A Guide To Content Auditing
Every time you create content it is not going to rank at the top of search results in spite of all your efforts. You should go through your lower-ranking content and update it to create new and stronger content.
You need to first find out if the web pages are not performing well. This is done through a process called a content audit. A content audit is conducting a systematic evaluation and inventorying of your website’s current published content. Regular content audit helps to keep your content updated and improve its rankings. You can hire SEO content writing services for your needs.
Conducting content audit
- Start with clearly defined goals about what you actually want to achieve. You can have goals like increasing conversions, improving the SEO results of pages, eliminating outdated content and more.
- Determine which types of content you want to review and find all the URLs. You can use tools like Semrush, HubSpot or Screaming Frog. For each content, you will have to check the URL, author, content team, time taken to create it, date, title, type of content, comments, word count, shares and content goals. You can create a content detail audit spreadsheet.
- Decide how much you want to go back and audit the content produced in the past. Gather all the URLs for that period. Knowing what content you have already published helps you to understand what content to create in the future.
To quickly inventory your content you can use analytic tools such as Google Analytics, Semrush’s content auditing tool and more.
What metrics to track in the content audit?
Social shares
Monitor the popularity of your content on social media and find topics that interest social audiences. If most of your conversions are from Facebook then you should create content for your Facebook audiences.
Comments
Comments help to get user-generated content for your blogs and articles. You can see what content topics and types generate the conversations. If you do not have a comment section for blogs you can check your posts on social media.
Organic traffic
Evaluate the organic traffic metrics to know when you have performed well and when you need to start again.
Bounce rate
A high bounce rate means your content is bad. A good bounce rate depends on your niche. The average bounce rate for eCommerce websites is 26% - 45%, for B2B websites it is 25% - 55% and for blogs, it is 90%.
Time on page
This metric can be used to know if your content is relevant to your audiences or not. If right then you can focus on similar content topics.
Backlinks
Track your backlinks for two main reasons. The first being the backlinks change over a period of time. When you publish content you may immediately get 2 - 3 backlinks, after a week it may be 10 -12 and after a year it could be 555 backlinks. The second is that you may have 555 backlinks but not all of them are good. Some may be dangerous for your website therefore you will have to remove all unwanted backlinks.
Unique visitors
You would want many unique visitors to view your content and increase the total number of views. The more views your content gets the more chances of ROI (return on investment).
New vs returning users
Returning users are better but you also need to attract more new visitors.
Pages per session
This helps you to know the number of pages a user visits once the user views your content.
Traffic courses
Find out where your traffic is coming from and identify your main sources of traffic. If more traffic is coming from Facebook then you should post more relevant content on your Facebook page.
Conversions
If your goal is to get over 100 conversions in a quarter then you need to track the conversions coming from your content.
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