Five steps to perform a website content audit

If you want to get more traffic to your site, then you need to make sure that you're providing quality content. If you've been putting off doing an audit of your own website, now's the perfect time to start.

An audit is simply a process where you review every single page on your website. It's a way to find out if there are any issues with your content, such as broken links, duplicate pages, missing images, etc.

You'll also want to check for any issues with your design, including broken links, broken images, and other problems.

Once you've completed your audit, you should have a much better idea of what needs to be fixed on your website.

Hold up, what's website content?

It's your blogs, your sales pages, your portfolio items - it's any words or images you have on your website.

Next you want to list a step-by-step process for performing a content audit. Here are some tips that should help you get started:

1. Create a spreadsheet

The first step will need them to create a spreadsheet with various headings in order to capture the data. Get organised! What would we include, at the very least?

• page type
• URL
• title
• main goal
• publish date

2. Define your goals

Think about what you want to accomplish. You'll have a better idea of how to organise your audit when you have your goals in mind.

An audit of your content can include information on conversion rates, as well as the number of visitors to your website. One goal to consider could be to determine which of your pages need to be SEO-optimised and focus on getting organic search traffic. Every content strategy needs to incorporate SEO best practice to be effective; every SEO needs to embrace SEO content marketing in order to remain on Google's good list.

But once you get that traffic, how are you content going to guide those new eyeballs toward their goal? That might be a stage two for your audit.

You could even identify your the most interesting and best-performing content during your audit and place  on your website's home page or in an email newsletter.

What goals would we have?

• Improve SEO
  • keyword use - h1, alt text, paragraph
  • backlinks and internal links
  • meta description
  • page loadings time
• Improve User experience
  • Have you answered a question? How can you help them solve their problems? You're the knowledeable guide to this hero remember, you're Yoda to their Skywalker. How can you nurture and educate them on their journey with you?
  • Have you given a plan to work with you?
  • assess length of content. Too long? Not enough?
  • Is it easy to understand? Is there jargon or clichés in there which need to come out?
  • Is it quality content?
• Technical assessment - Is it WCAG 2.0 compliant (for people with a disability)? This asks if you have accessible content for people using screen readers. As a bonus, this helps SEO too
  • is there enough contrast between elements?
  • are links easy to distinguish, that is not just rely on colour to tell that it is a link?

3. Populate your content

Now you need to have a list of all the pieces of content you want to focus on for this audit: web pages, landing pages, portfolio or blog posts? If you have a small website, you can easily copy and paste the information into your spreadsheet. Alternatively, you can use a tool such as Screaming Frog (https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/).

4. Data analysis

Time to analyse the data you've captured.

There may be gaps in titles and meta descriptions if they're looking to get more visibility. You should be paying special attention to older content if they want to update it. Finally, you should be looking at the level of traffic that each page receives. It's important that the pages that get a lot of traffic have good content. Important pages that aren't getting a lot of traffic are a good opportunity for improvement. Older posts are key areas that can be updated with new information - something that the search engines love!

5. Action plan

After this analysis, your 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.

Make a list of the action items and assign them each a priority. Then all you need to do is get started!