3.4 Content Audits
Visual elements such as graphs, charts, logos, photographs, diagrams, and maps capture your audience’s attention and help them to understand the brand more fully. They are important parts of content. Ensuring that visual elements and content are relevant and contextually important is an essential part of a content audit.
Auditing content and imagery greatly enhances your site’s search-ability. Some of these tasks include:
- conducting search intent research (again)
- researching the effectiveness of content & navigation links
- editing content to include more phrases or keywords that people are looking for in reference to your type of business
- writing/optimizing meta descriptions and titles
Google Search Console
Once you have had some organic site traffic to your site, you will want to analyze to connect it to Google Search Console[1]. This free, easy to use and set-up web application is an essential tool for auditing content. It helps you find out why people are coming to your site, from where and for what purpose. It is critical to understanding your sites search performance.
This tool shows only organic site traffic, not paid traffic through Google Ads, as well as insights on how google is indexing your website. Here you will find the literal search terms people are using to get to your website. Are the terms identified relevant to what you expect? What group of customers/clients are not showing up on your site?
In the results section of Google Search Console you can download search results into a spreadsheet.
This type of data determines how transparent and helpful your site is for individuals looking for your product/service.
User research
Connecting with real people who use your site is a must if you want to better understand whether your content is meeting their needs. These are your target audience and customers. Finding out how they get to the website, how they work through the pages and what they think is missing are all keys to helping you revamp and continue to build new content.
Competitive Analysis
A lot can be learned about your businesses competition on Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), especially if you plan on competing only locally within your community. You probably already know who shows up and how on local search result pages for your business type. Knowing this and harnessing it are two different things. Tools like Moz[2] and Ahrefs[3] take keyword and competitor analysis to the next level by comparing results of your website and others.
Specifically, look for gaps in content between your site and your (local) competitors and what people are looking for online. What problems are they solving and what kind of user experience do their websites provide?
From there, identify content gaps through themes, sections, and individual pages from your competitive analysis. The content feature in Ahrefs can also help identify overlaps between your sites and others as well as gaps in content coverage.
SEO
While a lot of this section is showing you how to modify content for search-ability, there are still a few more tasks you need to complete to ensure your content audit meets all the SEO needs.
Rebekah Baggs & Chris Corak in SEO for Everyone identify these three essential overarching questions to ask of your content:
- Does the content include on-page optimization? Are the headings and content related, are non-decorative images provided with alternative text, does the author meta tag have appropriate authority?
- Does the content satisfy search intent? Does your content speak about the major themes found in search results related to your products, services, topics, etc.
- Is the content optimized for SERP display? The title and description of each page should be unique and informative. To see the code, verbatim on any website, right-click > view source and look for the HTML meta tags are the top of the HTML document provided by the browser.[4]
- Google. (n.d.). Improve your performance on Google Search. https://search.google.com/search-console/about ↵
- Moz, Inc. (n.d.). There's a smarter way to do SEO. https://moz.com/ ↵
- Ahrefs Pte. Ltd. (n.d.). Everything you need to rank higher & get more traffic. https://ahrefs.com/ ↵
- Baggs, R. & Corak, C. (2021). SEO for everyone. A Book Apart ↵