Website Assessment Services for Extensive Online Platforms
Improving Website Content for Better Business Value: A Step-by-Step Guide
In the digital world, a well-structured content strategy plays a crucial role in enhancing search rankings and user experience. Here's a comprehensive guide on conducting a content audit to optimise your site's content and boost business value.
1. Define Your Goals and Objectives
Start by analysing your current content strategy and setting specific goals for the audit. These could include improving search visibility, increasing user engagement, or boosting conversions. Select appropriate Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) aligned with these goals.
2. Create a Content Inventory
Compile a comprehensive list of all your existing content assets, including blog posts, landing pages, product pages, videos, infographics, and more. Use site crawlers like Screaming Frog to gather URLs, titles, publication dates, word count, and performance metrics in a spreadsheet.
3. Gather and Analyse Data
Use analytics and content audit tools to collect performance data like page views, bounce rates, time on page, backlinks, social shares, keyword rankings, and identify technical SEO issues (broken links, duplicate content, missing metadata). Analyse this data to spot high-performing content, underperforming pages, content gaps, and technical problems.
4. Assess Content Quality
Evaluate each content piece for relevance to current audience needs, accuracy and currency of information, readability, and engagement metrics. This often includes a manual review for tone and style consistency and flagging content for updating, consolidation, or rewriting.
5. Prioritise Actions
Based on analysis, create a prioritized list of steps, such as optimising existing content for SEO and user engagement, creating new content to fill gaps, fixing technical SEO issues, and removing or consolidating outdated or duplicate content.
6. Implement Changes and Monitor
Execute the prioritized improvements and regularly monitor performance to measure progress towards your goals and continually refine your content strategy.
This systematic approach ensures your content aligns with business objectives, addresses user needs, enhances search engine rankings, and ultimately improves user experience on your site.
During the review process, key issues such as outdated content, lack of value to the audience, low traffic, and lack of inbound links are analysed. Algorithms classify the results of the initial data collection, and a technical review of user experience and content formatting is conducted.
The content audit framework manages content as a product portfolio, based on the specific value it provides to the business. The audit identifies areas where the website lacks content and points out pages with quality issues. Data collection involves gathering all relevant data about the site's pages, articles, products, services, and other information, along with data from web analytics, server logs, and inbound link data.
The content audit is beneficial for maximising the value from existing content, managing large sites, planning website migrations, and tracking content over time. After receiving the results, an action plan is given for improving the content portfolio and website results.
A recent content audit case study by SEO Agency Smash Digital showed a 76% increase in search traffic, taking a client from 40,000 to over 80,000 visitors. The content review process involves analysts going over flagged pages to make specific recommendations, such as weeding out outdated content without value to the audience, low traffic, or inbound links.
A preliminary UX and UI evaluation, along with a manual review of flagged pages, takes place. The audit process involves preparing with a team to access necessary data, and pages are sorted into brackets by value using automated recommendation algorithms.
In conclusion, a content audit is a process to manage and update website content, providing a clear overview and helping to decide key assets. By following this guide, you can optimise your site's content, improve search rankings, and provide a better user experience.
- Employing data-and-cloud-computing tools during the content audit, such as analytics and content audit software, can help analyze user engagement and performance metrics, thereby enhancing the user experience.
- To further improve user experience, it's essential to assess the quality of content by evaluating its relevance, accuracy, readability, and engagement, using technology like screens for site crawling and manual reviews for tone and style consistency.
