No matter what type of content is on your website, it is vital that you conduct audits every now and then to make sure that it is staying relevant and effective for producing the results that you want. When you create an inventory of your existing content, you will become aware of the gaps in content and will also be able to see the type of content that is performing well. This gives you the information that you need to move forward in being successful.

In previous articles we’ve talked about content marketing and auditing tools, DYNO Mapper’s Google analytics integration features and how sitemap tools can make your life much easier. We are going to take things a bit further in this article and talk about how analytics and content audits go hand in hand. Most people don’t realize that they can use analytics for content auditing purposes, but by utilizing your analytics data you will have the ability to rise to the top with fantastic content for search engines andvisitors.

As you probably already know, [optimized] website content and search engine optimization go hand-in-hand. There are a variety of tactics that website owners can use to ensure that the content on their website is top notch and doing its job. SEO optimized content is all about directing search engine traffic to your website—users who are looking for what you’re offering. The hope is that once those visitors get to your website and browse through your pages that they will love what you have to offer and convert into a sale.

You know you need a content audit when you realize that your organic search traffic has been going flat in the recent past or the ranking of your keywords in vital search terms has been falling.  A content audit is an assessment that examines the web content assets of your company for SEO value, relevance, messaging and quality.  Taking a comprehensive approach towards examining the nature of your website’s content goes a long way in enhancing your website for significantly better results. An audit can be time-consuming and boring especially because you are not spending your time on content creation and promotion. However, when done appropriately, it can be very effective in revolutionizing your online presence.

A content audit is imperative to the success of your website, especially when you realize that your organic search traffic has been going flat or that the ranking of your keywords in vital search terms haven’t been cutting it. In essence, a content audit is an assessment that examines the web content assets of your company for SEO value, relevance, messaging and quality. Not only that, by using a content audit tool and sitemap generator like DYNO Mapper users will be able to make sure their meta descriptions and their lengths are on point, thanks to the tool’s highlight feature.

Taking a comprehensive approach towards examining the nature of your website’s content goes a long way in enhancing your website for significantly better results. An audit can be time-consuming and boring, especially because you are not spending your time on content creation and promotion. However, when completed appropriately, it can be very effective in revolutionizing your online presence.

Performing content audits is an essential part of maintaining a website, but you cannot just jump right in and perform an audit. There are several important things that need to happen prior to starting the audit. Because some websites actually have thousands upon thousands of pages with their own text, images, applications, and documents, it is almost impossible to manually audit any website's content. Before even thinking of that, you will need to perform a content inventory. This will organize all of the information on the website into a format that will be easier to read and manipulate.

In this article, we will discuss and explain how to do a website content audit, why this is very useful, and how a content analysis tool can decrease your time and effort. But we will start first by answering the question “What is a content audit?”

What is a website content audit?

A content audit is a process that includes looking at all the content (data) in the website or a marketing funnel and determining the strong and weak points of it in order to maximize the marketing activities. This process is sometimes confused with a content inventory, which is just a list of all items on your website. When done in an effective way, a great content audit will help answer questions about which parts of the site an audience likes more and dislikes as well. It will give clear insight on potential issues that must be fixed in order to enhance the productivity of your website.

Planning and creating a website’s structure is not an easy job for a large website. There are some specific steps that should be followed. This article will provide you with the main steps to make sure that the website architecture achieves your client’s expectations.

The very first step is tomake a planduring the discovery phase of the website development project. If you do not make a detailed plan then you will most likely end up with a scope creep, unpredicted increases to the project’s scope. They call it project creep because it often sneeks up on you and it is hard to get compensated for the extra work that did not go through the approval process. You will have no base on which to defend yourself against and could waste lots of your time and money. It will help you avoid possible disagreements about the final product; if you follow the plan that was accepted by the client, then it is much easier to finalize a project and get paid. 

Monitoring issues on websites will help to keep the operation of the site in line. Because the issues may change, when they arise it can have a negative impact on the SEO and usability. DYNO Mapper will perform a content audit, monitoring every week to make sure that the integrity of the website is still intact. Users can receive weekly notifications as well as progress reports that are charted and available to be made into reports. Performing this action with the content audit tools will guarantee that the content is presented to the search engines in the ideal way, and it will reveal any glitches that are present in the website structure.

For years now content has been king of the marketing game. After all, rock solid content is what keeps your visitors on the page and wanting more, right? Great content is what makes visitors turn into conversions, with a little help from search engine optimization, and both XML and HTML sitemaps. But writing really good content that converts takes time, a lot of energy and research, doesn’t it?

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.

Performing a content audit for SEO on your website does not have to be the hard. Although it has not always been easy, it is vital that it gets done, so that your website and its content can receive the attention that is deserves. Whether or not you agree that content rules when it comes to website success, many others agree that it is one of the most important things to do correctly, so auditing your content is something that must be done. For those that are not familiar with a content audit, this is the process by which you will go through all of the content contained on your website and then determine its relevance and success. You will gather pieces of data about each individual piece of content and then you will analyze the data to conclude which content should be updated, what should be built on, promoted again, or what should even be deleted permanently.

What is a Content Audit?

A content audit is the process of checking each piece of content on a website, and then compiling it into a large list. When you opt to perform a full content inventory, you will make a complete list of every single item of content on the website. This will include all pages as well as any assets like videos or downloadable files. In lieu of this, you may opt to perform a partial content inventory. This is simply a listing of a specific subset of the website's content. A partial inventory could include the top few levels of a hierarchical website, or the most recent content created in a specific time period (like the last 6 months). This will still include all sections of the website. To dwindle it down even further, a content sample is a less detailed collection of content pieces from the website.