Our Guide To Auditing Your Website Content
Content is king when marketing your business online and helps your business connect with your target audience. Checking it regularly to ensure it is still fit for purpose is critical to know if it is doing its job. This blog post will outline why you should be checking that your content is up to date, how to perform a basic content audit and what to do with deadweight content that crops up.
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Top 5 Benefits of Auditing Your Content
Not all the blogs and landing pages on your website will perform at the level required to stand out online. What you presume is excellent content could actually harm your marketing efforts. The main benefits of performing a content audit are:
- Identifying problems in content: is any of your blogs not pulling in any traffic? Not ranking well enough? Do any need to be re-written?
- Identifying any content gaps: We all get lost in our content writing from time to time and can miss a topic or blog post that could plug a content gap.
- Improved SEO: All your blogs should serve a purpose, or you are wasting your efforts. Identifying problematic blogs or pages that need improvement will help your overall SEO strategy.
- Identifying internal linking opportunities: Internal links play a huge part in SEO and conversion rate optimisation. Content audits help you to find some.
- Identifying deadweight content: Deadweight content is any content that wastes the crawl budget from the search engines and is not being used by any of your website visitors. Getting rid of it will help your website overall.
How to Perform a Content Audit
There are many tools available to do a content audit, some free, some have a monthly or annual fee attached. The big ones are tools such as SEMRush, Ahrefs and Sitebulb, but if you do not have the budget for these tools, you can use Google Search Console – presuming that you have been using it on your site for more than 16 months or so.
To perform a manual content audit using Google Search Console, you can simply export the data into a spreadsheet and sort through it. Or you can use a simple free tool and available to use on Google Sheets. Rather than type out instructions, Daniel Foley, one of the UK’s leading SEO’s has produced a video below explaining how to do it:
We would only advise performing your own content audit if you are confident in doing so. Often an outside pair of eyes and thinking can find ways to repurpose the content or even cull it without sentiment or fear getting in the way.
How Often Should You Update Your Website Content?
So now you know why you need to do a content audit and how the main question is how often? If you have performed a content audit like above and your blogs are doing great, then there is no need to update them. If the blogs are not doing so well and are not new blogs, as they have not been published in the last 12 weeks or so, then chances are it may need some tweaks or delete altogether.
Our advice is to perform a full content audit at least every 6 months. This gives new content time to get traction, and also, any changes are picked up before they become too much of a problem.
Summary
As Dan explained in the video above, you should be removing deadweight content (blogs that don’t bring in traffic to your site), but remember before you delete anything, check:
- It is not a new post (12 weeks is usually enough as a rule to get traction).
- It is not linked internally. If it has internal links remove the links before deleting them.
- It does not form part of an ongoing marketing strategy and just needs to be re-written.
Try to remember that high traffic content does not always benefit your business unless you run a site that drives income from ads. So if you sell a service or product – your content no matter how high the traffic numbers are. If it is not driving conversions, it is not helping your business. Ensure that all content on your website relates to your niche and is helping your business grow – not just get website traffic!
Need further advice? Get in touch with us here at Morgan Branding we have a fully dedicated team ready to help you and your business get ahead online. You can get in touch via our contact page or get social with us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn!
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