According to Curata, 37 per cent of content marketers never complete a content audit. Conducting a content audit on your website may not be something you’ve considered before, but not doing it could mean you’re missing potential opportunities to best promote your business.
Having an effective (content) strategy in place is essential to growing your business. Your strategy should also factor in auditing, specifically content auditing – it can be key creating and refining both old and new content.
We explore some key reasons why it makes good business sense to consider a website content audit.
It helps identify issues with your website’s content
Like any audit, reviewing your website’s content can help you identify existing problems. These issues or gaps can impede a customer’s experience and limit their engagement with your business. Some common issues include:
- any internal links that might be broken or links to non-existent pages
- pictures that are missing correct tags or alt text
- missing micro copy, such as clear calls to action (CTA) or page errors.
These are just a select few of the many possible holes a content audit can help find in your website. Once you’ve identified the gaps, you can then work towards closing them and improving your website’s content.
It can provide information on your SEO performance
While a content audit can highlight your website’s deficiencies, it can also assess your search engine optimisation (SEO) performance. This helps to uncover what parts of your website aren’t performing well for search engines.
Running an audit on your website’s content can help map tags, images, and word counts – all things that affect how your page ranks on search engines, such as Google.
By assessing these elements, you can re-craft your website’s content to be more successful. With Google changing their search algorithm between 500 and 600 times a year, SEO performance is an essential aspect to configure on your website.
It can show you what content can be repurposed
A content audit can highlight parts of your website that need to be altered or updated, as well as sections that need to be completely removed. An audit can show you what content can be re-purposed for better performance, saving you more time than if you had to start from scratch.
If you have articles, blog posts or any other evergreen content, you can boost it with updated statistics or re-word it to reflect your new tone of voice.
It can help your webpage structure and accessibility
You may already have engaging and high-quality content on your website, but are your customers seeing it? An audit can reveal where some potentially high-performing material is buried or hidden, and how to shine a light on vital content.
With iOS screen readers increasing in use from 32.6 per cent in December 2010 to 75.6 per cent in October 2017, it’s important that your website follows web accessibility guidelines to help all users access your content.
Even for those not using tools like a screen reader, a content audit will help demonstrate how to present your website’s content in an engaging way, with best practice accessibility in mind.
By analysing aspects of your content such as search terms, this can help Google and any potential customers find your website through strong keywords.
How can you perform a website content audit?
While undertaking a website content audit can provide you with numerous benefits to your business, you may not have the time, resources or expertise to perform one yourself.
Our digital experts are real wizzes at content audits. Recently, we helped redevelop the Working with Children Check website for the Victorian Government. Reviewing over 78 pages helped identify what to keep, consolidate and where new content would need to be created.
If you’re interested in finding out more about how we can help your business with a content audit and a better performing website, contact the Avion Communications team today.
