Researching and publishing an article online is probably one or two of the most challenging tasks a content writers need to do during their shift.
Have you ever imagined how writers, content creators, and producers feel after seeing their publication materials are up online?
There might have been some relief and pride that comes with it, for there are those who went through various challenges to have their content fact-checked or error-proof by their editors.
Unfortunately, producing content dont just end the moment you post it. The real competition happens after. Tracking its traffic, engagement, and performance.
Now, try to think of all the articles or blogs you made – the good and the not so good ones. How do you improve those articles that don’t seem to pass your performance metrics?
If you think that content audit to spot articles that don’t deliver much, our post intends to help you discover content audit and its importance to your brand’s website.
You will also have FREE access of Roots Digital’s SEO content audit template!
What is a Content Audit?
A content audit is a systematic process of analysing, collecting, and reviewing the assets on your website. It keeps an inventory of your landing pages, blog posts and other documentation on your website.
This process provides essential insights, allows you to look closely at pieces of content that need optimisation, and permits you to create, rewrite, and delete blogs that are low performing.
When done correctly, you will be able to point out areas of your content that have gaps and lapses causing your brand’s website poor engagement and organic traffic.
Why is Content Audit Important?
If you are following our SEO series, you might think that the articles we released are sufficient enough for you to perform your SEO campaign.
Well, let us add more to that for a complete SEO experience. Content Audit and its benefits.
We want to share with you why this process should be part of your SEO audit practice.
Benefits of the content audit.
- Shows data-driven insight into your content’s performance.
- Identify pieces of content that are low performing.
- Opens areas of your content for updating, repurposing or reassessing.
- Point out valuable content that drives traffic and leads to sale conversion.
- An effective way to understand your audience preferences.
Few reasons why you need to regularly audit your content:
Target
Is your content hitting your goals? How much of those content drives your visitors into paying customers? You will have a concrete answer to these questions if you check your content’s performance regularly.
Keep updated
One of the best reasons to perform regular content audits is to stay in the loop. You will know what type of content or blog post garners the most traffic or following. You have metrics to track your SEO performance and progress. If your content doesn’t pass the criteria, you have set, it will be easier for you to revise or turn it down completely. Keeping fresh content on your website is significant to your SEO health as well.
Fact-checking and Accuracy
Every second the world changes. And the content that you produce is not an exemption from this. Your content ages, too. It matters that you check which content requires updating and repositioning. Keep in mind that the data and facts of yesterday can be inaccurate today. Regularly auditing your content will not only ensure fresh posts but guarantees accurate and reliable information. This factor greatly affects your brand’s reputation and search rankings.
How to Run Content Audit?
As your interest starts to build up while reading this post, we know you are eager now to know how to run your content audit.
As always, we recommend you start with straightforward and attainable factors such as:
Setting the KPI of the Content
An audit requires indicators to achieve its goals.
For you to have substantial data to guide your next move, you must establish your KPI or Key Performance Indicators.
What are the things that you deemed as essential when gauging the success of your content?
Here are some metrics that you can use for your KPIs:
- Social shares
- Comments or Engagement
- Conversions
- Organic Traffic
- Bounce rate
- Unique visitors
- Page per session
- Backlinks
Gathering and Categorising Content
Organising is a key element of SEO implementation.
When you strategise on crafting or producing your content, it matters that you categorise them logically.
In gathering your content, ensure to collect all URLs of the web pages that you desire to audit and place them all in a spreadsheet. If you have a big website, you may use online SEO tools like SEMrush, Screaming Frog, and HubSpot.
Once you are done with your audit, head on in categorising your content by type, author(s), publication date, and content format. Through this, it will keep the information organised and easy to read.
Keep in mind always to use categories that are relevant to your content.
Analysing and Creating Action Plan
Data are stories that need to be interpreted. In this stage, you must critically review what each data are telling you as it will give you a sound measurement of the state of your content.
Analysing data can be overwhelming especially for non-SEO professionals, but don’t get too intimidated right away. Here are some things that you can do when analysing.
1. Identify the type of content your audiences want you to cover
2. Find underperforming content.
3. Highlight content that is high performing.
4. Review stake or outdated content and subject them to revisions to maintain optimisation.
Creating an action plan is an exciting part.
In this phase, you will finalise your audit. You have already significant points to guide you on where to focus.
Weigh whether you have to delete, keep, update, repurpose or re-wite your blog posts. You may add these remarks to your spreadsheet to help you see the bigger picture moving forward.
Action plans are vital to your overall SEO campaigns, not only during the content audit. It depends on whether you would love to have it like a calendar or a to-do list. So, you will never forget about it and you’re sure to perform it religiously.
Go back to your goals and execute what will fit suitably to your plan.
Tools to Help Content Audit
Screaming Frog
You are familiar with Screaming Frog as an audit tool already. As a website crawler, Screaming Frog collects URLs from your sitemap and creates an SEO audit for you.
This SEO online tool provides you with substantial information about your website and categorises analysis for you. Another thing why we recommend this tool is because it is an SEO-based audit tool already which gives you information on how to improve your SEO implementation.
Semrush
Users of SEMrush can receive a robust audit. When you key in your desired domain, you will generate a customised report that shows you areas for improvement of your brand’s website.
SEMrush carries also features that allow you to connect to your analytics tool account, like Google Analytics. Using Google Analytics can help you develop a strategy based on the information it processes and shows you – like posts that are the most engaging for your audience.
Google Analytics
Yes. Google Analytics doesn’t carry auditing features but it will show you valuable information that you can use to formulate your auditing method.
It provides you with your website’s visitors’ insights: location, behaviour, and impressions to name a few.
SEO Content Audit Template
You may want to use Roots Digital’s SEO content audit template to make everything easier on your end. Kindly access and download the Roots Digital SEO content audit FREE template at this link.
Final Thoughts
Performing a content audit is extremely important and exhausting. We aren’t going to come clean here.
Our SEO service can attest to how intricate it can be sometimes to collect, analyse and structure content audit for our clients, but the best things always come out from challenging processes. And our team at Roots Digital are up for that challenge.
Content plays an integral role in making up your brand’s existence online. It’s what makes your presence felt and valued. If you continue to create content just for the sake of gaining visitors but lack the drive to improve on every article you produce, you will not thrive.
Competition is everywhere. The landscape of what people demands are changing drastically every second. For you to flourish and create a name for yourself and your brand, take content audit seriously and by heart.
If this process is burdensome for you and your team, we are one call away. Set your appointment now and will assure you of a smooth content audit journey.
FAQ
How Do You Audit SEO Content?
When you run an SEO audit for your website, remember the following:
– Set the KPI of the Content
– Gather and Categorise Content
– Analyse and Creat Action Plan
You may use online SEO tools available too.
What Should be Included in SEO Content Audit?
Here are some of the elements that should be present in your SEO content audit:
1. Date.
2. Title.
3. URL.
4. Author.
5. The production team involved in crafting the piece
6. Total Time
7. The Content-Type
8. Content Goal
9. Word count.
10. Comments.
11. Shares.
Which Tool is the Best Fit to Do Content Audit?
We recommend you use these three tools to help you begin your content audit journey.
– Screaming Frog
– SEMrush
– Google Analytics
