Benefits of a Content Audit
A content audit involves evaluating the performance of your website’s content, while assessing strengths and weaknesses. Using these results, you can find opportunities for growth and new target audiences.
Using a content calendar helps you prioritize and organize content ideas for your website. Thoughtfully planning your content production can make the difference between a transactional task and a strategic move to engage clients, increase your online conversions, and establish credibility in your industry.
But planning a content calendar can be difficult when you don’t know where to start. That’s how a content audit can help. When you analyze your website content, you can identify both weaknesses and opportunities.
Many of our clients can’t remember the last time they reviewed content on their own websites. However, evaluating current content performance is a key factor in determining your website’s success long-term. With the fast churn of information, refreshing and repurposing existing content should be a monthly focus for your content team. Otherwise, you could be missing out on positive results.
Why do a content audit? An audit will highlight areas of improvement, so you can make meaningful changes. Then you’ll have the ability to uncover new topics for audience expansion and increased online exposure.
What is a Content Audit?
An audit analyzes a website’s indexed content and the overall performance of each page by reviewing articles, white papers, FAQs, infographics, sales pages, etc.
A complete audit will give you an understanding of your assets, and a new perspective on where those assets fit within your overall strategy. This helps you gain comprehensive knowledge of the content types you should produce as you move forward.
Why is a Content Audit Useful?
An audit may sound overwhelming; however, it is useful because the benefits of a content audit are limitless. After reviewing the content and gaining perspective, you can identify your online assets and how to best utilize or improve each.
Data Insights
When you invest time into an audit, it provides essential data insights, including:
- Social engagement trends
- High-performing blog articles based on lead/sales conversions
- Top-performing sales articles based on organic search
- And much more
You can determine what assets bring quality traffic and conversions by looking at factual data.
Increased Life Span of Your Content
One of the most significant benefits of an audit is the data collected regarding customer interaction. Less interaction and fewer visits could reveal that an article or page is outdated, incorrect, or irrelevant. This presents an opportunity to refresh the content.
There are many ways to resurrect old content, such as:
- Updating keyword research for new trends or searches
- Adding additional content when necessary
- Analyzing search intent
- Improving your title or headlines
- Improving calls to action
- And much more
Improved SEO Performance
A content audit can improve your search engine optimization performance in many ways. By fixing issues you find, you may see improvements within Google rankings and a possible increase in traffic to your website. Other SEO benefits include:
- Better conversion rates
- Removal of duplicate pages that may be similar
- Fixing keyword cannibalization concerns
Find Content Gaps
A content gap is the lack of content concerning trending and/or relative material that could and should align with your target audience. If a hole is found, there are many ways to search for additional content for your online marketing needs. Options include:
- Checking the competition and trends within your niche
- Leveraging relationships with colleagues and peers
- Engaging in community discussions
Identifying content gaps can increase your chances of success by revitalizing the opportunities within your digital marketing outline, possibly leading to more search traffic.
Time-consuming as an audit may be, quarterly evaluations of your content are crucial for understanding what pages are trending, and what topics within your content may need revisions. With hyperfocus, you can take your online marketing to the next level as changes evolve into 2023.
Contact us today if you have questions about content creation or keyword research, or to inquire about our content audit service. We are here to take your digital content to the next level.