Audit Folder Log
Content audits are critical elements when it comes to successfully implementing content marketing . They are a powerful way to improve website traffic quickly. If you have a website that is 3-5 years old, have regular content cellphone number philippines format production, and have never performed a content audit, you should expect your organic traffic to increase 50-100% or more when you go through your first audit and improvement program.
From a technical standpoint, if you have a lot of outdated and non-functional pages, the crawling effectiveness of Google robots is seriously hampered. When robots have to crawl, say, 1,000 URLs to find 100 good ones, they will take note and not spend as much time crawling your content in the future.
From a marketing perspective, your content represents your brand. Maintaining, updating, and improving your content for your audience determines how visitors and customers view you as an authority in your industry. A clear topical focus, ease of discovery, and guaranteed value for users all come from optimizing and curating your existing content.
Regular content maintenance is not only worthwhile, but an essential effort to ensure that your content is and remains useful to you.
When performing content audits, we organize content elements into three categories:
Good : The content that generates the most traffic, the one with the highest conversion, the one that is linked to and the one that is shared.
Improve : Content that generates below-average results but covers a relevant subtopic.
Delete : Content that does not produce ROI and covers a topic/subtopic that is no longer relevant to the business.
Let’s talk about how a content audit will address these categories.
Steps to complete a basic content audit:
1. Decide what you want from your content
Define the main metrics you want to achieve with your content. Common goals are site traffic, backlinks, social shares, conversions, sales, and business growth. Every page on your site should contribute to at least one of these, and any page that doesn't promote at least one of these goals falls into the scrap pile .
Mandatory pages like About Us or Contact are exceptions to this general categorization. You may be able to improve these pages (meta descriptions, URL slugs, etc.), but they are outside of this general content analysis/audit.
2. Gather all your content
Start by finding all the pages on your website. You can pull them from your site’s backend or from your sitemap. Depending on the content management system you use, it may be as simple as exporting the pages to a spreadsheet. URLs can also be obtained from Google Analytics data , Google Search Console, or a thorough crawl with your tool of choice. Put this information into a spreadsheet with columns for URL, page title, page type (such as blog or landing page), and metrics (such as monthly traffic, backlinks, shares, and conversions).
3. Classify your content: Good, Needs Improvement and Delete
Keep track of where your traffic, backlinks, and conversions have come from over the past year. Use a tool like BuzzSumo to find which pages have gained traction on social media and where the backlinks to your content are. Google Analytics in Google Search Console can show you traffic to individual URLs.
Pages with above-average (or threshold) results for your metrics go into the "Good" pile. Pages with below-average results for any of the metrics go into the "Improve" pile. Pages with zeros for any of the metrics go into the "Delete" pile.
These are some questions to ask yourself when evaluating what to keep, what to improve, and what to eliminate .
Is it worth people's time? Is it useful, informative or entertaining? Does it answer questions, help solve problems or keep the reader interested?
Is it worth it for our company? Does it gain organic rankings, traffic, or backlinks? Does it provide business value by helping to drive conversions? Does it help establish branding or build authority effectively? Does it cover a critical subtopic of its topic cluster ?
Is it relevant to our work? There is no reason, with rare exceptions, to retain content that is not at least distantly related to your website, your industry and your customers.
Have we said it before? Duplicate content helps no one and bogs down your site. If you have content that has been better covered elsewhere, then it needs to be merged with the best performing content asset or pruned.
Content Marketing Blueprint