A content audit is intended to analyze the website content to ensure that it is accurate, relevant, and can engage its target audience. The audit will reveal out-of-date content or content that is irrelevant and even gaps that need to be plugged so that you can improve your website’s content marketing. A brief look at the many benefits of content audits:
Identifying Issues in the Existing Content
The principal purpose of a content audit is to review the content assets of the website and find out what is not working as expected or missing. Generally, these are performance-related issues, including broken links and overall site accessibility. By addressing the problem areas, you will be able to boost the value of the website search as well as make it more appealing to visitors for return visits as well as new visitors. Among the things that a website content audit specifically targets is the relevance of titles to the content, applicability of tags, and information that is new, exciting, and relevant to the visitors.
Recognizing Gaps in the Content
A content audit not only finds out what information is present on the website and what problems there are that prevent marketers from realizing their content marketing objectives but also highlights the areas that the current content does not address adequately or misses out completely. Content gap identification is important because it could very well be important information that the visitors would want to know to fulfill their search intent. When marketers can know the areas, the current content does not address, it helps them to equip the website with appropriate content that is focused on adding value to both the visitor and the brand. The addition of new content is also likely to help marketers expand their target audience to open up more opportunities for conversions.
Improving SEO
Google and other search engines are laying increasing stress of fulfilling the search intent of the user better by identifying the best possible content. Accordingly, more than ever before websites need to host high-quality, relevant, and original content that can best address the concerns of the users. Since it is no longer possible to stuff keywords or generate copious amounts of thin content that do not add value to the user to drive search engine page ranks, conducting content audits will help to understand the areas where the content is not up to the mark. A comprehensive content audit will also evaluate the SEO of your website to find out how well it promotes an overall user experience that satisfies the user intent, promotes repeat visits, and drastically reduces bounce rates, all very strong signals that search engines take into account for allocating the page rank for targeted searches. You can even consider getting a free website audit report that will examine other aspects of the website usability in addition to the content.
Knowing Content Re purposing Opportunities
The presence of valuable, accurate, original, current, and relevant information is what drives the website’s usability, stickiness, and search rankings. However, even though most people assume that this can only be achieved by creating new content, it not always necessary for content managers to do so. Much of the content that is already available can be repurposed for meeting specific objectives that might be in complete contrast with the original intention with which the content may have been created. However, the trick is not only in changing the presentation of the content but also making it more relevant and valuable by updating it with fresh perspectives and data. According to https://searchengineland.com, a content audit will reveal high-performing content that can be repurposed far less expensively than creating new content.
Evaluating the Quality of the Content
Google and other popular search engines have become increasingly sensitive to content that is short, thin, repetitive, or plagiarized and tend to downgrade those websites in their results page. To ensure that the website contains only content of very high quality, it is important not to create content that is similar to what the visitor will find on other websites. The focus should be on creating rich content that looks at issues and subjects with a fresh perspective, goes into much more detail, and presents it engagingly and entertainingly that compels visitors to spend time on it and interact with it as guided by the CTAs. It has to be appreciated that for the content to be considered of high quality, relevance to the reader is necessary because even content that is written well but not intended for the target audience will be considered as low quality.
Improving the Website Information Structure and Navigation
Even though you may have very good quality and relevant content on your website, it is of not much use to either the marketer or the users, if it cannot be easily discovered. One way of ensuring that the content can be easily accessed by users is to improve the navigation system so that contents can be found intuitively without much effort. The other way is through strong SEO facilitated by the use of well-researched keywords and key phrases as well as content that can be determined to be contextually relevant to the query by the search engines. A content audit will help you to understand if the search terms included in the content are either too broad or too specific because it is important to achieve a proper balance to ensure that the right target audience can discover them with the help of search engines. The content audit will also reveal the best ways of presenting the information so that users can easily understand it and are compelled to explore the rest of the website to uncover potentially useful knowledge.
Conclusion
The entire purpose of conducting content audits is to ensure that the quality and extent of the content matches the expectations of the target audience. Even though it can take a fair amount of effort, time, and investment to periodically conduct content audits to keep the content aligned to the brand objectives and user expectations, it is well worth it to stay ahead of the competition for eyeballs and conversions.
