5 Benefits of a Website Content Audit
For many brands, the content marketing process represents a complex and sophisticated journey. But before you embark on this journey, it’s critical to conduct a website content audit.
A content audit involves taking a careful look at your website’s existing content to ensure it’s relevant, accurate and engaging. Ideally, the content audit process will uncover the content that is effective on your website, reveal gaps where content needs to be created, and identify areas in which existing content is out of date or no longer useful for site users. Often, existing content can be repurposed or reformatted to streamline content creation, improving the efficiency of your brand’s content marketing efforts.
5 Benefits of a Website Content Audit:
A website content audit can take anywhere from several hours to several months depending on the scope of your website. But at the end of the day, an effective audit will improve your website in a number of ways, including:
- Determining Problems in Your Website Content. As you review your content assets, you can begin to address performance issues, fix broken links and improve your site’s accessibility. These fixes will not only increase your site’s search value, but also make your site more appealing to new and returning visitors.
- Identifying Opportunities for Content Repurposing. Valuable, up-to-date information contributes to site usability, search ranking and visitor loyalty. However, it’s not always necessary to create content from scratch when you have blog posts, contributed articles and other marketing collateral that can be repurposed to accomplish specific objectives.
- Diagnosing Content Gaps. In addition to providing an inventory of the information on your website, an audit also highlights areas where the site lacks the information your audience is seeking. By pinpointing the site’s content gaps, you become better equipped to create new content that adds value to your site and your brand.
- Evaluating Content Quality. Your website content audit should evaluate the quality of your existing content. Is it high, medium or low quality? Is it lengthy, rich content or short, light content? Google’s website crawlers are aware of content that is repetitive, short and invaluable, and can penalize your site in search rankings for inferior content.
- Improving Your Information Structure. You may have strong content on your website, but it isn’t helpful if it isn’t accessible. Use pertinent analytics data, including search terms, to determine how to make your most effective content easy to find by both your audience and search engines.
The main goal of a content audit is to provide a comprehensive framework of content that needs to be thrown out, edited, reorganized, optimized, repurposed, or created from scratch. A partial audit is also an effective method in maintain your website by taking samples from key areas on your website, such as the main landing page, and then improving them based on the information found.
Many B2B brand decide to outsource their website content audit to make sure it’s done correctly the first time. Walker Sands can offer expert assistance in performing an audit that will take your website to the next level. Fill out the form or call (312) 267-0066 to get started.