How to conduct a web content audit? Our practical guide

To determine the quality of your content or to write content on topics that will interest your target audience, you must perform a web content audit. How is this done? Here is our practical guide to help you conduct your audit. To start off on the right foot, let's look at the usefulness of a web content audit.

According to Everett Sizemore of Moz, [Translation] "an SEO content audit includes a complete inventory of all indexable content on a domain. It is then analyzed using performance tools from various sources to determine which content to keep, improve, or remove or consolidate."

Source: Sizemore, Everett. 2017. How to do a content audit. [Blog post].

A web content audit is measurable and quantifiable. Based on these data, a content marketing strategy can be created and developed.

A web content audit analyzes the topics and information contained in web pages via URLs.

An SEO audit analyzes the entire site to check if the foundations of SEO are well applied for natural referencing. The analyzed elements include incoming and outgoing links, social media, URLs, and much more. You can read our article on this topic.

Before the project begins, you must define the objectives or desired outcomes to address your questions. For example, is it to increase your target's engagement? Is it to increase the conversion rate?

Once you have determined your objectives, the statistical data to be processed will be on the profile and behavior of the visitors, the engagement rate, the SEO data, and the sales data.

To analyze the links, you can use tools like "Screaming Frog" or "Siteliner." These tools generate information about the quality of your URLs. Once the analysis is completed, you rank all the URLs of your site and take only the URLs of indexable content to export them to an Excel file. To simplify your work, you will choose the CSV file format and convert it into an Excel spreadsheet.

Make sure your site is indexable, i.e., a sitemap has been created with the path to follow for indexing the content URLs. This way, Google's bot will know what needs to be indexed and will follow the path. This step is important because if the URLs are poorly indexed or not indexed, the content audit will not reflect the true situation of your website. The sitemap can be created using Google Search Console. Google Analytics allows you to see the most and least visited pages.

Additionally, you can test just the performance of your mobile site via the site testmysite.withgoogle.com. Again, you only need to enter the URLs on your mobile and test the performance. With the Screaming Frog tool, you could also check other parameters of your mobile site.

According to the Moz site, you can use tools like URL Profiler or SEMrush to add other parameters to your URL analysis. The additional statistics will enhance your analysis with information from social networks, visit duration, keywords, backlinks, and much more.

The software analyzes the content on your web pages and breaks down the information in columns to explain the performance of each page. The criteria include the length of the text, the number of words, the URL address, the number of impressions, and many others.

Once you have completed the analyses, you export them in CSV format and again convert it into an Excel spreadsheet. Then, you export the information from different platforms into one Excel file. You create different tabs for each analysis. For example

, Google Search Console, Google Analytics, URL Profiler, and Screaming Frog. It all depends on the software you are using.

To complete an analysis of the content, a good understanding of basic SEO practices is necessary. Based on these data, you will perform the interpretation and justify the actions to be taken for your content marketing strategy.

For example, Googlebot values texts with a minimum length of 1,500 words. Therefore, if in your dashboard, you notice duplicates or similar topics, you can combine them. You can rework articles to optimize them. Your text will be richer, more complete, and more relevant. It is always possible to add and modify the information in your texts to keep them up to date and to prevent the text from becoming obsolete. Usually, your sitemap will be updated, which will inform Googlebot of the changes. The information will be updated after some time.

If you find that some texts are not performing well, you can conduct a keyword search with a tool like kwfinder. The goal is to choose a word whose search result is high and the SEO difficulty level is low. Thanks to the keyword, your text will have a better chance of appearing in search results and aiding its positioning for natural referencing.

For example, with the kwfinder tool, the word Instagram influencer appeared in search engines 110 times last month and the SEO difficulty level is 20. Therefore, it can be deduced that it is a good keyword. Indeed, every month, many internet users perform searches using the word Instagram influencer. Therefore, by using this word in the body of the article, there is a better chance that your text will appear in search results.

When writing content, it is necessary to use the keyword several times at the beginning of the text. However, the formulation of the text must be done naturally and not forced. Otherwise, your efforts to optimize web content will be in vain, not to mention that you must create the topic and title from the keyword and not the other way around. Subsequently, you check the topic on Google to see if there is interest in this topic.

Furthermore, you can create a lexical field around your keyword. For example, take the word Instagram influencer. Its lexical field includes influencer marketing, Instagram influencers, sponsored Instagram according to the results from kwfinder. These must be integrated throughout the blog article. Conducting a keyword and lexical field search helps find useful words for optimizing the text.

Why is the SEO difficulty level important? A word with a medium difficulty level and a high or low search result can make the positioning of the article difficult. You can do a test on Google to see the search results and validate the relevance. It is recommended to have a balance between the two parameters when choosing the keyword. Moreover, it is necessary to consider the context and environment in which your company operates to be able to analyze and interpret the data appropriately.

When analyzing blog articles, for example, the column of impressions and the number of clicks are also good indicators. For example, if the number of impressions is high and the number of clicks is low. You can deduce that the article appears in search results, but the internet user does not click on the link. Therefore, you could change the title or meta-description to encourage the internet user to click on your link.

You can exercise for each URL and classify them according to their importance. Subsequently, you can create another page in your Excel file and indicate the priorities to correct, optimize, and those not to be optimized with the list of URLs of your website.

To summarize your analysis, you can indicate the findings such as pages to delete, articles to rework, and those that do not need change.

Subsequently, you can indicate the recommendations for the deployment of your web content strategy that meets your objectives.