Improve Traffic to Your Website with a Content Audit
Content is always king in the world of marketing. Unfortunately, most businesses lack a unified and cohesive strategy for developing and maintaining their website content. This then leads to low organic traffic, marketing inefficiencies, and declining sales. Poor content and bad user experience often drive away organic traffic, which leads to low conversions. Improve traffic to your website with a content audit.
Fortunately, you can improve and grow traffic to your website with a content audit. A content audit helps to identify and fix underperforming content on a website before it damages user experience, traffic, and the sales funnel. Acting on the findings from a content audit can boost user engagement, improve conversion rates, and increase traffic.
What Does Content Audit Mean?
A content audit involves a thorough review of website pages to evaluate the performance of the content uploaded. This involves identifying if the content fits your target customers’ journey, meets your goals, and identifies other essential information.
A complete content audit should help website owners identify which pages to keep as they are and those that require updates. For instance, web pages with outdated and low-converting content should be updated. The content audit also refines content creation, as it prevents duplication of work.
Who Should Perform Content Audit?
Project managers and authors of the website content should conduct this audit. This is because no-third party agent can understand your industry, products, and unique selling proposition better than they do. Even though you might require outside help to develop updated content to meet specific goals, it is prudent to keep the content audit in-house.
How Often Should You Conduct Content Audit?
Websites are just a presentation tool for your content. As such, keeping your content fresh, insightful, and impactful should be an ongoing commitment. Therefore, while there are no hard rules when it comes to the frequency of performing a content audit, having a quarterly content audit schedule is prudent.
Performing content audits at such intervals provides access to fresh performance metrics, makes it easy to manage and interpret data, and assures that you are within the industry standards. Before running a content audit, ensure that you have an accurate buyer persona and a clearly mapped customer purchase journey. Auditing should enable website owners to refocus their content to suit their customers’ needs. All content should correlate with the specific target audience.
How to Conduct Content Audit
There are two major steps to conduct a proper content audit and improve traffic. The first procedure is content inventory, which helps in identifying and locating all content on your website. The second procedure is the audit, which helps assess content performance, relevance, and adherence to your content marketing strategy.
During the inventory, you should compile several aspects of content on your website. Among them are content URL, page title, content type, word count, author, keywords used, date it was last updated, broken links, and more. With this information, you can proceed to the main audit.
As mentioned, the second step involves evaluating the content’s purpose, accuracy, design, intended audience, and consistency of information in the content. At this step, you should also assess page performance issues. This includes engagement data, and why people are bouncing off quickly or staying longer. You can do this by evaluating the traffic and engagement data of individual pages.
Bottom Line
A content audit can help to prevent content decay, improve conversions, SEO, and overall website traffic. It also helps to seal content gaps, which reduce the website bounce rate, as visitors will find what they are looking for. However, to maximize the benefits of a content audit, treat it as an ongoing process and not a one-off activity. Implementing changes after a thorough audit should lead to noticeable results with a measurable boost in your site’s performance.