5 Steps to Perform a Complete Content Audit for Your Website

Author: Team WH

Published On: 04-07-23

Last Updated on: 11-12-23

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

With rapid development fuelled by the growth of technology, the amount of information out there constantly evolves. Ask yourself – are you keeping up with this evolution?

To ensure your content is up to date, you need to pre-plan and organise. This is where content audit proves to be extremely useful. With a clear idea of every aspect of your content, you can analyse the success metrics and refer to them for future posts.

But how to audit your website content? Here’s a complete guide to help you out.

What is Content Auditing?

A content audit is a process of systematically going through your content inventory on the website to analyse performance. This includes checking on existing content like:

• Web pages
• Landing pages
• Service pages
• Blogs
• Product descriptions
• Video content
• Whitepapers

The audit review clarifies if your content strategy is working to meet the right audience and your goals. With this analysis, you can find out what content to keep, update, delete, and what to create in the future.

Why is a Content Audit Useful?

The aim is to analyse website content to reveal the strengths and weaknesses of the content strategy. Based on this, you can develop a content marketing strategy and workflow that fits your goals.

The overall need for the content audit process can be summed up into the following:

• It points to specific parts of your content need that require improvement. For instance, your content potential may be low because of missing keywords, absence of metadata, or broken links.
• Auditing gives you an aerial view of your website content. You can identify certain changes, shortcomings, and power moves from here.
• The optimisations following an audit enhance website authority. Putting out quality content means increasing trust, sales, and conversions.
• This data-backed analysis helps you acknowledge the rights and wrongs in your content strategy. You can improve future content creation with clarity on what content works better.

When Should You Consider Doing a Website Content Audit?

You must take up an audit of your website content in the following cases:

• During your quarterly overall business content strategy review.
• If you have an old website which has never been audited before.
• While deciding on a new content marketing strategy, to know which elements to focus on.
• When you wish to redesign your website and existing content.

5 Steps to Conducting a Content Audit

1. Set Up Your Business Goals

As obvious as it sounds, having clarity about your goals before the audit can help you work to achieve targets. You can ensure that your stakeholders are aligned and prevent wasting efforts and time on vaguely addressing issues.

Understand your present goals and sort them according to the business’s relevance and priority. Your content audit checklist goals can look like this:

• Increased engagement
• Better conversions
• More organic traffic
• Removing redundancy
• Clearing old, outdated posts
• Opting for a new website structure

2. Organise What Needs Review

Knowing your goals, you can now work on the exact sections that need review/update.

You can classify pages manually on spreadsheets or take the help of online tools. It is best to use tools for accuracy if you have too many pages on the website. Once it is all laid out on the sheet, track separate elements such as:

• URL
• Author
• Title
• Content type
• Word count
• Shares

3. Analyse the Data and Track Metrics

With the goals outlined and items collected, it is time to get working!

Check out the metrics for the existing pages as per category. Analyse what strategies lead to the best results over time and which failed. Based on this, you can choose a format to apply to future posts, delete, or revamp existing ones.

Determine the major KPIs as per your goals. They can be:

• Conversions
• Traffic source
• Bounce rate
• Social shares
• Mobile optimisation
• Average time on page
• Backlinks
• Top ranking keywords

Pro tip: Keep in mind to judge your metrics as per Google’s E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness).

4. Gather Numbers and Get Calculating

This might be a dull step for most, but do not overlook its importance!

Well, you already have your goals set with the necessary items collected. You even know how you want to grade them for better ranking. So, pull the required data for each page to put it into numbers.

Looking straight at numbers and figures will direct you to plan exact steps and compare performance over time.

With this, it is time to grade your pages based on the numerical proof of performance. Evaluate pages as per efficiency. You can mark them with symbols that signify updates, edits, removals, etc.

5. Take Actionable Steps Based on Analysis

It’s now time to join all the dots to the success roadmap.

With the gathered data, you will have a heap of detailed insights. Sort it out as per priority, categorise pages based on edits necessary, and track improvements.

We know there must be a lot to do. Hence, it’s best to begin working on the most urgent aspects first. This way, you can concentrate on covering the essentials with reasonable effort. As you go on, you can develop a new content marketing strategy too.

Wrapping Up

It’s time to go through your website content inventory and identify weaknesses and strengths. It is necessary to step back and analyse your techniques to ensure that you are hitting the bulls-eye with all your content arrows.

Content auditing helps you review and analyse your strategies to develop planned improvements. Get to it with the rightly arranged steps that make this process systematic.

While a content audit seems hectic, you can not skip it! So, when is your audit due?

People Also Ask

1. How often do websites need content audits?

3-6 months is a good timeline to review and audit content. Auditing your website regularly helps you keep at it and reduce piled-up tasks later.

2. What is SEO content audit?

SEO content audit stands for assessing the prevailing website content to optimise SEO performance. SEO audit aims to look at organic traffic acquisition, conversions, leads, etc.

3. What is the difference between content audit and content inventory?

All the website’s digital content, like URL, author, metadata, titles, etc, make up the content inventory. Content audit refers to analysing existing content quality to improve and update.