When Do You Need A Content Audit?

If you don’t need a content audit now, you will soon enough.

Just like an occasional SEO analysis is good to assess areas where more optimization is needed, and things need tidying up, your on-page content needs to be audited periodically as well.

This is a vital part of organic SEO, as this tells your SEO services company what improvements need to be made. An SEO audit will include a basic content audit, though a strict content audit will be a little bit of a deeper dive.

What is that, and why would you need one? Let’s talk about that.

A Content Audit Starts By Looking At Traffic

One of the first parts of a content audit is to examine all the traffic coming to all the pages on your website. Blog articles, landing pages and so on can all be tracked using Google Analytics or a similar reporting tool that shows how many visitors are coming to your page.

By examining the pages that get very little or no traffic, you can tell which pages are obviously not doing you or your visitors or customers any good.

A page that just sits on your site, not getting any traffic or creating new leads or conversions generally isn’t going to help with your rankings. The whole point of optimization, after all, is to grow traffic!

Analyzing Content Gaps

Another component of a content audit is identifying content gaps, if there are any.

Most businesses will have a blog on their site. If you don’t, any good SEO services company is going to recommend that you do. It’s one of the best tools for optimization in existence.

If your blog is missing what your customers want to see or read – and that your competitors ARE covering – this is something that you need to address. A blog is a great tool for reaching your customers and visitors, and so often it’s just treated as a product or service showcase. Not that doing so is bad – in fact, it can be fantastic…in doses – but it’s more that you can do a lot more with one than just talking about your product or service.

Gaps are identified, and a plan to address them will be created.

On Page SEO for Your Content

Another component of a content audit is examining on-page SEO.

Organic optimization is improving the content that’s on a website in a strategic fashion, making sure to address the details that Google and other search engines want addressed. It can be certain attributes, or certain formatting structures that they and also users prefer.

For instance, you look at meta descriptions, header structures, images, and also how well keywords are used on a particular page. How much content is present, and is it good content? Is there a good amount of information, or is it just the same copy from a sales brochure that you’d throw away anyway?

Do I Need A Content Audit? 

Every site needs a content audit from time to time; it’s a good practice to conduct one every so often (quarterly, biannually, yearly at minimum) but it’s not that you need to perform one every single month.

Frankly, time is needed for sufficient data to be gathered and smaller sites don’t need one as often as larger sites. The more pages you have, the more it pays to have a content audit performed on a more regular basis.

However, if you haven’t had a content audit performed in a while – or havent had one ever – then it’s probably time that you had one.

If you notice that only a few of your pages get any traffic, but a lot of them don’t…there’s a chance you need a content audit. If your rankings are slipping, it’s definitely a good idea to have a content audit.