By Anna May Trogstad
An effective website content audit should be done annually and if executed well it can deliver invaluable insights into your content marketing strategy.
A recent study shows that 52% of B2B marketers attribute business stagnancy to a lack of effective content marketing, and 57% believe that not enough time dedicated to content marketing decreases an organization’s content marketing success. Despite these numbers, only 37% of B2B marketers report having a content marketing strategy.
It’s easy to understand why you need to carry out a website content audit. A good content audit will take time and this should be considered before beginning such a project. If you cannot devote the amount of time required to complete a quality audit it is better to wait until you can.
What is a content audit?
A content audit involves reviewing all the content on your website to evaluate strengths and weaknesses. It will help you gain insights into how to prioritize your future marketing strategy and how to effectively grow your website.
A content audit is not a content inventory, and should not be mistaken for one. Although you will need to do an inventory of your content during a content audit, an audit goes much further and is a qualitative assessment of the content on your website. To conduct an effective website content audit, follow these steps:
Step 1: Identify all of your content
Begin by collating all of the content on your website in one place. You can do this by using a web content crawling tool which will identify your current content and collate a spreadsheet of this information. There are many crawling tools available, some paid and some free. These tools search your site and import all of your URLs into one manageable table.
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Step 2: Gather additional data
Once you have identified all the URLs on your website, you can use the crawling tool to gather KPIs and SEO data for each URL. This data will help you to understand which content is working on your website and which is not. If you choose to use a crawling tool that doesn’t gather KPI and SEO data, you will need to import your list of URLs into a tool that does.
Potential SEO data to collect:
- Page titles
- Page visits—This will give you basic but valuable insight into which URLs are most popular.
- Average time on a page/bounce rate—This will tell you whether or not viewers are bounding through your website or actually taking the time to read the content.
Content marketing data to collect:
- Internal and external inbound links
- Date last updated—If a page has been updated on several occasions and is still not receiving a high amount of visitors, it may be time to delete this content.
- Word count—This may give you a further insight into the performance of a page based on whether there is too much or too little content available.
- Type of content—Blog posts, status page, etc.
- Content author—Who originally created or edited the post.
- Shared count—This will show you the number of times a URL is shared using social media.
It is not necessary to collect every variable of asset data; instead, tailor the collection to only a handful of possible data types that will provide the insights that you need. You can do this by determining what goals you want your website to achieve and selecting data that will help you to understand how to move closer to those goals.
If there are specific goals you want to achieve, you can create a grading system for how well a URL performs against those goals. Create a new column on your spreadsheet to record a grade for each URL. This will help you determine which content should be kept, updated, or even deleted.
Note: Depending on the size of your website, it could take days or weeks to collect all of the information you need.
Step 3: Analyze your data
Once you have collected a large list of data, you will pull information from it. The grading system suggested earlier will help you to decide what action needs to be taken. You may want to create a new column on your spreadsheet that details the action to be taken for each URL.
For those URLs graded as requiring an update, take a look at why they require updating. If the information on the page is out of date, the action required simply may be to update the content. Or you may find that the number of page views for a URL is particularly high, but it has not performed well with social shares. The action here may be to develop a strategy to promote existing popular content on social media in order to increase social shares and visitors.
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If your website uses a mixture of video and written content, you may notice that URLs containing videos have more views than URLs with only written text. An action based on this data may be to use more video content to increase the number of visitors.
There is no tool that will determine which actions are required; it’s up to you to assess the data and create actions based on the information you’ve collected. If you end up having too much data, stick to analyzing the data related to the target goals of your website.
Step 4: Set deadlines for your actions
Once you have analyzed your data and decided which actions are required, start setting deadlines for completing each action. Make sure to regularly revisit your content audit to ensure you are working effectively towards your goals; also try to track your metrics regularly.
If your aim was to increase the number of visitors to old but popular content through inbound links, you should notice an increase in views through inbound links once you have made these links available. However, if you see no change, this could be because the location of the inbound links are not suitable and need to be altered, and not a reflection of the content of that URL.
Ultimately you should not stress over whether you have carried out each action perfectly. The purpose of a content audit is to make you aware of how to improve the performance of your website, and as long as you keep taking small steps, you should find that the overall performance of your website has improved the next time you do an audit.
Final audit
If you are looking to improve the performance of your website, a website content audit should not be a one-off process. It should help you to adopt a mindset of creating goal-orientated content and to effectively market your website. This, in turn, will help you to save time and money, and to grow your website successfully.
RELATED: 5 Things Every Great Content Marketer Does (And That You Can Do Too!)
The post How to Do a Website Content Audit in 4 Simple Steps appeared first on AllBusiness.com
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