We’ve all been there. Although you know you have tons of content, you don’t know if you know what it is, where it is, and if it’s still useful. If your content management is based on the one person who did it once, then it’s time to conduct a content audit.
Why is it important to conduct a content audit of your website?
This article will discuss two types of website audits, the reasons, and when to perform them. We will also provide simple step-by-step instructions for completing your content audit(s). Ready? Let’s dig in.
Quantitative inventory website content audit: What is it, and when should it be done?
This list shows you every piece of content on your website and its location. This will give you baseline data on your website’s content performance, allowing you to make easy decisions about which web pages you should keep and which ones you should delete.
Qualitative website content audits: What they are and when you should do them.
This accomplishes two important things.
- It helps you to understand the potential performance of your content by comparing it with industry best practices.
- It allows you to see your content from a strategic business perspective. This gives you a valuable, in-depth view of how it compares to your strategic goals.
It is more difficult to do than it looks, takes more effort and requires more brainpower. Qualitative audits can help you prioritize content efforts, identify low-quality content that needs to be removed or cleaned up, and highlight opportunities to learn from. These audits can also ensure that your content is relevant to your business goals and audience.
Export your website data.
Start a quantitative inventory by exporting all pages and views from your Google Analytics account for at least one year. You can pull data back to the date that you are doing the audit.
Get rid of anything that isn’t necessary.
Sort your sheet to remove non-pages such as search queries and website back-end webpages. This information is usually accessed via 1-page views and page URLs.
For your assessment, create manageable tabs based on the content type.
Each website section should have its tab. The navigation is a good place for you to start.
You can create tabs for sections of your website that are meaningful, such as services, products and industries, blogs, case studies, about, or even about. You might be able to break down individual services, product types and industries depending on the complexity of your business and how many pages you have.
You want to achieve the same content with similar content. You can then quickly analyze standout high- and low-performing content. Visitors use different types of content in different ways. You don’t want your service pages to perform like a blog posts.
