How to perform a content audit on your own website

Content audits are important as they help to identify outdated content that can be revised or updated, as well as errors such as broken links.

Firstly, it can help to identify content that needs to be revised or updated. Secondly, it can show SEO opportunities where the content or on-page SEO can be improved. Finally, a content audit can find errors such as broken links, which deliver a poor user experience to readers.

Here is sample step-by-step process for performing a content audit and some tips that should help you get started:

Create a spreadsheet

The first step will require you to create a spreadsheet with various headings in order to capture the data. Typically this will include things like: page type, URL, title, meta description, image alt tags, analytics data and so on.

Define your goals

Before starting on a content audit, you will need to define your goals. You might be looking to generally improve the content across their website and to make sure that your audience has access to the best information. Alternatively, you could be looking to have more visibility in the search engines.

List your content

At this step, you will want to make a list of all the content that you want to analyze. This will usually be web pages, landing pages and blog posts. If you have a smaller website, you can easily copy and paste this information into your spreadsheet. Alternatively, you may want to use a tool such as Screaming Frog (https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/)

Categorize the content

Now it’s time to categorize the content that you’ve listed and to pull in analytics metrics. You will want to make a note of the content type, for example, a blog post. With blog posts, it’s worth including the date the post was published or last updated. Older posts are key areas that can be updated with new information – something that the search engines love!

Data analysis

At this step, you will be analyzing the data that you’ve captured. If you’re looking to get more SEO visibility, there may be some obvious gaps or opportunities with titles and meta descriptions. If you’re looking to update content, you should be paying particular attention to older content that might be outdated. Finally, you should be looking at the level of traffic that each page receives. For pages that get a lot of traffic, it’s important that these are optimized with the best content. Important pages that aren’t getting much traffic are also a clear opportunity for improvement.

Action plan

From the analysis step, you will now have an action plan that you can work on. Some content will need updating, some might need deleting and there are likely whole new content pieces that you’ll want to create. You should make a list of the action items and assign each a priority. Then all you need to do is get started!