If you’re looking to maximize your website’s reach or rate higher on the search engine results page (SERP), your first thought may be to create brand new content.
We’re here to tell you that there’s another way!
Think of your website like a closet. If it’s filled with years of clothing items you no longer wear — or maybe forgot you had — you’re less likely to put together nicer outfits. In this case, the best solution is to do an audit.
This is exactly what we do for website’s content.
Performing a content audit is a great way to take stock of what your website already has to offer as well as what needs to be improved, added, or removed.
Here are five steps you can take right now to create a killer content audit for your site:
What is Content Audit?
Before we look at how to create a content audit, let’s start with explaining what a content audit is.
A content audit is the process of performing a qualitative assessment on an existing website, analyzing content like blog posts or landing pages, in order to keep inventory and provide insight on what to keep, update, or omit.
Benefits of Performing a Content Audit
There are numerous benefits of performing a content audit. Typically, a content audit can answer questions regarding SEO, page optimization, page performance, and audience engagement. If you don’t understand why your website isn’t ranking high on the SERP or why one of your blog posts underperformed, a content audit can give you that information.
A few other benefits of a content audit include:
- Content performance insight backed by data allowing you to build a strategy based on factual information
- The ability to discover weaker content on your website so you can then repurpose it instead of creating new content from scratch
- The ability to identify your strongest ranking content, therefore providing you valuable insight on what works
- A better understanding of your current and desired audience
While this may sound like the perfect solution (it is), it does, however, require time, resources, and possibly a professional content strategy team that can help curate your perfect website.
Five Steps for Creating a Killer Content Audit
Now that we have the basics, let’s take a look at how you can begin auditing your website’s content in five steps!
Step 1: Identify Your Goals
With any audit, you will want to first identify your goals and objectives. Are you looking to rank higher on the SERP, target a new audience, or improve your content’s SEO by creating SEO-friendly content? Maybe you’re looking to do all three.
With a goal in mind, you can tailor the insight you’ll receive in your audit to meet your desired outcome.
Step 2: Collect Your Content
The next step in the process is to collect the content you will want to audit. It can be anything from blog posts, landing pages, product descriptions, PDFs, or videos.
Pro Tip: Create a spreadsheet of all of your URLs to make a clean, organized list of your data. This can help you visualize what needs to be kept, changed, or omitted.
For expert support in content organization, check out Americaneagle.com’s digital marketing services today!
Step 3: Analyze Your Data
This is an important step of the content audit process as it’s going to give you a look at the state of your content. During the process, here’s a few things to look out for:
- What content is missing – Do your competitors have content you don’t? Now’s the time to create!
- What content isn’t doing well – If a landing page, blog post, etc. isn’t performing, you’ll want to optimize it.
- What content is old – Do you have an outdated blog post that is no longer ranking? Might be time to update it.
- What content is doing well – analyzing content that is performing well is just as important as analyzing content that isn’t. Use your best content as a reference.
Use this information and write down the results in the spreadsheet made in Step 2. This will help you stay organized and on-track.
Pro Tip: Color code based on the criteria you set (i.e. yellow is for content that’s doing well and blue is for old content).
Step 4: Create an Action Plan
You’ve gathered your data, now what? This is the step where you put it into action.
Using the tips from Step 2 and Step 3 that helped organize the data, you can now create an action plan for each content piece. Here are a few tips that will help you get started:
- Condense pages – If you have multiple URLs that are disorganized, create one section that you can add a drop-down bar for. Landing pages will then have a dedicated space on your website that looks clean and organized.
- Upgrade your content – This can mean rewriting, expanding, refreshing, and restructuring your current content. Adding new tips, examples, or H2 and H3 tags can really help your content stand out.
- Update CTAs – If you have outdated banners, rewrite your CTAs to make them more user-friendly.
- Add videos and images – Incorporating videos and images to your existing content can increase engagement from users as well as increase the chances of ending up on the SERP.
- Check backlinks – Old content could have broken backlinks that no longer work. Checking that your backlinks still work builds audience trust and tells search engines that you have quality information on your site.
Step 5: Adapt Your Content Marketing Strategy
In order to keep up with the ever-changing environment of the internet, you will want to constantly adapt your content marketing strategy to meet the needs of your goals.
It’s all full-circle.
Review your content annually to determine what is working and what needs to be revised. If your industry is always evolving, you will want to be as well.
Looking to Audit Your Site's Content?
Are you looking to audit your website’s content, but don’t know where to start?
Let the professionals at Americaneagle.com take care of that for you. Our team of experienced digital marketers, content strategists, and writers are here to help make sure your website is performing how it should be.
Contact us today to get started!