If you’ve noticed your conversion metrics are slowing down, or you aren’t having as much success with your SEO strategy, it may be time to review your website content. By conducting an SEO content audit you’ll be able to see which content pieces on your website are in need of improvements. This can help open up more opportunities to improve upon your search engine rankings as well as help increase your conversion rates.
What Is An SEO Content Audit?
A content audit is the process of collecting and analyzing different assets on a website such as landing pages, blogs, and other posts. Content audits keep the inventory of a website and provide analytical insight into which content to create, update, re-write, or delete. It’s a useful practice to incorporate into your SEO and content strategy to help keep your content in top shape and give you a better chance at a higher search engine ranking.
How To Start An SEO Content Audit?
Before you begin your audit you’ll want to establish what your goals are going to be. Having goals set can help you better pick and choose what opportunities you want to focus on and improve. Some goals to focus on are improving SEO rankings, organic traffic, conversion rates, etc. Be sure to keep your goals in mind when conducting your audit.
1. Gather Your Content
To begin your audit, start by collecting all of the content you are wanting to review. It can be product descriptions, meta descriptions, blogs, landing pages, etc. One of the easiest ways to do this is to upload your sitemap to helpful programs such as HubSpot, Screaming Frog, and SEMrush. Or you can list them yourself in a spreadsheet.
You’ll also want to be sure that your spreadsheet lists the metrics associated with each page. Knowing how much traffic or how many conversions are coming from a certain page can help you decide what to work on and how to do so.
2. Analyze Your Metrics
Now, it’s time to look at your metrics and see how well your content is doing. This is the step that will give you a good look at the state of your website content. Here are some thing to keep in mind when analyzing the data:
- What content is missing — What is your audience interested in that you haven’t covered?
- Content that’s underperforming — Which pieces of content aren’t getting the numbers you want?
- Outdated content — If you have old content, can it be updated or reworked to improve optimization?
- Home run content — Content that has performed extremely well.
Based on the results of this analysis, organize them in the spreadsheet. One of the better ways to organize your sheet is to color code it. Color coding your sheet will help you know what content piece is having what done to it. This is a great way to ensure the right updates are being made.
3. Create Action Items
Once you’ve pulled your data and reviewed it, it’s time to get to work. By now you should have a pretty good idea of what to work on based on the analysis in step 2. You should mark on your data sheet what changes are being made to what pieces of content to keep in mind when reviewing how things have improved in the future. Always remember to compare your data to see how things have changed for both better or worse.
The Takeaway
The key takeaway is that an SEO content audit is a great way to view how successful your content strategy has been. This is a great best practice to incorporate as it allows digital marketers to view all their content data in one place and easily see how things are progressing based on their optimizations. Be sure to keep track of what changes you make to your content strategy and review how your metrics change over time.