The Importance of a Content Audit
Sometimes evergreen content isn’t really evergreen. And that’s okay. You can go into a content project or a website project with the best intentions, but the reality is that things change.
Some of your blogs might be out of date. Website pages, too. Again, that’s okay, so long as you’re periodically auditing your content and selectively pruning those elements that are no longer accurate or relevant.
But what if you’ve purchased content from agencies that license off-the-shelf blogs and webpage content to businesses in your industry? How much duplicate content could you be sitting on? (And how much is that duplicate content penalizing your rankings in search?)
A content audit is critical to accurately reflect your brand in its current state, but it’s also essential to your business’s SEO strategy and for your site’s user experience.
Is content auditing and pruning difficult? Anyone can do it, but to do it really well requires some expertise. Is content auditing and pruning time consuming? Also yes.
But is it worth it? Absolutely.
Here’s the Formada team’s philosophy and approach to content auditing and pruning, so you can consistently maintain the best version of your business’s brand.
Does Your Website Need Some Spring Cleaning?
Why a content audit is important to most websites
Yes, that’s right — I said most websites. For example, if your website features a dozen or so blogs, and they were all written within the past year, there isn’t really much to audit or prune.
However, if you have hundreds of blogs that were published over the last 3–4 years, then a content audit (and some inevitable content pruning) is probably your best move. And sifting through hundreds of blogs is no easy feat.
The same goes for your website’s non-blog pages — sales, products or services pages, about us pages, any of them, really. All too often, we’re so focused on the next thing in our businesses that we forget about what we’ve already done, and whether or not it’s still relevant to our customers or the current iteration of our mission.
This is precisely where content experts can help you focus your content strategy, align it with your current business goals, audit and assess your content, and judiciously prune anything outdated or irrelevant.
When Formada approaches a content audit, we focus on three distinct areas:
- Technical SEO
- On-page SEO
- User Experience
Technical SEO Content Auditing
In a nutshell, technical SEO refers to making improvements to your website that will help search engines find and assess your content.
These improvements can include things like faster page loading times, mobile device compatibility, and yes, content considerations.
With less content on your website, it’s a little easier for Google’s crawlers to navigate and index the site, AND getting rid of older content can sometimes help remove broken links, which can hurt your technical SEO when Google finds them.
On-Page SEO Content Auditing
On-page SEO refers to, you guessed it, SEO considerations regarding what’s on your site’s pages.
Additionally, on-page SEO considerations include keywords, relevant meta descriptions, headers, and titles, internal linking (linking to relevant pages within your own website), and, generally speaking, publishing content that is useful to your reader.
More and more, Google’s algorithm is prioritizing sites with useful, valuable content that gets good engagement and is recent, and having older content or a very large volume of content that’s not amazing can hurt your SEO in the long run
User Experience Content Auditing
When someone lands on your site, what do they see? It’s important to be objective about this. Often, we have certain perceptions about our business, our brand, and our content that don’t necessarily translate onto the page. We see the brand changing in our mind’s eye before we’ve literally changed what’s on the actual page.
Auditing and pruning your content for user experience helps to make sure that all the info on your site fits not only your current brand voice but also accurately reflects your current product and service offerings.
For example, if you’re a MedSpa that used to offer IV therapy but moved away from that service, you probably don’t need IV therapy content anymore. You’re likely to create confusion with the end user who is reading IV therapy content and perhaps looking for a way to make use of that service, but if you don’t offer it, they’ll just jump to another site.
That experience might color their perception of your brand, and when they’re searching for a service you actually do offer, you might get skipped over due to that poor experience.
If any of this piques your curiosity, then I’d encourage you to take a look at your website analytics.
Anyone with a website and a GA4 property can review their website data, assess its performance, and conduct a content audit. There are probably a million different ways in which you can approach it, but this is how we do it — and we feel like it really works for our clients.
No matter what, it’s sometimes better to lean on an expert, like the team at Formada, to help you understand what you’re seeing, why you’re getting the results you are, and what you can do to improve them.
So, How Do You Do a Content Audit?
There are several different ways to conduct a content audit and pruning project, and it really just depends on your goals, how much content is on your website, and the recency of that content.
At Formada, content audits generally fall into one of three buckets:
1) SEO-Focused Content Auditing
We want to help you improve your website’s organic performance without sacrificing human-first content.
2) Strategy-Focused Content Auditing
Before creating new content, we want to make sure the content we already have is clean and optimized.
3) Rebuild-Focused Content Auditing
This is for businesses that have changed significantly since first publishing the website or who are doing a website rebuild and need an overhaul of their content.
Once we’ve established the right approach (or approaches) to your content needs, we can establish goals and then begin with the actual auditing and pruning that your site needs.
The Formada Approach to a Content Audit & Content Pruning
Like I previously mentioned, there are virtually countless ways in which you can approach a content audit, but in our experience, this is our general approach to successfully auditing, pruning, and improving the performance of your website’s content.
Identify Your Goal & Gather Relevant Data Into a Single Place
Content auditing can get real messy, real fast if there isn’t a goal in place to narrow down the type of data you’re looking at, so I recommend starting by asking yourself these questions:
- What do you want the audit to accomplish?
- What do you ideally want to learn?
- And what actions should be taken based on the data?
After you’ve clearly answered those questions, it’s time to do a data pull.
Depending on how much content you have (and how old it is) I like to start with assessing data over a short but still relevant period of time — about 3-6 months. It’s long enough to see trends emerge but not so long as to be overwhelming.
You can then compare that data to data from a previous period of publication the same length of time. Since not all data is relevant to your goals, it’s important to narrow down the metrics you’re focusing on.
Data points you might pull include:
- Views
- Sessions
- Engagement Rate
- Average Rank
- Click Through Rate
In our experience, anything related to the actual performance of your website will probably come from GA4 and anything related to ranking and search engine performance will probably come from Google Search Console.
Now if you want this data to play nice together, you may need to “splice it together” using a tool like VLOOKUP in Excel or Google Sheets to see all the data together organized by page.
This is where you can also identify your content audit buckets, depending on your goal. I usually use the following four:
- Prune — Get rid of these pages and redirect the URL to another relevant place
- Leave As-Is — These pages perform well, are new, or are core to your website, and you don’t want to mess with greatness
- Rewrite — These pages maybe performed well in the past and are outdated or are high-value but aren’t resonating
- Optimize — These pages are fine, but maybe could use some love, like some updated keyword targets or H2s or need to have some research/links updated
Start Organizing Your Content — Obvious Ones First
To start, I usually like to identify the pages or posts that either rank poorly and/or don’t drive any notable traffic and put them into the Prune bucket right away, as this helps give me a cleaner playing field and gives me a quick win.
As you’re doing this, spot check the low traffic-drivers against the % change metric you pulled from the previous period, because if a page only drove 10 sessions in the last 3 months but drove 200+ in the months prior, this may just need to be updated vs pruned completely.
Then, do the same thing on the other end of the spectrum: Identify which pages or posts perform well, rank well, and are core to your website and shouldn’t be messed with.
Go ahead and put these in the Leave As-Is bucket. This is where the fun starts.
Start Analyzing & Bucketing Your Content
Once the obvious winners and losers are bucketed, it’s time to start analyzing the remaining pages!
Here are some indicators that might help you decide why a page should be sorted into a specific bucket:
- If a page is a top traffic driver but has decreased since the previous period, then it might be time for a rewrite
- If a page ranks well but doesn’t drive a lot of traffic, it might be time to optimize the meta title & description and the copy to be more compelling to readers
- If a page doesn’t drive much traffic and/or doesn’t rank well and isn’t super relevant to your business, put it in the Prune bucket
- If a page is kinda in the middle but was only published recently, maybe bucket it as Leave As-Is to give it some time to shine
As you start tossing things into the Rewrite and Optimize bucket, take notes about the types of things you think would strengthen that content.
For example:
- Did you recently launch a new service that would support this page and strengthen the content’s CTA?
- Does this page point to a product that no longer exists and needs to be changed?
- Is this blog post missing headings for readability and an intentional keyword target?
- Is there a new research study that has come out recently to support a blog post’s main message?
One other thing that often happens as you’re looking at all your content in one place is ideas will spark for new pages and content that might fill a gap, or content that performs really well and is a large enough topic to write even more content.
When I’m working on client projects or projects for Formada, I like to keep a running list of potential new content as I’m auditing to help with any pending content planning.
That’s one of the many beautiful things about really focusing on your content — you can not only see what it’s doing for your business, but it can inspire you to take what you’re already doing even further in pursuit of your goals.
However, we understand that you might not have the time or the energy to focus all of your attention on website content. After all, you’ve got a business to run, and luckily, this is precisely where we can help you!
Feeling Daunted by Content Auditing and Pruning? Formada Can Help!
Your website should be pushing your business forward. Your website’s content is central to making that possible.
One important way to get the most out of your website is by ensuring that your content is relevant, accurate, and actionable. Formada can help you audit, assess, and prune your content to create a new, better performing content strategy, one that helps achieve your goals.
It’s time to clean up your site, isn’t it? We’re here to roll up our sleeves to help you do it!
Contact us today to schedule your website content audit!