Content Auditing

Content marketing is an integral part of an SEO campaign. Without great, engaging and relevant content, your website is going to struggle to break into the coveted ‘top 10’ of SERPs. However, this is not a case of creating as much content as possible. Creating high quality, in-depth content, rather than lots of low quality pieces. More often than not, we find clients create many short, low quality content that hinders organic rankings.

Content auditing is our first step in the content marketing process. A content audit is simply a deep dive into a website’s existing content. Doing this during the early stages of the content marketing journey enables us to achieve a faster positive ROI for a client. If we can determine which existing content and topics are already generating organic traffic and ranking inside search engines, we are able to extend these topics in a full content strategy. Additionally, we can improve the existing content pieces and begin link building straight away.

Over the years we have refined our auditing technique to ensure a successful and thorough content marketing strategy that produces great results for clients. This process can be three stages, content analysis, inventory and structure.

Content Inventory

The first step in the auditing process is to form a content inventory. This is a curated list of all the content already present on the website. From this inventory we are able to analyse each content piece for strengths and weaknesses. Working with our clients, we set goals that underpin the content inventory, as well as the SEO campaign as a whole.

By using industry content inventory tools such as Screaming Frog, Google Analytics and Ahrefs, we are able to prioritise content. Content pieces that are generating links, organic search traffic and is a high quality will be our first priority. On a sliding scale downwards, we remain with the lowest quality content with no backlinks or organic search traffic.

Content Analysis

Once the content inventory has been created, we then analyse all the individual content pieces, to determine which action to take. Actions can include improving, keeping, or removing the content. This treatment includes qualitative content analysis to assess the engagement metrics, and quantitative content analysis to assess the traffic metrics.

Improve 

When we find a high quality content piece that is already generating backlinks and organic search traffic, we often decide to improve this further. By reviewing the existing text and the ranking keywords for that content piece, we are able make granular improvements. These little changes can add up to increase traffic and hopefully conversions.

Keep

If your content piece is performing well as it is, or is relevant to the business, it may be appropriate to keep that piece of content.

Delete

Deleting a content piece is often a last resort. The instances it may be reasonable to delete content are if it contains duplicate text, seasonal information, old/irrelevant news, or is low quality and unsalvageable. In these cases, keeping this content on your website could be harming organic rankings. To remove outdated content is also to leverage fresh, more valuable content for better SEO results.

Content Structure

Content structure is another important part of the audit process. Ensuring content is located in the correct places on a website can improve search engine rankings, but also user experience. When combined with our on page optimisation, these two strategies can improve site architecture and subsequently, search engine rankings.

Content Audit Is the Much-Needed Health Check For Your Content Marketing Efforts. 

Once we have determined a piece that falls into one of these categories we build a content marketing strategy around it. This includes on-page optimisation, content “pruning” and link outreach. Using this strategy we can get extremely quick organic ranking benefits which result in increases in the key KPIs for clients – all usually within a very short time period.

If you do not have any pre-existing content on the website that is not a problem as one of the key elements we do at HQ SEO is build a content marketing plan, the content audit simply allows us to analyse if we can use anything that already exists on the website.

A misfiring content marketing campaign is only going to drain your marketing budget. Get in touch with us to know more about how our content audit services can help your marketing campaigns start off on the right foot.