What Are The Benefits of Content Audits?
The audit process will enable you to maintain, create and update your content, improve your site rankings, and make your website easier to navigate.
Audits provide data-driven insight into the performance of your content, helping you make informed decisions - for example, identifying which content needs to be rewritten or re-optimised if performance is not where you want it to be. Here are some of the key benefits:
1. Improve SEO results
Helping more potential customers find your website is a crucial objective. Content audits play a big role here, improving your visibility in the search engine results by making your site and its pages easier for search engines like Google to find, understand, and categorise.
Removing duplicate content helps search engines understand your site and will make it easier for your pages to rank for the terms you’re aiming for
Implementing on-page optimisations for key pages will help improve visibility in the SERPs (search engine results pages)
Updating pages that are ranking for valuable keywords but could perform better in the results
Consolidating pages on similar topics and keywords to prevent keyword cannibalisation (when multiple pages on a website compete for the same keywords in search engine results)
Identifying content gaps to uncover new organic traffic opportunities
2. Streamline and improve your site’s user experience
Many of the improvements that will enhance your SEO results, like deleting low-quality content, optimising existing content and addressing content gaps, as well as increasing the visibility of your site in search, will also create a better experience for the people who then arrive at your website.
This makes visitors more likely to stay on your site and engage with your content more deeply.
3. Realign with business objectives
Conducting a content audit ensures your website continues to help you achieve your business goals, and is communicating the right messaging to the right audience.
This might involve verifying authority around key subjects, or assessing your content’s relevance to your audience.
Content audits are especially useful in this context when companies are going through a website migration, a rebrand, or a new product launch.
4. Improve conversion and sales
One thing commonly discovered during a content audit is that there are pages unexpectedly ranking for terms and driving traffic to your site. This is a great opportunity to optimise and update these pages to work harder for you.
It’s a good idea to review these pages and maximise their value, adding new relevant calls to action or promoting other pages or resources on your site. This can help visitors learn more about your brand, get some added value, or move closer to a purchase.
5. Keeps your content current and credible
In order for your content to convey credibility, it needs to be accurate. But for Shopify businesses with lots of content on their websites, it can be difficult to keep things up to date.
Content audits are a great way to ensure that the brand voice and messaging on your website are consistent with your guidelines. For example, if your company decided to rebrand or remove a particular product or service, audits can quickly flag up all content featuring it so you can make the changes you need.
For businesses operating in regulated industries, content audits can also be extremely helpful for remaining compliant and reducing risk.
How To Conduct a Content Audit?
Here’s a top level list of steps to take when conducting a content audit:
Create a content inventory (a spreadsheet detailing all your site content)
Keyword analysis
Assess content quality (using th metrics we look at below)
Evaluate Internal linking
Check for and remove duplicate content
Perform content gap analysis (opportunities for content that does not yet exist)
Develop an informed content plan
We’d recommend doing the following audit at least once a year:
Check your site analytics and run a report on traffic to all pages in the last 6 months.
Take a look at the high-performing pages first and ask yourself the following:
Are the top pages those you want people to visit most?
Are the pages serving your business needs? i.e. driving leads or conversions
Can you improve those pages so they become more aligned with their purpose?
Are there pages that should be in the top ten that are not?
Next, look at the pages with the worst performance and consider the following:
What is the purpose of this page?
Why is it not succeeding?
Can it be improved?
If not, should it be removed?
The answers to these questions should inform how you manage your content. Four common outcomes from the review are:
1 - Optimise
Can you improve that piece of content to make a more rich and detailed page that will better service your needs, and perform better on Google? Look at the results pages and see what content is at the top for the same keywords
2 - Merge
If you have several similar pieces of content that are competing with each other, it sometimes makes sense to consolidate them into one comprehensive piece.
3 - Leave alone
If it’s doing well, it might be best to leave it as it is.
4 - Delete and redirect
If it’s outdated, no longer relevant or has been superseded by another piece of content, sometimes removing it is the best approach. Make sure that as well as deleting it, you redirect the url to another relevant page to prevent visitors landing on a 404 error page.
Conducting content audits like this regularly enables you to prune and nurture content where necessary so your site performance should continually improve.
The main benefit of conducting a content audit is that it will help your existing content do more for you, increasing traffic, engagement, and ultimately, sales. Without regular audits, your site content can become sprawling and inconsistent. It is a great way to keep your website current, engaging and clear, so that your visitors (and Google!) experience a clear and consistent experience.
If you need assistance optimising your Shopify store, get in touch with us at Radiant and talk to one of our ecommerce experts.
