The iconic phrase “Content is King” is typically used by search engine optimization (SEO) specialists and content marketers for years. It means that the creation of high-quality, unique, relevant, and informative content can boost the online presence of a website. It is also attributed to the high ranking of the site in popular search engines like Google. But regular posting on content without a deeper understanding of all the posts may appear like you firing blacks on the Internet. It is the reason why a content audit is an essential part of a website’s content strategy.
Content audit refers to the process of keeping track of all the content of a website and organizing it according to different factors. If you want to audit your content for SEO purposes, it must include a complete inventory containing all the indexable content on a domain page. Then it must be evaluated using different performance metrics to know which ones can be kept, removed, or improved.
What Is The Main Purpose Of Doing Content Audit For SEO?
There are many reasons why content marketers audit a site’s content. For SEO reasons, this strategy is often implemented to figure out the following:
- Content that needs updated information
- Content that needs editing or revisions for better quality
- Content that can be merged as one to get rid of overlapping topics
- Content that is no longer relevant
- Content that must be omitted from the website
Implementing content audit for SEO can also allow the site administrators to fix gap opportunities. It will also let them determine which one must be ranking for specific keywords. This method will also let them discover the strongest pages on the site to find a way to leverage them. Also, it can let the content marketers find out if the website has some undiscovered content marketing opportunities that they can develop.
How To Do Content Audit For SEO?
Like many components of SEO, content audit for website optimization can go wrong if it is not done properly. One of the most common mistakes includes omitting URLs with external links when the link metrics were not evaluated as a component of the audit. Mistakes can be avoided when auditing the content for SEO using these phrases.
Inventory And Audit Phase
Making an inventory of the site’s content and all the related metrics starts by crawling the site. But unlike crawling the technical SEO audits that involve all crawlable content, the content audit crawls are mainly concerned for all the indexable content.
There are several processes to do under this phase. First, the site must allow all indexable URLs to get crawled using online crawling tools like Screaming Frog. The URLs can also be collected from other tools like Google Analytics. Google Webmaster, or the XML Sitemaps, or an internal database if possible. Crawl these URLs separately in a list mode, then place these on the main URL list and begin to reduplicate to come up with a full list of URLs that can be indexed
The website must also generate additional metrics like titles, descriptions, word count, and meta tags. It would also help if additional information about both the internal and external links, content uniqueness, and traffic can be generated to better content audit.
Analysis And Recommendations Phase
Once the entire inventory is over, the content audit will push through with this phase. The person responsible for the task may upload all the important data on MS Excel or Google Sheets for presentation. By creating a dashboard, they can organize the actions that must be implemented for each date.
Once every detail is in order, the actual content audit can finally take place. The best way to begin the process is to look for any content-related issues that could lead to a manual penalty or algorithm filter to get penalized, which can affect the site’s rankings.
Reporting Phase
Once the auditing phase is over, the person who is given the task to make the content audit must write up the report. It must include the summaries of the findings, recommendations, and the succeeding steps from the audit. The report must begin with the executive summary.
After the content audit process, all websites must implement a continuous content optimization. It will help in getting rid of low-quality content away from Google’s indexing bots all year round. By doing all these processes regularly, the content audit can help ensure that marketing efforts of the business using their website will succeed for years to come and help them gain better revenue in the long run.
