Why do you need to conduct a content audit? Here’s
why.
Doing a content audit may entail a lot of
back-breaking work and take a lot of your time but the results are definitely
well worth all the effort. By doing a content audit, you can understand what
your audience wants, provide a better user experience, increase your web
traffic and encourage visitor loyalty.
Content
Audit: What’s It All About?
In a nutshell, content audit is all about
putting together a complete picture of your existing content. It involves
making an inventory of all the pages and the content that you have
(quantitative audit or content inventory) and assessing the quality
(qualitative audit).
Both quantitative and qualitative audits
are equally important. A quantitative audit requires you to list all the pages
of your blog or website on a designated spreadsheet so you will instantly get a
solid idea of the scale of your blog or website.
The qualitative audit, on the other hand,
requires you to evaluate the quality, relevance, tone, usability and timeliness
of your content. It also requires you to assess your website
traffic (to see which pages actually get the most visits) and metadata (to
determine if the pages have relevant, keyword-rich title tags and meta
descriptions). ?
The
Importance of a Content Audit
By doing a content audit, you can determine
which content gets accessed the most by your audience and identify those that need
to be updated or deleted. By updating your content and deleting any redundant
and outdated entries, you can effectively keep
your website fresh and make it easier for your visitors to find the content
that they need. In the process, you may also find content that give you a lot
of fresh, useful ideas as well as those that can be used for other purposes.
How
to Start Auditing Your Content
As mentioned earlier, auditing your content
can be very time consuming. However, it does not need to be difficult ? if you
know how to do it right. Here are some tips that can help you conduct a
successful content audit.
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Start with a plan. Identify who will
make the audit, know where to start and determine what you want to achieve.
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Stay organized. Use a spreadsheet to
organize the details of your audit. Identify the page title, URL, category and
keywords, and indicate whether it should stay, needs updating or should be
deleted. You also need to indicate the traffic and social popularity of each
page.
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Think SEO. If you are using your
keywords as your anchor text, then it’s time to change some of them.
Summing it up, a content audit can give you
a clearer understanding on what you have and what you need to do to get to where
you want to go. It can also give you an idea of what your visitors think of
your site and the kind of content that they want.
