So, What is a Content Audit?

A content audit is an inventory of all the content on your website. This includes text, images, videos, and any other form of content that you’ve published. Content audits are important – they help you identify gaps in your content in comparison to your competition, and improve the overall quality of your website for both users and the search engine. By regularly conducting audits, you can ensure that your website is always providing the best possible experience for your

Why are content audits important?

Content audits are important – they help you identify gaps in your content in comparison to your competition, and improve the overall quality of your website for both users and the search engine. By regularly conducting audits, you can ensure that your website is always providing the best possible experience for your customers.

There are a few different ways to go about conducting a content audit. The most important thing is to be thorough and methodical in your approach. Once you’ve completed your audit, you’ll be able to make research-informed decisions about how to improve your website going forward.

In this blog, we’ll be discussing what content auditing is, why it’s important, a few considerations, and what the content auditing process entails – so read on to find out everything there is to know about auditing your website content!

What is Content Auditing?

Content auditing is the process of examining URLs that exist on your website, establishing where they perform on SERPs, and planning how you can improve the performance of the page in relation to your competitors.

If you’re thinking to yourself, I’ve got loads of content on my website – then you may be missing the point of web content. While having a good amount of information on your website can be a good thing, it doesn’t mean that you’re ticking all the boxes. To truly optimise the content on your website, you need to make sure that it’s relevant to what your target audience is searching for, optimised for search engines, and is better than what exists on your competition’s websites. If you’re unsure if you tick these boxes – this is where the content audit comes in.

What Does Content Auditing Involve?

Auditing your website’s content involves a few important steps, including auditing your existing content, discovering gaps in your site’s content, evaluating duplicate content, and removing content that is bloating your site. Let’s dive into these elements and find out how they’ll play an important role in improving how your site performs.

Auditing Existing Content

The first step in conducting a content audit is to assess what you currently have. This involves looking at all the pages on your website and evaluating their quality, and their purpose.

When evaluating the quality of your content, there are a few factors you’ll need to take into consideration, such as:

• The topic of the page and whether it’s relevant to your target audience
• The overall quality of the writing
• If the page is optimised for SEO
• If the page design is user-friendly
• How well the page performs in comparison to other pages on your site and in SERPs.

“Keeping on top of your content is crucial to organic success, creating & maintaining existing content connects your brand to your customer and potential customers”

If you haven’t already, conducting and referencing keyword research that centres around your industry, products and services, should be used in every step of your content audit. When auditing your existing pages, you should be optimising the heading structures in reference to your keyword research – this will help your pages rank on SERPs for the key terms that your audience is searching for.

Discovering Gaps in Your Site’s Content

As part of your content audit, you should also be looking for any gaps in your site’s content. This involves conducting keyword research to find out what topics your target audience is searching for that you don’t have a page for.

For example, if you’re a florist and sell wedding flowers – but don’t have a dedicated page on your website discussing this service – then this would be considered a gap in your site’s content. By conducting regular keyword research, you can easily discover any gaps in your site’s content and plan to create new pages accordingly, or amend your existing copy.

Also, you can conduct research into the market and see what kind of informational content exists online regarding your industry. For example, if longer form guides on your competitor’s websites gain them a significant amount of traffic and perform well, then you should consider creating one for your website.

Content that is Bloating Your Website

It’s not always a good idea to fill a site with stacks of information. It’s true that search engines do, in fact, value sites with a substantial content offering. However, that only applies if said content is cohesive, relevant, and substantive.

A content audit might show you whether, and how, your site has grown “congested” with information. An audit will highlight pages that could be removed from your site without any negative effects – pages that aren’t performing well, lack focus, or provide little value can all be removed for a more streamlined approach.

In this case, we might choose to delete the page, but why not instead gather comparable pages and create new, bumper-sized information hubs? Serve your customers with a wealth of valuable information while also reducing the amount of bloat on your website.

The Rundown

Content audits are an important part of any digital marketing strategy and can help you identify content that isn’t performing well, and perform a deep analysis to see if your site has bloat or duplicate content. In the end, it’s about improving customer experiences by making sure their needs are met with relevant and up-to-date information. If you need help conducting a content audit, get in touch with our team at Onelink Media today! We’d be happy to help you out. Thanks for reading.