The process of analyzing and evaluating the elements and information on a website is called a content audit. Content audits are important to conduct so companies can determine what areas to improve in a website’s search engine optimization and discover how its content marketing efforts are performing based on page length, social shares, and visit metrics.
Content audits help companies uncover which marketing content performs best, which topics an audience prefers, where pages contain overlapping content and can stir up ideas for future content.
When performing a content audit, first determine the purpose and desired result of it. It could be to determine the most engaging content for visitors to place it on the website’s homepage or determine what pages to SEO optimization to increase conversion rates.
Next, gathering all web page URLs into a spreadsheet can be done quickly by online tools like Screaming Frog, SEMrush, and Hubspot. These online programs will provide information about the website’s sitemap and be sorted by content, metric data, categories, and metadata. Google Analytics is a great tool to use for gathering data for analysis.
Once all the data is organized and ready to go, note what content is underperforming, missing, outdated, and performed extremely well. Lastly, develop a list of action items to clean up your website based on the audit.
One tip for conducting a content audit includes choosing three metrics to measure. By not selecting a dozen metrics to use, insights can be more easily drawn from the data, whether that is focusing on traffic, bounce rates, number of backlinks, time spent on a page, conversions, or engagement. Another tip is to look for trends in the data and create a grading system for content to easily identify how content is performing.