SEO audit is one of the points we give the most importance to in our content marketing work. Conducting a content audit can allow us to reconsider our website performance from many different perspectives. If we were to list the main ones;
Finding low-performing content
Improving existing content
To use the experiences gained in future content and produce more SEO compatible content.
Identifying high-performance writing
For example, in this article, we will talk about the examples that the world-famous SEO platform Backlinko has made on its own website.
They felt that some of the content that performed well during the day (in terms of traffic and Google ranking) was losing performance over time and decided to first conduct an SEO content audit to take action.
Content-control-in-seo-work
They came across a situation like the one we see in the picture above and immediately started taking action.
An in-depth content audit was conducted to reverse the above picture and as you can see below, they were successful.
seo-content-audit
How to Conduct Content Audit?
Step #1: Delete or Redirect Low-Performing Pages
Your first step should be to find and get rid of the low-performing pages on your site. In other words:
Identify content that generates ZERO traffic and ZERO sales.
Why do we start here?
If you have published a lot of content on your site, you also have a lot of content to review.
Once you get rid of the junk, you can focus pakistan mobile phone numbers database on the content worth developing.
You can easily identify low-performing content with Google Analytics .
All you have to do is “site content” > “landing pages”
content-control-landing-page
And sort the landing pages from lowest session to highest.
content-control-sessions
You will probably find some strange pages in the report that do not actually exist.
But as you work your way down the list, you’ll probably find some content that has brought in a handful of visitors in the last month.
Once you define your content, you'll also want to:
Deleting the content directly (without thinking)
Combine it with other content on your site and make it more powerful.
Making a 301 redirect to another page on your site
The “correct” option varies depending on the content. At the end of this article, you will understand better what we mean.
**For example, if you posted a blog post about an event 5 years ago, it may be more appropriate to delete it immediately.
However, if your post is generally valid but weak in some areas, this may be a situation where you need to combine it with other content.
Step #2: Evaluating Content Based on Traffic
You’ve deleted, merged, or redirected your lowest-performing content, now it’s time to work on what’s left. Specifically, you’ll want to evaluate your content based on an objective metric
I recommend that you evaluate the performance of your content based solely on the traffic it generates. There are many different reasons for this, but this is the simplest and most understandable method.
Traffic is a key measure of whether a piece of content is accomplishing its mission. After all, why does this content exist?
If your content audit focuses on SEO, then you may want to look at another measurement method…
Things you should look at;
Pages with low bounce rates
Pages with low site time
Pages with very slow loading speeds
TACTICS TO REDUCE Bounce Rate
Basically, you can make evaluations with the metrics we wrote above, apart from traffic. In many cases, you may encounter cases that receive very high traffic but need to increase the quality of content.
** When deleting a content, do not forget to check the backlinks and 301 the appropriate pages.
Step #3: Developing Content
Once you identify your content as inadequate, it's time to improve it.
Yes, this is the most time-consuming part of the process, but it’s also the most important. If you’re not making your content better, you’re barely doing a content audit at all.
There are a million ways to make content better.
Here are some approaches that work well across almost all types of content:
Include visuals: If your content is 100% text, consider adding some visuals to your post, such as graphs, charts, and infographics.
Update everything : Find and replace dead links. Refresh old images. And update the content itself to keep up with changes in your industry.
Make it easy to read : Especially on mobile devices. Most people created their content in years when mobile compatibility was not considered much. However, considering that mobile visitors are now a larger community than desktop visitors, the readability of our content on smartphones and tablets will be an important step.
More coverage : If your post is something like “8 tips for…”, turn it into a comprehensive guide that covers the entire topic in depth. This isn’t about pumping up your word count. It’s about making sure your content is a complete answer to people’s problems or questions.
Try to write more up-to-date: Usually, when articles lose their freshness, visitors’ interest in them will decrease at the same rate. To give a simple example, the article “The best SEO agencies of 2019 ” will naturally start to be read less in 2020. It will need to be rewritten for 2020.
Step #4: Boost High-Converting Content
Yes, as we mentioned earlier, you may want to base your content audit on traffic , but that doesn’t mean you should completely ignore conversions in your content strategy.
Because a content that generates a lot of traffic may also generate zero registrations and zero sales. In this case, it may be useful to re-evaluate your content according to conversion rates.
You can easily find these conversions with the help of Google Analytics (of course, if you have defined a conversion before) . You can visit this page for detailed information on this subject .
Maybe there’s a specific topic that has the potential to bring in new buyers, so you’ll definitely want to produce more content on that topic.
Or maybe you see a topic that is taking up a lot of traffic… But almost no one is converting. Then it might be time to reduce the scope of that topic. Maybe you need to add more CTAs to that topic. It might be time to think about why all that traffic is going to waste. If you have an example like that,
Note: This content was prepared by the Clicksus SEO Team by compiling different sources.
