In the online world, staying ahead is crucial. This means that if you want to have a website that attracts a high volume of traffic and enjoys popularity, you need to take care of your content. The published content should meet the requirements of both users and search engines. It’s time to find out how to check whether your content is well-prepared – the audit will reveal the truth.
What is a content audit?
Within content marketing, a content audit plays a particularly important role. It allows you to assess the quality of the content published on a website. It is crucial to examine the value of the content for the users visiting the website. Users can immediately recognize when a text lacks value, serving only to fill space on the page without offering anything new, interesting, or encouraging engagement. This is highly unfavorable for the website and its search engine ranking. It can lead to a decrease in traffic or its complete disappearance. In the case of sales-oriented websites, this translates to a lack of profits. A content audit enables the determination of whether the website’s content contains reliable, verified information relevant to the industry. Evaluating the quality of the texts also allows the creator/owner of the website to assess their usefulness for generating traffic. Content that users consider relevant and noteworthy will make them want to return for new information. During the audit, it is possible to assess how to improve the quality of the texts, what needs modification, or what needs to be rewritten.
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Why conduct a content audit?
A content audit provides detailed and specific information about the content on a website. Some of the most significant benefits include the ability to evaluate:
- The types of texts that users demand.
- How well the website meets users’ content needs.
- How frequently new texts are published.
- The volume and diversity of published content.
- The number of users visiting the website on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.
- How many users read the entire article on the website.
- How many users return for new information.
- The target audience.
- The problems and deficiencies in the published content.
Assessing each of these elements allows for the recognition of positive aspects of the content on the website, as well as facilitating the improvement of content that has shortcomings. At the same time, during the content audit, duplicated texts can be identified. They are not only unnecessary but also have a detrimental effect on the website’s search engine ranking.
How to conduct a content audit?
Now that we understand why a content audit should be conducted, let’s focus on how it should be done. First and foremost, it is necessary to identify subpages – this is easier for small websites but more challenging for larger ones. However, locating them allows for content evaluation during the audit. Once the subpages are found (tools like Screaming Frog can be used for this purpose), the obtained results should be analyzed. This analysis includes the time users spend on the website, the number of views, and the bounce rate. This provides insights into which types or forms of content generate increased interest and which ones elicit no or minimal response. This forms the basis for optimizing content based on user interest. Similar analysis should be applied to links and metadata during the content audit. This means checking whether the texts published on the website contain links, and if so, what type and quality of links they are, where they lead, and whether they have a negative impact on the website. Links to low-quality sites are not appreciated by users. It is also necessary to examine keywords. Users find a website through keywords in search engines. The poorer the keywords, the poorer the search engine ranking. However, texts that contain too many keywords negatively affect users’ perception of the content as well as the search engine itself. Similarly, headings should be analyzed. They contribute to text readability and assist in search engine optimization.
Duplicated content in a content audit
The most important element in a content audit is the content of the published texts. During the audit, its value for the user is evaluated. The substantive value of the content from the users’ perspective should be examined. It is necessary to assess whether the content is interesting for them, whether it encourages anticipation for subsequent texts, allows them to learn more about a specific topic, and helps them achieve their goals related to the website. The quantity of texts often matters less than their quality. Users will avoid uninteresting and empty content, as well as content overloaded with keywords. Grammatical, stylistic, and spelling rules should also be verified. Texts with errors will be perceived as low-quality, and a website with such flaws will be seen as unprofessional. At the same time, during the content audit, it is possible to check whether the published texts are unique. This is a simple procedure – just copy a portion of the text into a search engine and assess the results. To obtain greater certainty, freely available text analysis programs can be used.