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SEO-optimized content is a must for successful digital marketing, as great content helps target the audience by providing them with helpful information about what they are looking for. In this regard, let’s learn – why auditing WordPress content is essential.
When any website delivers quality content, it is a sweet gesture to help readers get desired results easily; when satisfied, users are more likely to be engaged with your website.
A proper content strategy is needed to deliver quality content while targeting performance. Since industries keep updating, content cannot be constant. One must re-plan their strategy and audit available content for amendments or removal.
When you decide to audit your website’s content, you need a reasonable plan to continue delivering optimized, user-friendly, and quality content.
In this blog, we have explained what content audit is while preparing the surface for content auditing. The later section of the blog also discusses the components of a successful content audit. We have also shared answers to questions while discussing how often one should perform content auditing and how one should perform content auditing for their website.
What is Content Strategy?
Planning, delivering, creating, and governing content while developing content is called forming a strategy or strategically managing content. Sometimes, it is also known as a content marketing strategy. The components of a content strategy are choosing content topics, finding ideal content formats, writing styles, promotion, and designs.
A content marketing strategy ensures that you are using valuable and usable content while targeting relevant keywords for your business. These well-structured content pieces help improve the user experience on your websites.
Uses of Content Strategy
The benefits of using a content strategy are as follows while focusing on various measures involved:
- A strategy helps in adding content and people-oriented components to the content.
- A content strategy helps to plan one’s site content marketing.
- A strategy adds meaningful, engaging, and user-friendly content to your websites.
- It helps prioritize topics, writing styles, and website content types.
Components of Successful Content
Since content plays a critical role in any business website, taking necessary measures for content marketing is essential. Here are a few crucial components of a content strategy:
Content Inventory
Content inventory lists all your website contents: text, documents, images, and applications. To understand the available content on your website, you can access content inventory, which provides valuable insights into different pieces of content on your website.
Before deciding what to include in a content inventory while addressing various factors, it is essential to know the goal and scope of your content audit. Once your purpose and scope are clear while addressing measures, the next step is to find its inclusions. Content inventory can have different data, but the essential raw data components of content inventory are:
- Title
- Unique Content ID
- Author of the Content
- Meta Description
- File Format (Doc, Txt, PDF, HTML)
- Physical Location of the Content
- Dates of creating, revising, and accessing content
The other valuable tools in content inventory are:
- Website Performance
- Keyword Ranking
- Website details
Data Analysis
Since data collection is not accessible, one has to get data from multiple sources and add it manually to spreadsheets. For accessible data collection, specific tools can be utilized, such as:
- Google Analytics
- Position Tracking
- Google Search Console
- Backlink Analytics
- Site Audit
Analyzing Competition and Gaps
One of the essential components of a successful content audit is analyzing the content of significant competitors and finding the gaps in your website’s content. Once you find the faults and gaps in your content, you must find different ways and plan strategies to fill these gaps and improve your content efficiency.
What does WordPress Content Auditing mean?
Having learned about content strategy and its vital components, let’s explore the concept further and learn about WordPress content auditing in detail.
Meaning of Content Auditing
Content auditing is the process of regularly evaluating and analyzing any website’s existing live content. It helps measure and analyze a website’s live content performance over time. This includes website content such as landing pages, blogs, and educational resources.
Content auditing differs from content inventory as it involves an in-depth evaluation and analysis of your live website, depending on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) found on different sources.
Moreover, content auditing also involves a content analysis after understanding the target audience, prioritizing ideas for new content, and guiding content strategy. Content auditing is essential to add regular content backed by data on the website, such as daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly content reporting.
Purpose of Content Auditing (Why Auditing WordPress Content is Important?)
Content auditing is the best practice for businesses, both small and large. Content auditing shows the pathway to focus on future SEO and content marketing efforts. This practice helps companies to get insights on the changes required on their website content for a seamless and user-friendly experience for visitors.
Businesses should perform content auditing of their live website at least once a year. The two essential components of the content audit are:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Organic search is one of the essential traffic increases for many businesses, so Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays a significant role in businesses, especially the ones getting businesses online and depending on brand awareness.
Content auditing for the websites of such businesses identifies the shortcomings in the websites that spoil the SEO factors. Conducting timely content audits for SEO helps identify steps that can improve a website’s traffic and search engine performance.
Content Marketing
Content auditing also lets you get insights on the audience response to every piece of content available on your website and analyzes content engagement, social shares, and visit metrics. Auditing helps one cross-check your content depending on different cross-references and learn what strategies are working and what aren’t.
Benefits of WordPress Content Auditing
The most crucial benefit of regularly auditing content is evaluating your SEO strategies and finding ways to improve organic search engine rankings. Also, it helps determine the weaknesses and inconsistencies of your websites. The other key benefits of content auditing are:
- Get data-driven insights into the available content of your website.
- Find the latest content topics your audience might be interested in and improve future engagements.
- Learn about the different topics you can re-purpose as new marketing collateral.
- Know what available content on your website is not performing well, and find ways to improve it.
- Detect broken links or pages that might hamper your brand voice and are inconsistent with your brands. Find ways to address them and build a more compelling digital experience for your audience.
- Develop a content strategy for your website with data-driven information.
Guide to Audit WordPress Content
Managing a website is no different from maintaining a vehicle. Like your vehicle, which needs regular checking and maintenance for multiple trips, your website needs regular maintenance for good performance.
Content audit is the process of maintaining your website’s performance. Below, we have shared vital steps to audit your website content:
Define Goals and Metrics
Although content auditing is time-consuming and tedious, it is essential for website performance. With defined objectives and clear goals, it can be a success.
So, the first step for content auditing is to define the goals and objectives of the content auditing process. The everyday purpose of content auditing can be:
- Better SEO Results
- Improved Audience Engagement
- Increased Conversion Rates
After getting insights into the set goals, the next step is to align these goals with your content marketing metrics. The four common categories of content marketing metrics are:
- User-behavior Metrics
- SEO Metrics
- Engagement Metrics
- Sales Metrics
Have an Inventory of Your Content
Do you know what content inventory is? If not, do not worry! Let’s address the subject in more detail.
A content inventory is a listed form of all types of content available for your site. It includes everything ranging from texts, images, documents, and applications. Understanding your content inventory helps you know your sites better, locate things on site correctly, and update content as per the latest norms.
The considerations for creating a content inventory are:
- Analyze the content of your sites.
- Collect all URLs of different web pages for analysis.
- Put the Content in a Catalog.
- Collect metadata for every piece of content.
Gather and Analyze Data
Since data collection is lengthy and complex when performed manually on spreadsheets while measuring performance, to gather a large amount of data, using analytics tools is helpful in content auditing.
Some of the valuable tools for data collection are:
- Google Analytics
- Google Search Console
- Position Tracking
- Backlink Analytics
- Site Audit
We have elaborated on these analytics tools in the later sections of this blog. Time-tracking software is also an essential tool for gathering data these days.
Draft an Action Plan
Once your content auditing data and analysis are gathered, the next step is to craft an action plan for your content auditing. Some of the potential inclusions of the content auditing action plan can be:
- Prioritizing Action Plans based on the goals and objectives of the content audit.
- A unique action plan for different URLs of your site
Adjust Existing Content Strategy
While performing WordPress content auditing, it is essential to consider the long-term content strategy, which optimizes content for goals like SEO optimization and user engagement.
Here are a few essential points you may include in your content strategy while you are focusing on content performance:
- Identify the strategies that might work for your content and start working on them.
- Find the least successful content of your websites and identify methods to improve their performance.
- Compare your website’s content with that of your competitors and improve it with periodic analysis.
- Reviewing your content strategy regularly is essential, and auditing content once a year is ideal.
Tools to Use for WordPress Content Auditing
For an ideal content audit, one needs enough time and resources. Using manual data sources for website content auditing over a long period can be daunting. Therefore, using analytics tools for automatic data collection and content research can magnificently improve content auditing. Here are a few crucial tools to aid content audit for your websites:
Google Search Console
This essential tool improves your website’s performance on the Google search engine. Google Search Console lets you gain insights into search analytics, receive immediate alerts about site issues, crawl individual URLs, and use many other features.
Semrush
It is also one of the most essential content auditing tools. This tool helps you personalize your content audits based on the metrics from sources like Google Analytics and Google Search Console. The tool provides inputs on your website domain and enables access to a custom report on all crucial areas of your website requiring improvement.
Yoast SEO
It is considered the top WordPress SEO plugin, ensuring your sites meet the highest SEO standards. This plugin also provides you with tools to perform content auditing and optimize your content according to SEO guidelines.
Screaming Frog
This tool is composed of small tools used for SEO improvements. It is essential to crawl websites of every size and collect URLs from your site map to create an SEO content audit. The audits of this tool have details about broken links, page titles and metadata analysis, duplicate content, and many other useful information helping in content improvement. The goal of this tool is to find site issues quickly and help you make informed decisions to improve the SEO of your websites.
Moz
This SEO software helps users crawl their websites on demand, which finds technical SEO issues instantly and knows different ways to improve a site’s content. One can also build custom dashboards on this software.
Parse.ly
This is a component of WordPress’s VIP platform and a content analytics solution for the users to measure their content’s performance other than just providing SEO-related or general web analytics. This tool is helpful, especially for the content teams, to gather real-time and historical data through comprehensive reports. With this tool, one can access content analytics that is well-analyzed and backed by data to improve your website’s content auditing.
How often do you need to perform Content Auditing?
Content auditing must be performed regularly and include factors while targeting focused keywords. But what is the regularity? How often do you perform the content audit while targeting an increase in ROI? Everyone needs clarification on these questions. Let us help you with such concerns.
However, how often content auditing should be done depends on the size and complexity of your website content and how frequently you update old content and add new content. One fit for all is auditing content once a year while achieving distinct results. However, the websites with a more significant range and those regularly updated need auditing more than once a year.
There is debate over whether an audit should be performed once or twice a year. Approximately 33% of people find a twice-a-year audit more suitable, whereas 50% prepare to update their content once a year when it is outdated.
Conclusion
Why Auditing WordPress Content is Important?
Content audits aim to understand the quality of existing content and learn how to improve it. If performed correctly, a content audit can provide valuable insights into missing meta tags, keyword focus, and low keyword density.
Besides the prominent benefits of SEO results, a comprehensive content audit also provides an opportunity to find poorly written and outdated posts and ways to update them. Also, it helps see what forms of content, topics, voice, or tone your target audience likes the most.
Adopting the given methods and strategies allows you to quickly audit your WordPress content while keeping it fresh and engaging to increase SEO and content marketing’s ROI. For more information on conducting a WordPress content audit, visit our WordPress services page.