A Simple Definition Of Content Audit And It’s Purpose

Content is the king of SEO. So it is important to keep quality contents and remove unwanted or low-quality contents. For this, we do the content audit. By using some performance metrics we can analyze the content and from that, we can understand which to keep, which to remove and improve. The purpose of a content audit is to improve the domain quality, trust and other ranking things on the site. Here we explain how to do content audit.

How To Do Content Audit

The content audit is not a simple thing. If it is not done properly it will affect your site. The content is analyzed by using different metrics. We must have the inventory data and depend upon it we do actions.

It has three phases:

1)    Inventory And Audit

2)    Analysis And Recommendations

3)    Summary And Reporting

 1)   Inventory And Audit

The inventory of contents begins with crawling of the site. The difference between the technical audit and content audit is, in technical audit crawls are mattered with crawlable content and in the content, audit crawls are concerned with indexable content. URLs are the unique identity of websites. Some URLs contain important contents and worth the entire application. But to get the effect of the URLs it may take one or two years. So in such cases, the process given below will help.

Step 1: Crawl All Indexable URLs

Website crawl can be done by Screaming Frog crawler. Also collect URLs from Google webmaster tools, XML sitemaps, Google Analytics, the internal database of the e-commerce website and these URLs can be crawled in the crawler. Add these URLs to your main URLs and obtain a complete list of indexable URLs. But there are some URLs that are not actually indexable. So exclude them. You can avoid URLs like

• Error 4XX and Error 5XX
• Robots.txt and blocked URLs
• CSS file, JavaScript files, SWF files
• Images and redirecting URLs which have canonicalize to other URL

Crawling New Technologies

• Crawling of large websites
• Crawl only the indexable content. No need to crawl all URLs of the site.
• Divide the site into crawlable parts
• If the site is too large you can crawl single directory at a time.
• Machine Upgrade

To hold data during the crawl time you need more RAM. So install additional RAM on your computer for this. It will improve performance.

• Change to proper URL

In WordPress like sites, the URL structure may be like numbers. This is not good. So always add your keyword in URL and it must be simple and meaningful one. If the URLs contain numbers and not a meaningful one then redirect them to correct URLs.

• Adapt your tools

To get more from the crawler screaming frog provides speed adjustments, query strings, search depth etc. To avoid hanging and data loss leave some GB to the spider.

• Use Other Tools

At the time of the content audit, there is a lot of bandwidth waste. This may due to the crawling of the entire website and it may contain an indexable URLs. There are some other tools too like Deep-crawl and Botify.

• Dynamic Mobile site crawling

In the mobile setup, there are two codes one for mobile and other for desktop. But for both these version, only one URL is there. Depending on the type of device the URL may vary. By using JavaScript frames works it affect the speed in the mobile version.

Step 2: Choose additional metrics

Crawlers will give URLs, metrics, titles, meta tags, word count and descriptions. You also get information about internal and external links, traffic etc. and by these, you can make an informed data during analysis of content audit. URL profiler world well with screaming frog and URL profiler is the best for it.

2)   Analysis And Recommendations

In a large organization, it’s tempting to have a junior SEO do all of the data-gathering up to this point. We find it useful to perform the crawl our-self, as the process can be highly informative.

Let’s check how to do Analysis.

Step 3: Put the data on the dashboard

Do the work details in Excel and upload it to Google sheets later. Because while using Google sheets you may face performance issues. The dashboard creation is easy just add action column and details column in the spreadsheet. The action column must have three options like leave as-is, remove and improve. In the detail, column adds instructions for implementation.

Step 4: Do the work depending on the content audit dashboard

Now you have all the data and you may work differently from others. Some content related issues may cause algorithmic filter look for these issues and start with it. This may cause penalty issues. For big websites, it is better to do content audit periodically.

3)  Summary and Reporting

The content audit is very useful. The report should contain all details and recommendations.The clients are going to find the greater benefit in our final content audit report, which include high level overview of our recommendations.

 Step 5: Report Writing

The report should contain finding, recommendation and next steps from the audit, and should start with an executive summary.