To achieve the content marketing goals, it is essential to follow the search engine guidelines and keep a strict check on your website. This is important to maintain the ranking in the search engine. Thus, one should do audits of the website regularly to get positive outcomes. The primary purpose reveals the strengths and weaknesses of the content strategy and adapts the content plan to achieve the marketing goals. If this is your first experience regarding the website and you don’t know how to carry out a website audit, we have listed a step-by-step guide to do audits of your online platform.
Define Your Goals, And Metrics
A content audit is a challenging and time-consuming process. Thus, it is essential to make a defined objective to make your website successful. To set the goals, you can do the following things.
Set your SEO goals in which you have to identify the web pages with high SEO potential to tank in the top 10. Moreover, understand the content that needs upgradations well as removal from the website. Lastly, optimize your internal linking.
The next thing in this step is to increase the engagement of the audience. This identifies the type of content that is engaging. Plus, find out the topics that your visitors love to read and determine the kind of content that will improve the audience’s engagement.
Content Inventory
When you are doing a content audit, it is essential to decide what kind of content you will check. There is a need to do a review before creating the URLs and metrics. One should audit the blog posts, educational materials, landing pages, product descriptions, and other types of content like video, PDF or quizzes, or tests. To create the inventory, collect the URLs of web pages for those you want to analyze.
You can make a catalogue by having the sitemap. It is not helpful for content audit but also assists you to know the website structure. One can create a record of the content by using the categories like buyer’s journey stage, content format, number of words, author-date of publication or last modifications.
Collecting And Analyzing Data
Data collection is a long process. There is a need to recover data by using multiple sources and adding data manually on a spreadsheet. If you want to save your time, then try to use a content audit tool to collect the information automatically according to the goals you have set for your website. Several tools are available that audit the website content and provide the various data like content authors, metadata, content length with each URL.
Drawing An Action Plan
Once you assess the content, there is a need to set a plan to improve it. It will be based on the goals as well as outcomes you are expecting from the analysis. To draw an action plan, you have to prioritize the actions for each URL. For this, you have to invest in a content plan that is according to your business plan. After that, you have to prioritize based on the business goals. For example, you can do actions like adding a few links to an article to bring positive outcomes.
To create the action plan for URL, you can do the following things
- Reuse your content by using the content in different formats like slides or infographics
- Rewriting the content in a unique way and with new examples
- Lengthen the content by adding more authentic details
- Refresh your content by adding some fresh and relevant information,
- Structuring of content adding suitable H2 and H3 tags
- Upgradation of the CTAs by adding new banners or adding new offers.
- The addition of videos enhance the traffic to the website
- The addition of images also increase chances of appearing in SERP features
- Optimization of metadata
- Optimization of internal linking
Adjustment Of The Content Marketing Strategy
Image source: OptinMonster
When you are doing the website content audit, it is essential to have a term marketing strategy. This will enable you to take your website towards success. To make a marketing strategy adjustment, you should check what will work and what will not.
You can check the competitor’s site. Moreover, review your content marketing strategy to ensure the activities and tactics that meet your business goals. You should review your website frequently. Try to do a review once a month or every fourth month. This will help you find innovative ways for engaging and reaching your audience.
Technology has been changing day by day. The thing that may work today may not be practical tomorrow, so you should adopt the plan and bring innovation from time to time. Thus, there is a need to do content audits at least two times a year to focus and make adjustments to your business.
These are five steps you should do to do an audit of your website to get positive outcomes.
Website Content Audit Checklist
It would be best if you did a website content audit review once following all five steps. These are given below.
- The first thing is that your business goals should be clear before doing a content audit. It is essential to get fruitful results. Setting up business goals include improving SEO results, conversion rate, and engagement of the audience. You should match them with different metrics and compare these bounce rates, organic traffic, and ROI.
- Secondly, you have to collect the URLs of your content. After that, catalogue your content by content type, journey stages, and other categories.
- Data collection on the performance of content assets is the third thing you have to do while preparing an audit checklist.
Benefits Of The Website Content Audit
Performing website audits plays a significant role in making websites the top ranking. There are several benefits associated with a website audit. Some of them are discussed below
- Help In Determining Problems In Your Content
The key benefit of the website content audit is that you can review the asset of the content. Therefore, you can address the performance issues, broken links, and issues in site accessibility. In this way, you can resolve problems, and the fixes will increase the search value of your site.
Identifying opportunities for repurposing content: The up-to-date information contributes to search ranking, visitor loyalty, and site usability. You can use the contributed articles to meet the specific objectives of the website.
- Diagnosing The Content Gaps
The content audit helps in diagnosing the gaps between the content. The audit helps highlight the areas where there is a lack of information that your audience wants to check. By noticing the site’s content gaps, you can modify your content that will add value to your brand or site.
- Evaluation Of The Content Quality
By doing an audit of your website, you can evaluate the quality of your content. You can get to know the level of the quality. Plus, you can identify either short, light, lengthy, or rich? You can penalize your site ranking for content that is of low quality.
- Helps Improve Site Ranking
Using the pertinent analytics data, you can determine the compelling content engaging for the search engines and audience.
In conclusion
Website audits play a massive role in growing your website. The repeated analysis will help you rectify and eliminate the shortcoming to build the perfect business platform. The above-given tips should assist you through it. Until then, all the best!