The content on your website is an absolute hotbed of SEO value. Years of blogs, articles and information combines to make a vast resource for you to attract more people to what you’re all about.
Your business might well be an authority in your industry. This means the content you produce can be a really handy resource for your customers, or anybody researching what you work in. You probably know what’s what and what your customers likely need or want to know about.
But if you are finding that your content isn’t doing the business it should be, then reconsidering what you’re writing about and what the best approach might be can be worthwhile.
This is where a content audit can provide the kind of insight and understanding that can enable proactive, positive decisions about content to be made.
The role of a content audit can be twofold. One element is going back over old content to add to it, enhance it, stick some additional keywords in for good measure and give these pieces of writing a once over.
This is with a view to making them more discoverable through search or social media. You can make your content more appealing to readers, and enhance your overall credibility.
The other reason for going through the content audit process is to highlight and identify gaps in your content plan. Are there topics that are relevant to your audience that you’ve neglected in the past? Or new topics and trends that are starting to become increasingly relevant?
Conducting a content audit presents the chance to work on these areas and broaden the scope of what your content arsenal contains.
It’s not necessarily fun doing a content audit, and it can be quite time consuming. It might not be as fun as writing a blog about a great topic that you love to immerse yourself in. But there can be huge benefits from completing a content audit. So without further ado, this is our guide to content audits and why you should consider carrying one out for your company.
The art of the content audit
Performing a content audit is a great addition to any digital marketing plans you have for 2020. They allow you to review every piece of content you have, whip up some new ideas for blog posts, and get the ball rolling for enhanced content performance in the new year.
Every piece of content you have on your site has value. Every word can contribute to your overall search engine and SEO presence and help you reach those all important end customers. So if you’ve not thought about auditing the content that appears on your website before, don’t underestimate what a thorough analysis can do.
Consider it a type of content inventory. It’s a chance to take what you have, review it, make it that bit better and get more social shares. Make your content that bit more effective. That bit more worthwhile.
It’s the same as any other inventory you might do. It’s about checking what’s what, and looking for opportunities to make improvements.
Analyse and prioritise
So how do you go about prioritising this? It’s really a case of analysing what you have, and choosing where your focus goes.
There are plenty of content audit tools out there, and programmes like Semrush and Screaming Frog are really good options. These can help you get to grips with what’s what on your website from a content perspective.
Google Analytics is also a great way of working out who and how frequently pages of your site are being visiting. This allows you to pin down which gaps you need to fill, or find any areas of potential improvement.
For example, you might have a set of blogs from a year ago that aren’t really firing anymore. By reviewing the content and researching relevant, ‘on-trend’ keywords, you can make tweaks and changes to your content that will boost their SEO value and help you enhance your standing.
Or you might have a blog that’s really relevant given current trends, but was written a while ago and sits in the annals of your content library. This offers the chance to capitalise on new trends and make yourself that bit more relevant to the present audience.
Perhaps your meta information wasn’t uploaded properly first time round on certain pages. Meta information such as meta titles and meta descriptions are valuable SEO entities that will align your content with keywords and search terms. So if you haven’t been as stringent or focused in the past as you are now, then meta information presents the opportunity to add to the value of your content substantially.
Of course, new trends and topic options are forever coming to the fore. This allows you to really open up your creative juices to new exciting options and get audiences really interested in what you have to say. You could even identify opportunities to create great content based on emerging trends that are yet to really take off. This could put your content at the top of the pile as more and more people are searching for terms relevant to it.
Leave no stone unturned
We’ve all been on a website that is plain and simple in style. They have a dynamic, classy effect that is really visually impressive and helps deliver a great user experience. It might be a fashion website, or a cultural organisation’s online presence that looks really good whenever you encounter it.
Websites like these use visual means to have the desired effect on any viewer. But they also use content subtly to maintain SEO value. Things like title tags and various types of content can be successfully harnessed for great end results. This shows that content is a strategic entity as well as an informational one. It’s not how much you use, it’s how you use it.
So go through your website with a magnifying glass if you have to and find the opportunities, gaps and areas that content can be utilised within it. There are more than you think, and they’re all potentially beneficial for your SEO.
But don’t overdo it. Don’t turn your website into a page of the Oxford English Dictionary. Look to find that optimal balance between words and images to create a website that is effective in a multi-faceted way.
Start auditing
The best way to make progress is by taking that first step. So consider whether a content audit could help your brand, and what you’d like to focus on achieving from it.
Look at how you can take the time to get there, who might be the best person for the job, and how this can tie in with your overall content marketing strategy.
If you don’t have time to carry out a content audit but are keen to reap the benefits, the Williams Commerce team is here to help. We can go through your site and pin down what and where your efforts should be focused.
Get in touch with the Williams Commerce team if you would like to take that first step towards better, more worthwhile content today.
