The Competitive Content Audit

It is the desire of every webmaster to own a website that can meet their needs, serve and engage his/her visitors. Every webmaster has to develop a positive stance towards competition which many people dread. Competition should be given the right perspective and proper interpretation as you should learn from it in order to improve on personal services and products. Content auditing is aimed at auditing your website as a defense against competitors. It helps you to examine the effectiveness of your contents as well as bridging any technical flaws and gaps.

Website content inventory is the basis of real and comprehensive auditing. A general competitive content audit entails the following:

• Formats
• Audience
• Publishing frequency
• Nature and content quantity
• Unique features
• Language – tone and voice
• General impression
• Contributors’ names and numbers

While the initial step is data gathering, the major task is found in the comparison of your contents with those of your competitors with special focus on possible strengths and weaknesses as well as the differences between both sites.

Draft a Scorecard

For any content audit to be deemed a success, it must be properly supported by well defined roles that can serve as a yardstick for measuring your website. For instance, in blog auditing, you must ensure fresh contents are frequently published, commented on and also shared with different social sites. Similarly, if you have a product for sale in your website content inventory, you must check the available information that the product shows in any eCommerce site as well as how your content is properly synchronized to persuade a visitor to make his/her first purchase.

Be Specific

To know how you fair among your competitors in your own niche, you must conduct as many as three different competitive content audits that focus on the first three players in your area. By conducting multiple audits, you are able to reduce as many biases as possible.

What to Assess

During an assessment, there are some basic elements that need your attention. These include:

• The breadth and depth of your content. Here you focus on the wideness of topics, the category in which they belong and the description of the products if they are sufficient and informative enough.

• Consistency and quality. The focus here should be to identify if your contents are consistent enough for your target audience. Check your competitors’ site if both of you have the same content construction. Another aspect is checking the quality of the content with consistency.

• Completeness. In this segment, your focus should be whether your competitors’ contents are so vast and comprehensive to initiate a decision from the user. Attention should be on the ease of access to information, help functions and similar things.

• Frequency. You must check the consistency and frequency of publishing fresh content.

• Usability. Close attention should be paid on the user interface such as categorization and navigational structures that aid visitors without stressing them out. Also, make sure you have search functionality so the user can find what they are looking for.

Competitive Analysis

After completing the above processes, then you are almost done with your competitive audit. Remember that analysis is aimed at identifying your weakness and lapses for improvement. DYNO Mapper is tool for efficient website content inventory that can speed up the process for any content audit. Sign up for a free 14 day trial today.