I am sure you will agree with me when I say that it is easier to achieve our goals and objectives if we have a clear vision of what we want. Because, in fact, when we know what we have and what works for us, it is much easier to define the strategy we will employ to achieve our goals.
That’s why today we will talk about how to do a detailed content audit of your website. A content audit is a way to know in detail what we got: the positive and the negative.
Often too, many people just look at the content and don’t think about what to do with it. This is counterproductive because we have a lot of content and no idea how to improve it or if it is even worth improving.
What is a content audit?
A content audit is a detailed review of all the content of a website with the goal to know if the content is delivering the expected results we need to achieve our objectives.
Auditing allows us to know what are the strengths and weaknesses of our content. In general, we always seek to measure some of the following metrics:
SEO metrics. The purpose of these is to know what content is ranking and how much traffic we are getting. That’s why we seek to know details such as organic traffic, backlinks, keyword ranking, time spent, etc.
User behavior metrics. These allow us to know what type of content is good or interesting for the user. To do this, we look for data from the user such as page views, the average duration of the session, bounce rate, etc.
Engagement metrics: These help to know what content connects emotionally with the user, what we call engagement. Therefore, data such as the following are useful: likes, shares, comments, mentions, etc.
Sales metrics: Finally, these help us to know which types of content are more profitable for our business, or which do not give the results we expect. Here we seek to measure details such as the number of leads, conversion rate, ROI, etc.
For example, if you need to know which are the most popular topics to create more similar content, the priority will be to analyze engagement and user behavior metrics.
And, if you want to improve ranking, looking at SEO metrics will be the priority. Or maybe you already have good organic traffic and you are interested in improving sales or lead conversions.
Why is an audit important?
A detailed audit of the content of our website shows us what are the strengths and weaknesses of the strategy we are implementing. This way we will know what to improve and what not to improve, therefore, the main benefits are:
- Identify the web pages that are performing well.
- Which ones we should improve
- Identify content gaps for the creation of new content.
- Having control of the topics we have covered
- And what types of audience we are attracting
How often is it advisable to perform a content audit?
- When metrics are unfavorable. Visits, visualization, or conversions are not as expected or correct. Here it is necessary to identify which are the failures to correct them.
- Algorithm Updates. Every time Google makes a relevant algorithm update. We must do an audit to monitor how these changes are affecting our page rankings.
- Regular audit. At least once every 6 months, it may happen that we are slowly losing positions and we do not realize it.
How to perform a content audit?
1. Define objectives and criteria
The first thing to do is to define the objectives we want to achieve. This will allow us to know what to measure. Usually, before starting a content marketing strategy, the objectives are already defined. But if you don’t have the objectives you must start setting some.
A few examples:
- If your goal is to position yourself to get more organic traffic. Your goal will be to measure SEO metrics.
- Or maybe you want to improve conversion with the traffic you already get. Then your goal will be to measure conversion metrics,
- Or maybe you want to create more content that interests your audience. Here it will be useful to know what is your most popular content or at least the ones that work best for you. Measuring user behavior metrics and content engagement will be the priority.
Be careful, sometimes you will need to look at more than one metric at a time, maybe you need to improve your ranking and conversions at the same time.
It all depends on the objectives you want to achieve, it is advisable to measure in order to improve those metrics that will help you achieve a more profitable business.
2. Make a list with all the content
Now that you know what your objectives are, it will be necessary to collect data from all the content on your website. After that, you will have to add them to a list. In the list, you are going to place the data according to the criteria you need to measure.
Imagine that you want to measure the ranking. Then collecting data like the following will be useful:
- URL
- Date
- Title
- Keyword
- Keyword ranking
- Organic traffic
- Number of words
- External links
- Time of permanence
Knowing how to collect this data will be crucial for good analysis. The data you collect may vary according to the metrics you are interested in improving. Remember that the most important ones are the ones that will help you achieve your business goals. So you will have to configure the list according to your needs.
3. Analyze and apply solutions
Now that you have a clear and detailed view of your content, you will have to draw conclusions about what is working and what is not. That way you’ll know if your content plan is working or if you’ll have to make another one.
Once the analysis is ready, you will have to make a list of things to do, a plan, to keep you on target and get down to work.
Conclusion
Performing a content audit is not an impossible mission. We just need to know where to start and what to look for; we must analyze all the pages of our website that have content, trying to identify both the quality of this content and the quantity.
The main objective of doing an audit is to get an idea of what we have on our website in order to decide which parts we should improve and which ones can help us to improve our SEO strategy, generate more traffic and reach new customers.