Steps to Perform a Content Audit for SEO and Why It Matters

Gone are the days when you could leave your website contents unchanged for years without having to suffer any implications. With more advent and evolution, search engines are adopting new strategies and rules for generating the most relevant SERP. Today, when it comes to determining website rankings, many other factors play their part in addition to basic KPIs. Out of these “many” factors, high-quality website content is the most crucial aspect to accommodate the priority list of every organization. Check out the Steps to Perform a Content Audit for SEO and Why It Matters

If the search engine finds any redundant, outdated, or irrelevant website content, it will immediately jump to the next site. As a result, it will drag your website to the bottom of the list and you won’t get the expected visibility of traffic either. In order to tackle such situations, it is essential to initiate a quantitative analysis that can measure the website’s content based on high-level KPIs. It will help to reveal deeper insights and you could take the necessary action accordingly.

Termed content auditing, this entire process helps businesses in multiple ways. Going forward, you will see how audits have made SEO realistic. You will also learn about the entire auditing process.

Why is content auditing important for SEO?

Before learning how to carry out content auditing, let us have a quick glance at the roles it plays in terms of SEO.

1. Identifies the trouble areas

Auditing the content will let you know about the parts of a website or a webpage that require modification. For example, suppose your website is running slow on the latest Windows OS version. If you are not aware of this issue, your business will take a huge blow. This necessitates the need for auditing.

2. Finds out the redundancy

When you have not changed the website contents for years, and you do not have any quantitative analytical way out, an audit will help you to know about the redundancy present in your website.

3. Improves the website structure

You can also improve the overall website content structure using the audit reports. This will make the UI more intuitive, user-friendly, and can drive more traffic.

In addition, content auditing will also help improve the overall quality of the website so that you can achieve higher SERPs without any hassle.

Steps to ensure perfect content auditing

These important steps will help you to carry out content auditing in a systematic manner:

1. Defining all the analytical metrics and your goals for the audit

The first thing you have to focus on is the identification of your goals or motives for which you want to initiate the content audit. For example, you can add improvement in the conversion ratio and make the website visible for local markets at the same time. Once you set the goals, it will become easier to move ahead and decide the metrics needed to define those motives.

For example, pageview, and bounce rate are user-dependent metrics while organic traffic and keyword ranks are SEO-related metrics. Relating these KPIs will help you assess the audit results properly and understand the areas where your website content is lagging behind.

2. Creating the content inventory

The next step involves the creation of a content inventory, which includes every element present on the website. For example, when you design a URL-specific inventory, it includes the URLs of not only the main pages but also the category pages, service pages, and more. Besides, it will also consider several essential points like texts, multimedia, and more.

A catalog will be more helpful as it will contain all the information divided into different sections. For example, under the CSS style tab, you can add font styles, size, color, paragraph gap, and more. Similarly, you can divide the inventory into content types based on the purpose of the website like the manual content, blog posts, and more.

3. Collection and analysis of all data

Next, collect all the data required from different endpoints. For example, if you want to check the number of viewers on the blog posts, you need to gather data from the last six months. This will let you have a proper data set and help you to draw the analytical report.

Once you have collected all the data, you can take certain major decisions, such as:

• Keep: You need to assign this action to all those contents, which satisfy your requirements and hence, don’t need any improvement or modification.
• Update: Assign this task to all the content elements that need modification. It can be due to redundancies, discrepancies, changing trends, and more.
• Delete: This action intends at removing the contents that will not serve any purpose or is beyond modification.

4. Decide your actions and implementation

The next step will involve making decisions about the actions you need to take followed by implementation strategies. Make sure that the action plans are as per the requirement. For example, if there are a couple of links within the website and two of them have become dead, there is no need to remove all the links present. You simply need to modify the URLs that do not serve the purpose.

5. Make changes in the content marketing strategies

Lastly, you have to work on your content marketing strategies and make adjustments in order to improve audit results. Once you end up checking the flaws in the content existing on the website, you can focus on mitigating those redundancies and ensuring their prompt resolution.

Wrapping Up!

Content auditing is not just a technique to update your website and improve its performance. Rather is a method by which you can make your website at par with the trends and ensure that it can drive more traffic and revenues to your business. For flawless content auditing, you should avail the services of an expert SEO services provider.

You can expect any such organization to be well aware of the importance of content auditing for SEO. Evidently, it can deal with the involved processes better and help to improve the performance of your website over search engines. Notably, Puneet.ae is one of the most suitable service providers and the best Branding Agency in Dubai to consider for this purpose.