evaluate content. You’ll need to assess each piece of content against your chosen KPIs and assign it 1 of 5 actions:
The content audit process can help you uncover detailed information about your target audience and the way they engage with your content. You can use this invaluable information to improve your marketing strategies.
Finally, the information you uncover from a content audit can also help you prioritize the tasks that will produce the largest ROI, so you can get the most from your limited resources.
Final Thoughts
What are you trying to achieve with your website content audit? If you know what information you’re trying to find, you’ll be able to use these steps to guide you through that process.
Content Refined was born from a desire to simplify the process of content creation. With our clients, we want to have the personal touch and mutual respect of an in-house marketing team, but without the cost of in-house employees. To accomplish this, we pair each client up with a Project Manager.
Resource:
https://torquemag.io/2020/08/content-audit-website/
https://www.gokantaloupe.com/marketing-guides/how-to-do-a-content-audit-step-by-step
https://www.contentrefined.com/website-content-audit/