Having high-quality, relevant, and helpful content is vital in 2022. Great content will allow you and your business to reach your desired target audiences with the information that they are searching for, bringing them to your website and giving you the ability to engage and interact with them. No matter how big your business is, you will be able to harness the power of good content to drive engagement, leads, and sales.
But if you’ve been producing content that isn’t ranking well, what can you do to improve its value and exposure on the search engine results page? The answer is a content audit.
A content audit is a process of analysing and assessing all the content on your website. It reveals the strengths and weaknesses in your content strategy and allows you to optimise existing content to perform better on the search engine results page.
Why Audit Your Content?
Your main goal when auditing content should be seeking opportunities to improve the quality and relevance. The content should answer your audiences’ concerns, queries, and questions. The key benefit of conducting a content audit for you and your business will be the positive impact on your SEO, which in turn will improve the user experience too.
How to Perform a Content Audit
There are three steps to a basic content audit, each of which will take some time to complete but must be conducted thoroughly to guarantee the desired impact.
1. Create a content list
The first step is to gather all the content into one large list, including blog posts, website page content, social media posts, etc. You can use platforms such as Screaming Frog or SEMrush to do this for you, so you don’t need to do it manually yourself.
Once collected, you will need to organise your list of content. You can search online for free content audit templates that will help you organise your content in an effective way for you. When finished, you should have a spreadsheet with your content grouped within a sheet and organised by the page URLs, H1s, metadata, and other relevant information that you deem important.
2. Categorise your content
It’s time to move on to categorising your content to help you spot recurring themes and understand the strengths and weaknesses of the content. For example, it may become clear which pages are lacking SEO best practices such as keyword optimisation within the meta titles and description. Some of the categories you may want to include for analysis are:
- URL
- Heading 1
- Meta title and meta description
- Content format (blog, social post, product page, etc.)
- Content purpose
- Customer journey stage
- Main focus keyword
- Internal links
- Outbound links
Now you’ll be ready for the final stage of the content audit process.
3. Content analysis & updating
The analysis stage will require you to identify the weaknesses of the current underperforming content and establish what needs to be done in order to better optimise the content for more success. This may be an outdated blog post that needs updating with more relevant and current information, for example.
With the content analysed, you can now prioritise which changes will have the biggest impact and should therefore be completed first.
topclick has an excellent team and more than 20 years of experience, where we have gained priceless knowledge that will help us to deliver an expertly tailored SEO service for your specific business niche. As part of our service, we will give you regular updates, access to granular SEO reporting metrics; as well as a dedicated account manager to help you achieve the results you need. Contact us today for more information.