What is Content Audit?

Introduction

A content audit collects and analyses your website’s data, such as blog posts or landing pages. It keeps an inventory of the website and provides insights into your website content which has to be changed, updated, rewritten, or deleted.

Running a content audit on your website will improve your website’s ranking, and users will have a great experience. In addition, it will help you keep your content up to date.

If you want good content for your readers, you should consider investing time in a audit. In this article, you will learn about the roadmap to your success through a   audit.

How to Process a Content Audit?

Now, as we know, it is necessary to use it. So let us see how we can use it step by step for our website’s content.

Identify your Goals for Content Audit

You have to be sure of what you accomplish. Once you decide what you want, it will be easy to categorize your audit later since content identifies user-friendly content, tells you what gives your users a great experience, and can include information on SEO.

Your primary goal should determine which page needs to be SEO optimized. Then organize the homepage pages with unique and exciting content for your readers to give them a great experience with your website.

Gather the Content

You should first collect all the content you want to audit. Mostly the content that people audit are blog posts, product descriptions, publications and more. Decide and then get the buildup of all the content you want to audit.

Now collect all the URLs of the pages you want to audit. You can do it manually if you have a smaller website or if you have a more prominent brand; you can use different tools like SEMrush or Screaming frog.

Both tools are free of cost and available online. It provides the information using your website’s sitemap. The sitemap is something that has all the information of your website.

Sort the Content for Content Audit

Once you receive the audit, put the information on the spreadsheet to keep things organized. You can do it using some online tools. Since the data is collected, the content audit will meet your needs.

You can sort the content based on necessary information like content type, author, publication date and format. Include only essential information. Suppose, for example; you want to audit a blog post. The information you need to categorize is the type of content, publication date, author, and metadata (title tag, meta description).

The next crucial thing you need to collect is the metrics. You have different tools for this, too, online. But, again, you can use google analytics. Metrics will provide more information for you to analyze later.

So let us go over everything you need on your spreadsheet—URLs of your web pages, content data, metadata, metrics etc.

Analyze the Collected Data

As we have collected the data, you have rerun through it with a lot of attention. This step will give you a good measure of the position of your content. Let us note down a few points before analyzing the data you need to look for:

• Outdated content needs to be updated to maintain optimization.
• Content that is not bringing the number of clicks you want. Remove that. You don’t want unnecessary things on your website.
• The missing information on your website. Add content that your audience is interested in and not have been covered on your website.

Create Action Items for Content Audit

This is the final step where you will finalize and clean up the audit. We hope you got the idea about how to audit the content from the above steps. Think about the posts that need to be updated, rewritten or deleted.

Advantages of Content Audit

A content audit will help you keep your content up to date, increase your website’s ranking position, provide easy navigation to your users, and avoid errors. Other advantages of the content audit are:

It helps you understand what your audience is interested in or content, making them lose interest.

Recognizes the content is highly ranked and performs well so that you can influence the marketing materials.

Identifies the content which brings a lower number of clicks than what is desired. So you can update or delete them.

Maintaining your website becomes easier when you become aware of everything mentioned above.

So make sure that your website goes through a audit. Give enough time to your website to have a smoothly working business.