Today, the Internet plays a large and vital role in how businesses and consumers connect with one another. Businesses of all sizes recognize the vital importance of establishing and maintaining a strong online presence. This allows current and potential customers are able to easily find the information, products, and services they need and want. Obviously, the mere existence of a website is insufficient to produce the results one desires, which is precisely why content is king. But, businesses overlook this factor, as not all content is created equally or has the same value and benefit.
Organizing Website Content
When it comes to attracting consumers and creating conversions, high-quality content is essential. A content plan for a website should always consider what content is most desired and how best to optimize content for search engine results. This means that any business should run regular content audits for their website. This allows business to better detect and handle weaknesses and bolster strengths.
During a content audit, you will review all the content that is currently on your website in order to better understand why it is operating the way it is, and how your future website content planning can help you achieve maximum growth. Here are few things you can do in order to carry out an effective content audit.
Collect Data
Identify and collect all your current website content. First collect all of your website content into one location, preferably with a web content crawling tool. This will quickly search your website, locating and importing all your content URLs to one location–like an easy-to-follow spreadsheet.
SEO Information
Collect additional data related to your website content. A web content crawling tool can search out the KPIs and SEO information for each content URL you have collected. This additional data is critical in helping you to understand your current content’s strengths and weaknesses. You will then be able to make necessary adjustments. Some of the most important SEO-related data to collect includes page titles, page visits, and average time spent on a page. Other important data to collect includes internal and external inbound links, last update date, word count, type of content, content author, and share count. This can take some time, but it will be time very well spent as this data can provide great insights.
Analyze the Data
Once you have collected all the pertinent data, you can analyze it and determine what actions are needed to improve your web content performance. There are tools you can use in order to help you analyze data and determine whether URLs need to be updated. Content pages with higher word counts fare better than content pages with lower word counts. These tools show you what types of content attract more attention and what is shared more often. If any of your URLs contain video content, you may notice that these pages have more views than URLs that only contain written content. This may drive you to focus more on video marketing as part of your overall content marketing plan.
Set Deadlines
Obviously collecting and analyzing data relating to your web content is valuable. But, this is true only if you use this data to make the changes that are necessary to improve your website’s performance. Business owners may be overwhelmed while considering how many changes need to be made. This is why it is helpful to set deadlines for completing each change. As you make these changes, revisit your content audit in order to ensure that you are achieving the desired results.
The entire purpose of any content audit is, of course, to better understand how your website is performing. It also shows how you can improve this performance. This is why regular content audits are absolutely necessary to any successful website. You may not collect every single bit of available data. But, even small, steady improvements can bring about better performance.
And for even more help with them check out these content audit tools: https://dynomapper.com/blog/12-content-audits/283-top-content-audit-tools [thank you, Dynomapper].
