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Content Audit: A Comprehensive guide to boost your content’s performance

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You probably have asked yourself how to measure the quality of your website content? What steps need to be followed to spot the problems within your content marketing strategy to bring more performance and better ranking?

The answer is to run a content audit. Content audit is an essential part of your inbound marketing strategy. Learn the four steps for conducting a review of all your website’s content.

    What is content audit and why it is essential?

    Website content audit plays a crucial part in optimising a website to be SEO friendly and bring the best user experience. Your website content needs to be fresh, useful and relevant to your targeted traffics requirements. When time passed, the content on your website can become irrelevant or inaccurate. Therefore the ranking will go down as Google hasn’t seen your updated information, and by default, the search engine will downgrade your website and prioritise other new contents which are fresh and meet user needs.

    Identifying whether your website is facing those issues requires auditing of your website content to find out the core problem and modify it accordingly.

    How to Perform a Content Audit? 

    Define your business objectives

    Before starting, identify what your goals are. As a constructive audit takes a lot of time, therefore it is vital to determine what insights you are looking. What information are you expecting to gain from the content audit? And how this information can help to achieve your goals?

    Here are five examples of your potential goals: 

    • To identify which pages of your website are generating the most traffic.
    • To understand which part of the website helps to improve the SEO results.
    • To find new SEO opportunities for your website to rank in the top 10.
    • To figure out a new digital marketing strategy for the website.
    • To determine which content is irrelevant and can be removed.

    Usually, content audits are performed for either SEO or Content Marketing purposes. 

    Gather all the URLs in one place

    The second step is to put all the URLs into one file. There are three crawling tools that you can use to collect all the URLs: Screaming Frog, URL Profiler and SEMrush Content Audit.

    These tools will collect all the information regarding your websites, and you can download this data. There are ways you can do it manually by using Microsoft Spreadsheets or Google sheets. After collecting all the URLs, it is time to categorise based on the following factors:

    • Content-type
    • Content format
    • Number of words
    • Date of publication
    • Author

    It would be beneficial to collect metadata: Title, Meta description and all the Headings (h1).

    Analyse the Data

    The next step after creating an inventory for the content on your website is to see how your web pages are performing.

     Here are some popular content audit tools:

    •  Google Analytics: This is a comprehensive yet FREE analytic tool that any webmaster needs to know. The tool will give all essential information and valuable insights into your website performance, such as click-through rate, average time users spent on a page, bounce rate, etc.
    • SEMrush: This is one of the best all-in-one marketing analytics software that offers solutions for SEO, PPC, content, social media and competitive research. It also provides a FREE browser extension for content auditing. 
    • Dyno Mapper: The tool will inventory your website and create an interactive visual site map that displays the website hierarchy and includes Google Analytics, easy access to all your inventory Information, and comment capability for efficient collaboration with decision-makers.
    The metrics that you might want to track can be divided into four categories:
    • SEO metrics: Use the relevant keywords, HTML to Text Ratio, internal and external linking, backlinks, entity building, social submission, structured data, Gzip, etc.

    • User behaviour metrics: Page view, the average time that the user spent on the content, Bounce rate.
    • Engagement metric: likes, shares, comments, etc.
    • Sales metrics: Number of leads, conversion rate, ROI, etc.

    Through using the content audit tools set, we can track all four metrics that are presented above. In the analysis, we need to find out which part of the website is performing poorly based on the set parameters.

    Create an action plan

    After you have finished analysing and identifying core problems, you need to come up with an action plan. Based on the results and information, now you need to update the content to make it fresh and more relevant by adding the keywords and republish the material. Republishing your content is one of the best tricks to improve your page rank and get more traffic.

    Developing an actionable content strategy will help improve inbound marketing and also help achieve business objectives. A weekly site health check is required to make sure your website ranks do not go down or being affected by dirty backlink. Audit website content to come up with new best practices SEOstrategy.

    Google keeps updating its algorithms, so it is important to check back your content quality and its performance to make sure your website content is up to date. Additionally, make use of all free content audit software available on the internet to improve your website’s quality and to bring more performance and better ranking.

    Check out the other blogs on content marketing at The Hash Agency to ace your content marketing strategy. 

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