How to audit content
However, before you go on and begin implementing your plan, it’s crucial that you step back and take a crucial (but often ignored) step: the content audit.
Examining all web pages on your site can help you:
- Find out what’s not working and you’re less likely to repeat it in the future.
- Find out which content could be reused
- Look for holes in the kinds of content you write and the topics you write about
- Beware of the use of duplicate information on your site
- Enhance the content quality
- Make the most powerful content available on your site
- Learn what terms you’re finding
It’s possible to spend several hours browsing your site, skimming over the material and drawing conclusions in response to what stands out to you. However, a loosely organized content audit doesn’t provide the complete picture. To truly assess what your contents are worth you should evaluate every page with an array of common metrics.
Here are five essential steps to conduct an audit of content:
Step 1: Identify your content
If you’ve got a smaller size, you can accomplish this by hand, however, for the majority of websites, it is recommended to use an application such as Screaming Frog to assist you to get the complete list of URLs from your website.
Alongside Screaming Frog you can also use an application such as Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools or Sitemaps that use XML to gather all URLs on your site.
A majority of crawlers provide information on pages like H1 and H2 titles, headings as well as meta descriptions along with the word count. It’s important to know this before you begin your next task.
Important note
The information you gather from crawlers is very detailed and can mean that you have more data than you can comprehend. do with.
For instance, Screaming Frog will likely give results for photos and files which you’ve uploaded into your CMS (like HubSpot or WordPress). You might want to filter this data and restrict it to pages for your website and blogs.
Also, feel free to block any columns — such as title pixels or meta description pixels that aren’t important or important to an audit.`
Step 2: Sort and label your content
When you’ve got a complete list of all URLs of your website You’ll have to write a description of your current content according to the following guidelines:
- Topic
What’s the topic of the article?
Makeup with an outline of general categories to cover the subjects you’ve written about in your articles and then assign each article to one or two categories. - Length
How many words are in the text for each piece? What’s the word count? Does it influence how it is viewed and shared with your audience? Do your audience members prefer more extensive, longer pieces of material or do they prefer shorter pieces that they are able to digest quickly? - The journey of a buyer
Which phase of the buying process does every piece of content fall within the stages of consideration, awareness or a decision? - Buyers persona
Which buyer’s persona(s) are you to be directed at? - If you don’t have buyer personas for your business You can find out more about the process of creating these here.
- Tone
What is the tone of every article? Conversational? Professional? Persuasive? You can come up with several adjectives to define the tone of articles you write. - Relevance
What is the relevance of the content in relation to what you do as a business? - Does the website address the issues that your customers face? Make a scale and then determine the place each piece of content fits on the scale.
- Datedness
Certain content is always in demand and is a constant source of content, whereas other content is linked to current occasions. Choose the category that your content falls under (you might want to develop an additional scale for this). - SEO
Does the page have the proper optimization for SEO? Note down all of these items, and make notes if there is anything not present.
Visual content
Does the post contain other content such as embedded videos, a lot of photos as well as an infographic?
