It may seem like there’s a lot of work involved with creating a content audit. But it’s easy when you break it down into manageable steps.
Create a List of Your Content Assets
The first step of a website content audit is to make an inventory of your assets. Seeing all of them in one location makes it much easier to analyze content performance, highlight areas to improve, and update each asset methodically.
Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider Tool is the best way to extract content assets from your site. It’s free to use if your site has less than 500 pages. But you can also use any of the other content extractors I mentioned above.
Whichever tool you use, export your data into a spreadsheet, making sure relevant data points (word count, meta description, target keyword, no. of images, etc.) are included. You may also want to add traffic data from Google Analytics to each page so you can analyze content performance alongside technical SEO metrics.
Content Audit Templates
As I explained above, you will want to build a content audit spreadsheet so you can keep all the data in one place. You can build one from scratch, download one of the following templates, or use these as a launching point and customize your spreadsheet.
CoSchedule Content Audit Template
HubSpot SEO Template
Distilled Content Audit Template
Keep in mind the goals we discussed earlier. There are lots of stats or data points you could pull alongside each content. However, some data is going to be more relevant to you than others.
If you are using this audit to improve your content marketing engagement, you will want to check information about clickthroughs, social media engagement, comments, and so on.
If your goal is associated with SEO, you may want to include warnings and recommendations you gather from S-Media.
Create a List of Content Issues to Identify
Now you have all your content assets in one place; it’s time to analyze them. Go through each piece of content one at a time to see how it’s performing, whether it’s missing metadata or there are any obvious ways it can be improved.
Here are a few things to look for, in particular:
Duplicate Content: Search engines prioritize fresh content. If you have a lot of duplicate content living on different pages or posts, you’ll want to remove or rewrite those pages.
Outdated Content: People don’t want to read outdated content, and search engines overlook it too. Update it wherever possible.
Content Gaps: What’s missing in your content? Are there topics you haven’t addressed yet? Target markets you haven’t spoken to? Being able to look at everything at once can help you find the gaps and fill them in.
Target Keyword: Does the content asset target a particular keyword and include it in the copy?
Metadata: Have you written metadata descriptions for all pages? This spreadsheet is going to help you see which ones need to be written and which ones are repetitive and should be updated.
Image Data: Does every image have a descriptive title and alt tag? This will ensure your images are SEO-optimized and accessibility-friendly.
Word Count: Do your pages and posts have enough words to optimize for SEO? Or are they too short? Check that word count to see if pages need to be updated or edited down.
Keep track of everything by creating a note next to each asset about why it needs improving. You can also color-code your spreadsheet based on the type of optimization required, but this can quickly become complicated if a single asset has multiple issues.
Address Content Issues
You can’t do everything at once, so now it’s time to prioritize your content issues. One strategy is to work through each asset numerically, starting with those at the top of the spreadsheet.
Another is to group each optimization issue together and tackle them in bulk. For instance, you could update the meta data on every page, then move on to fixing image issues and so on.
Alternatively, use Ubersuggest to prioritize content issues for you. When you run an SEO audit on S-Media, you’ll receive recommendations based on an issue’s difficulty and SEO impact.
Focusing on tasks with a high SEO impact and low difficulty will give you a series of quick wins. But you could also prioritize all of the easy tasks to get the ball rolling if you’re not that confident.
Content audits work best when they are tackled by several people, so don’t be afraid to ask for help and split up the work. Maybe you can take care of on-page issues while a colleague addresses the content gaps your audit has highlighted.
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