You may have the best content on your website, but is it optimized well enough to drive traffic and conversions to your site?
Well, a content audit can help answer your query and show how your content is performing. If you want to acquire more leads, revenues, and traffic to your site then determine what are the holes in your content delivery so that you could improve them.
A content audit determines which audience segment and customer purchase funnels are inefficiently resourced, compare historical performance, competitor’s performance, and which content ought to be deleted, kept, or revamped.
An audit may sound like a scary undertaking, but it isn’t. With a slight learning curve, you could perform wonders with your content once you have those actionable insights acquired via content audit.
1. Create an Inventory of Metrics
There are certain metrics that you can note down on a spreadsheet. A spreadsheet can prove to be quite useful during a content audit. you can note down all your content data there and perform analysis and jot down the outcomes.
If you aren’t sure what sort of format your content audit sheet should have, try these well-structured formats by Digital Marketing Institute and MaadMob. There are dozens of formats available on SEO sites, but it is recommended that you take one and then customize it as per your requirements. Needs vary across sites and the type of the audit (Mini or thorough) you are conducting.
Here is a list of core metrics that ought to give you a basic insight into your content performance and help you skyrocket its traffic with a few simple tweaks.
- Page title
- Word count
- Target keyword for each page
- Date of upload
- Date of the last update
- Page visits
- Time on page
- URL
- Bounce rate
- Meta description
- Content-Type
- Content Goal such as generating lead, conversions, backlinks, etc
- Total time in producing the content
- Teams that produced the content
- Dates
There are some advanced level metrics that you could consider tracking as well. The ones you choose varies on the depth and thoroughness of your audit, the time you would like to dedicate to its revamping, and the goals associated with your website.
- DA and TF of linking websites
- Image quality and their quantity per page including ALT tags
- Number Internal links per page
- Inbound links per page and their linking websites
- Broken links on the page
- Conversions per page and their value
- Level of Competition per keyword
- Current Keyword the page is ranking for
- Potential Keywords the page could rank for
- Search volume for each keyword
- Links required to rank higher per keyword
- Social shares and comments per post (Break this down by each social network and total)
- CTA and potential improvements
2. Determine the Important Content Categories
Once you have collected the data, tag the data by category to identify which sections are important and require your immediate attention. For example, tagging content by buying cycle could help see where content resources are required i.e. the top, middle or bottom of the funnel.
You could utilize a selection of tags as per your needs:
- Publish date
- Redundant, outdated, or trivial content (ROT)
- Theme
- Product line
- Content Category
- Buyer Persona
- Buyer-centric or Product-centric
- Buying Funnel
- Keywords
- Competitor
- Author
- Social shares
- Comments
- CTA
3. Assess, Analyze, and Execute
Once you have organized and tagged your data on a spreadsheet, you can have a detailed map, which could help you with your analysis and pinpoint trends.
For example, are your customers spending a lot of time on the spectrum TV customer service page Dallas? If so, then what could be the cause? Is there a product-related issue or lack of information on its TV page that has prompted this traffic here.
Which content is receiving the most traffic? Which pages are ranking for obsolete terms? Which pages are outdated? Which pages people open and exit in less than 10 seconds?
There are a lot of insights that could be obtained with that assessment. However, you better not waste time analyzing metrics that are of no use to you or you would not be doing anything about them.
It’s better to have a goal in mind. For example, if your aim is to boost your social media campaigns, focus on metrics relevant to your social networks and identify pages that need to be improved.
If your aim is to rank for certain keywords, zoom in to your search and keyword related metrics. Identify pages, which would require a content update or where you could easily build links. Assess your internal linking structure as well.
Wrapping Up
You cannot determine where you stand unless you have a check and balance in place. A content audit is a great way to achieve that and keep your content fresh, maintain it as per the search engine’s algorithm and also keep it healthily competitive.
It’s a good practice to conduct a monthly mini content audit and a quarterly thorough audit for optimal SEO results.
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