How To Run Content Audit?

by | Jan 31, 2023

When was the last time you thoroughly analyzed and did a complete inventory of your content? The process of doing this analysis and assessing all the content on your website is called a content audit.

Nowadays, most content creators are so preoccupied with producing new content that they don’t pay more attention to auditing their earlier work. And if it has been more than a year, then your content strategy can be based on out-of-date data.

Moreover, Google introduced the ‘Helpful Content Update’ in August 2022, a brand-new ranking factor intended to lessen the visibility of subpar content. And, if your website gets hit with that penalty, then the only method to get out of it is to do content audits.

Simply put, content audits are a clever and strategic approach to assess your previous content marketing efforts and gain a clear understanding of how they aid or impede your goals.

Why Should You Do A Website Content Audit?

A website content audit has a heap of advantages, such as:

  1. Assisting you in making data-backed decisions about which pages should be properly optimized.
  2. Highlight the web pages on your site that have poor SEO.
  3. Locating SEO opportunities and content gaps that you can replace with fresh content.
  4. Enhancing the reader experience by raising the standard of the content on your website.
  5. Identify the content you can reuse.
  6. Make a thorough inventory of your content to simplify future content marketing strategies.
  7. Enhancing the diversity and accessibility of your content.

How To Run A Website Content Audit?

You should review your content marketing strategy at least once a year to ensure your methods and activities align with your business’s objectives. Although a complete content audit process may be time-consuming, dividing it into small steps is simple.

1. Determine your goals

The first step is to consider your business goals, such as improving your search engine optimization (SEO), content quality, increasing audience engagement, and conversion optimization. Once your goals have been established, you must align them with pertinent content metrics.

Content metrics include SEO metrics (organic traffic, backlinks, keyword rankings, dwell time, etc.), user behavior metrics (page views, average session duration, bounce rate, etc.), engagement metrics ( likes, shares, comments, mentions, etc.) and sales metrics (number of leads, ROI, conversion rates, etc.).

For instance, if you want to identify the most popular topic and provide more content to them, then you should analyze user behavior and engagement metrics. And if you intend to concentrate on your SEO performance, check the number of backlinks and examine your rankings in search engines. Then place the most engaging and effective content on your homepage for your website visitors to win in organic search.

2. Perform a content inventory

Before compiling a list of URLs and metrics, reviewing the existing content is critical. You may check the internal content, such as blog posts, news articles, instructional materials, product descriptions, landing pages, and external publications.

Then, begin your inventory by gathering all the URLs for the websites you wish to analyze. The best approach to collect these is to utilize an online content audit tool that can swiftly audit your content based on your sitemap data and provide you with a list of URLs and related metrics.

A reputed digital marketing agency can guide you in selecting the best analytics tools.

After gathering your URLs, using a content auditing tool or content audit templates, catalog your content by the following categories:

  • Content types like blog posts, product descriptions, website pages, or a landing page
  • Content format like text only, images or videos present, with or without a call to action
  • Word count
  • Meta descriptions
  • Date of publication or latest modified
  • Author

Finally, establish columns with your metrics to identify content for each web page and ensure all pertinent data points are included.

How to run a website content audit

3. Collect data

Obtain data from several sources, then manually enter it into your content audit spreadsheet or download a content audit template. And if you want to save time, use content audit tools that automatically gather information based on your objectives and KPIs.

To expand and deepen your data, link your Google Analytics account and Google Search Console. It provides in-depth insights, and for each URL, you can examine more stats, such as sessions, average session length, page views, page title tags, average time on page, bounce rate, and search queries.

4. Analyze your data

At this point, it’s time to examine your data closely. This stage will provide you with a reliable assessment of your content assets. Some factors to consider while assessing your data include missing information, underperforming content, outdated information, and home run content.

Then, based on the findings of this study, sort the information in the spreadsheet. Depending on your examination, you may assign various colors and highlight the rows with those colors.

5. Create an action plan

At this phase, based on the analysis, you now know what to prioritize and can go forward. Consider which old site content you should edit, rewrite, or reorganize. For example, remove low-quality pages that don’t target keywords or offer your readers little value.

Also, individual pages may not receive organic traffic, but they may offer valuable context to Google through internal links. In that case, choose where you think it is viable to raise page quality and optimize older content for certain organic searches.

After you’ve sorted your priority list, make an action plan for each piece of content. And to ensure that you can monitor it, add one last column to the spreadsheet, preferably one towards the top. You may use this column to determine what to do on a URL. For instance, will you rewrite, update, delete, or keep that blog post?

You can also utilize a website content audit checklist to ensure your audit is done correctly.

How Can KloudPortal Help?

KloudPortal’s top digital marketing services outline which approach is best for your company, which strategy is geared at, and how to reach the audience. Its free website SEO audit provides you with information and areas for improvement.

Also, the well-known digital marketing agency provides various digital transformation solutions, including social media advertising, content development and optimization, SEO services, and sales services. So, why wait? Schedule a meeting with our experts today.

Bishnupriya Pradhan

Bishnu Priya

About The Author…

Bishnupriya Pradhan hails from the serene hill station in Odisha, Koraput. As a Veterinary Science and Animal Husbandry graduate, she has served as a Veterinary Assistant Surgeon for the Government of Odisha and also worked as a Research Associate in Bharat Biotech’s RCC Laboratories, Hyderabad. Researching and writing on diverse topics has always been her passion. She chose to be a content writer to exercise her writing skills and creativity and produce a quality write-up that can reach scores of online readers.

We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it.

Cookies settings
Accept
Privacy & Cookie policy
Privacy & Cookies policy
Cookie name Active

Privacy Policy

What information do we collect?

We collect information from you when you register on our site or place an order. When ordering or registering on our site, as appropriate, you may be asked to enter your: name, e-mail address or mailing address.

What do we use your information for?

Any of the information we collect from you may be used in one of the following ways: To personalize your experience (your information helps us to better respond to your individual needs) To improve our website (we continually strive to improve our website offerings based on the information and feedback we receive from you) To improve customer service (your information helps us to more effectively respond to your customer service requests and support needs) To process transactions Your information, whether public or private, will not be sold, exchanged, transferred, or given to any other company for any reason whatsoever, without your consent, other than for the express purpose of delivering the purchased product or service requested. To administer a contest, promotion, survey or other site feature To send periodic emails The email address you provide for order processing, will only be used to send you information and updates pertaining to your order.

How do we protect your information?

We implement a variety of security measures to maintain the safety of your personal information when you place an order or enter, submit, or access your personal information. We offer the use of a secure server. All supplied sensitive/credit information is transmitted via Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology and then encrypted into our Payment gateway providers database only to be accessible by those authorized with special access rights to such systems, and are required to?keep the information confidential. After a transaction, your private information (credit cards, social security numbers, financials, etc.) will not be kept on file for more than 60 days.

Do we use cookies?

Yes (Cookies are small files that a site or its service provider transfers to your computers hard drive through your Web browser (if you allow) that enables the sites or service providers systems to recognize your browser and capture and remember certain information We use cookies to help us remember and process the items in your shopping cart, understand and save your preferences for future visits, keep track of advertisements and compile aggregate data about site traffic and site interaction so that we can offer better site experiences and tools in the future. We may contract with third-party service providers to assist us in better understanding our site visitors. These service providers are not permitted to use the information collected on our behalf except to help us conduct and improve our business. If you prefer, you can choose to have your computer warn you each time a cookie is being sent, or you can choose to turn off all cookies via your browser settings. Like most websites, if you turn your cookies off, some of our services may not function properly. However, you can still place orders by contacting customer service. Google Analytics We use Google Analytics on our sites for anonymous reporting of site usage and for advertising on the site. If you would like to opt-out of Google Analytics monitoring your behaviour on our sites please use this link (https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout/)

Do we disclose any information to outside parties?

We do not sell, trade, or otherwise transfer to outside parties your personally identifiable information. This does not include trusted third parties who assist us in operating our website, conducting our business, or servicing you, so long as those parties agree to keep this information confidential. We may also release your information when we believe release is appropriate to comply with the law, enforce our site policies, or protect ours or others rights, property, or safety. However, non-personally identifiable visitor information may be provided to other parties for marketing, advertising, or other uses.

Registration

The minimum information we need to register you is your name, email address and a password. We will ask you more questions for different services, including sales promotions. Unless we say otherwise, you have to answer all the registration questions. We may also ask some other, voluntary questions during registration for certain services (for example, professional networks) so we can gain a clearer understanding of who you are. This also allows us to personalise services for you. To assist us in our marketing, in addition to the data that you provide to us if you register, we may also obtain data from trusted third parties to help us understand what you might be interested in. This ‘profiling’ information is produced from a variety of sources, including publicly available data (such as the electoral roll) or from sources such as surveys and polls where you have given your permission for your data to be shared. You can choose not to have such data shared with the Guardian from these sources by logging into your account and changing the settings in the privacy section. After you have registered, and with your permission, we may send you emails we think may interest you. Newsletters may be personalised based on what you have been reading on theguardian.com. At any time you can decide not to receive these emails and will be able to ‘unsubscribe’. Logging in using social networking credentials If you log-in to our sites using a Facebook log-in, you are granting permission to Facebook to share your user details with us. This will include your name, email address, date of birth and location which will then be used to form a Guardian identity. You can also use your picture from Facebook as part of your profile. This will also allow us and Facebook to share your, networks, user ID and any other information you choose to share according to your Facebook account settings. If you remove the Guardian app from your Facebook settings, we will no longer have access to this information. If you log-in to our sites using a Google log-in, you grant permission to Google to share your user details with us. This will include your name, email address, date of birth, sex and location which we will then use to form a Guardian identity. You may use your picture from Google as part of your profile. This also allows us to share your networks, user ID and any other information you choose to share according to your Google account settings. If you remove the Guardian from your Google settings, we will no longer have access to this information. If you log-in to our sites using a twitter log-in, we receive your avatar (the small picture that appears next to your tweets) and twitter username.

Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act Compliance

We are in compliance with the requirements of COPPA (Childrens Online Privacy Protection Act), we do not collect any information from anyone under 13 years of age. Our website, products and services are all directed to people who are at least 13 years old or older.

Updating your personal information

We offer a ‘My details’ page (also known as Dashboard), where you can update your personal information at any time, and change your marketing preferences. You can get to this page from most pages on the site – simply click on the ‘My details’ link at the top of the screen when you are signed in.

Online Privacy Policy Only

This online privacy policy applies only to information collected through our website and not to information collected offline.

Your Consent

By using our site, you consent to our privacy policy.

Changes to our Privacy Policy

If we decide to change our privacy policy, we will post those changes on this page.
Save settings
Cookies settings