Out of everything that goes into a website, it’s content that is the most important when it comes to attracting visitors, nurturing them through their customer journeys and helping them see how you can solve their problems. And it’s not just your ideal customer: search engines also rely on your content to understand what your website is about (and how good it is).
If you’re reading this content audit guide, you’ve already got some idea of how valuable good content can be to an effective digital strategy. The questions remaining are: how valuable is your content? And how good is it at the job it needs to do?
There are three key things that good website content does well:
- Attract – it can be found by search engines and brings the right people to your website.
- Illuminate – users and search engines understand what it’s about, and it gives readers the information they want.
- Persuade – it convinces readers of your value.
By following this content audit guide, you’ll be able to accurately assess how well each and every piece of content on your website does these jobs and you can build a clear picture of how well your overall website does them. This guide will give you a clear framework for gaining insight into the current state of your content and what you can do to improve it.
Despite the scary “audit” word, our SEO specialists really enjoy auditing content and interpreting the data, and we hope you will too.
What’s in this guide?
You shouldn’t have to sort through a million different data points on your website during a content audit. This guide has been distilled into the most essential data points to give you a clear picture of your website content.
We’ve also tried to design this guide so you can audit content as objectively as possible. We’ve focused on: things that can be consistently measured with numbers, categories you can set, and any research you might have into your target customers.
This Content Audit Guide will walk you through:
- Auditing with specific goals and audiences in mind
- Setting up your content audit
- Reviewing your metadata
- Mapping content to your audiences
- Mapping content to Customer Journey stages
- Analysing content by themes and topics
- Analysing content by types and formats
- Analysing content by reading difficulty
- Analysing content by usefulness
- Analysing content by actionability
- Analysing content by length
- Identifying your best and worst performing content
- Defining next steps for your content
We usually recommend pairing a Content Audit with a Technical SEO Audit. As luck would have it, we have a Technical SEO Audit Guide for that too.
Audit with specific goals and audiences in mind
Content audits are their most insightful when you know what you’re looking for. Defining goals for your audit is essential for getting the most out of it. Some questions you should ask before beginning your content audit are:
- What do you want to achieve with your website? Do you want more sales, leads, website traffic, customer loyalty or a stronger brand?
- Ideally, what is your content’s role in meeting those goals?
- What is content contributing to those goals?
- What should content be contributing, but isn’t?
- What content shouldn’t be on your website?
- What content should be on your website, but isn’t?
It’s not just your goals that you should get a grip on before you start your audit.
The better you understand your target audience, their motivations, what interests them and their customer journey, the better you can audit your content according to how well it serves their needs. And the better you serve your audience’s needs, the more likely they are to convert to customers.
At Kwasi, we conduct thorough audience research prior to content audits so we have concrete digital personas with mapped customer journeys that are as accurate as possible to audit against.
Set up your content audit
Start your content audit by creating a list of every URL on your website. Unless you have all the time in the world, use a crawler like Screaming Frog. Screaming Frog is our top pick because you can connect it to Google Analytics and Moz APIs. With these, you’ll get a whole host of data for each URL, including the important ones you should add to your content audit spreadsheet. These include:
- URL
- Title Tag
- Title Tag length
- Meta Description
- Meta Description length
- Word Count
- Pageviews
- Bounce rate
- External links
The crawl will likely include some URLs you won’t need in your audit (like 404 pages), so just cull them from your list. If your website has a huge number of URLs, consider using a random sample for the audit.
Review metadata
Metadata, specifically Title Tags, Meta Descriptions and H1 tags are usually the first things readers will see for any web page. Readers will see Title Tags and Meta Descriptions even before they get to your page, in search results and social media. This metadata is also important to search engines when working out what to rank your pages for and how highly to rank them.
When written well, metadata helps your pages appear in relevant search results and convinces readers to visit the pages. Reviewing metadata allows you to make informed decisions about which Title Tags, Meta Descriptions and H1 tags are well-written, and which need to be rewritten.
Learn more: How to Write Better Metadata for SEO
What to do
Each Title Tag, Meta Description and H1 tag in your content audit spreadsheet should be labelled as either “keep as-is” or “rewrite” based on their length, quality and optimisation. Consider the following in your review:
- Any metadata that is missing needs to be labelled “rewrite”
- Title Tags longer than 70 characters or shorter than 50 should be labelled “rewrite”
- Meta descriptions longer than 155 characters or shorter than 130 should be labelled “rewrite”
- Any metadata that doesn’t accurately describe the corresponding URL (ideally using appropriate keywords) should be labelled “rewrite”
- Any metadata that isn’t compelling, doesn’t read well or contains spelling and grammatical errors should be labelled “rewrite”
You will be able to review metadata straight from the content audit spreadsheet.
Quick note: the Technical SEO Audit Guide includes a metadata review too. If you’re doing both audits, just review metadata once.
Map content to buyer personas
Mapping content to your buyer personas (your target audiences) tells you what and how much of your content is relevant to them.
The effectiveness of this mapping depends on how well you know your audience. Kwasi’s approach is to develop detailed digital personas that research and identify a target audience’s demographics, interests, online behaviours and motivations.
You may have customer research that takes another form or no formal research at all, but it’s important to have as accurate an idea of your audiences as possible.
What to do
- For each piece of content on your website, state which of your personas it is most relevant to
- If it’s relevant to some or all personas, label it as “multiple” or “all”
- If it isn’t relevant to any of your personas, label it as “none”
Quick note: not all businesses will need multiple personas. It’s 100% okay to have just one.
Map content to customer journey stages
Customers have very different needs depending on which stages of their journey towards making a decision about a product or service they are currently in. While working towards a single goal, the motivations and questions driving them will change with each new stage of their journey.
Likewise, the content they need at each stage, from Awareness through Consideration to Decision, should be very different. Mapping content to each stage of the (most relevant) persona’s customer journey lets you know which stages of the journey are well represented and which are not.
What to do
- For each piece of content on your website, identify which stage of the customer journey it aligns to (Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Post-Purchase – though you can get more granular if you want)
- Pieces of content that don’t align to a customer journey stage – or a persona at all – should be labelled as “none”.
8 additional factors to consider in the content audit
An effective way to rate your content is to benchmark it against your competitors’ content. This will help you to identify any gaps and opportunities for you to work
- While conducting your audit, review the website content of your top 1-3 competitors in relation to yours and consider the following:
1. Theme and topic
Attracting and converting the right people depends upon having content on your website that interests and matters to them.
Analysing your content by theme and topic lets you see which of the themes and topics relevant to your personas are:
- Well-represented on your site
- Under-represented
- Not represented at all
And:
- Are there any themes and topics on your site that aren’t relevant to your personas?
- Are there any themes or topics that appear regularly on a competitor’s website?
- Is there an opportunity to add value for your personas by including certain themes or topics on your website?
2. Content type
As with themes and topics, you want to make sure that the content types you use on your website are a good match for what’s relevant to your personas. This analysis is less related to what your content is, as it is to how your content is presented.
The different types of content include (but there’s lots more):
- Blog posts (get specific with types of blog posts too)
- Instructional content
- Landing pages
- Category pages
- Product pages
- Forms
- FAQs
- Videos
After classifying your content, consider:
- Are there content types that appear regularly on a competitor’s website?
- Is there an opportunity to add value for your Personas by including certain content types on your website?
3. Evergreen vs seasonal vs topical content
An effective long-term content strategy strikes the right balance between evergreen, seasonal and topical content.
Evergreen content (content that has a long or permanent shelf life) can maintain and improve a high level of performance over time.
Topical content, on the other hand, is great for generating spikes in traffic, attention and links in the short term; but is less likely to perform as well in the long term.
Seasonal content has potential for both, but will only ever be effective when it is in season (such as once per year). This might include content about Christmas, fire preparedness or tax advice.
You will want to think about:
- What is the mix of content like on your website vs your competitors?
- Are there any opportunities for improvement here?
4. Reading difficulty
Reading difficulty measures how difficult your persona would find it to read and understand each piece of content based on a quick first-time read.
Auditing content for difficulty will help you find which pages are too difficult for your persona to understand, and which pieces of content may be lacking in depth or information (pages that are too easy).
Factors that can affect the difficulty of a page include:
- Sophistication of vocabulary
- Use of jargon
- Sentence lengths and structures
- Clarity of arguments
- Paragraph length
- Assumed level of background knowledge – Specialisation of subject
- Amount of reflection/active engagement the content demands
- Content length and format
Set a benchmark for an appropriate level of difficulty, or a maximum level of difficulty. The easiest way to do this is based on reading level by grade (NB: Hemingway is an online editing tool that automatically grades your content in terms of readability).
Score each page (of your sample) for difficulty on the following scale:
- 1 – Very easy to understand
- 2/3 – An appropriate level of difficulty
- 4 – Slightly challenging, but within your persona’s abilities
- 5 – Very challenging or too difficult
5. Usefulness
Usefulness is a measure of how useful each piece of content is to your persona. It should account for how likely the content is to help them achieve a goal or answer a question relevant to the current stage of their customer journey.
Auditing content for usefulness will identify your most and least useful pages. By comparing this information with things like customer journey mapping, you can identify improvements to make to your content.
How useful is the content on your website vs your competitors? Can you see any opportunities for improvement?
6. Actionability
Actionability measures how likely it is that any piece of content encourages your persona to complete a desired action from that page.
Actions are likely to be different for different types of pages and at different stages of the customer journey. An appropriate action for a product page may be to complete a purchase, but for a blog post the most appropriate action may be to read another blog post, download something or subscribe to a mailing list.
How easy is it for your persona to take action on your website? In reviewing your competitors, can you see any useful techniques or opportunities for improvement?
7. Content Length
Auditing website content by length is also important. Content that is too short is unlikely to give readers enough information. It is also much less likely to rank in search engines for the keywords you want to target, which can result in less website traffic.
At the other end of the spectrum, content that is very long is unlikely to be read in full by visitors in a single session and may be too complex to be well understood.
Be ruthless with your website content. Anything that is longer than 2000 words should be edited for readability. Anything that is shorter than 200 words should probably be fleshed out further.
Learn more: How Long Should Your Blog Posts Be?
8. Content performance
Your content audit should illuminate the best and worst performing pages on your website, so it makes sense to identify and look at these pages closely during the audit. There are three main metrics you should (and can easily) look at to better understand the best and the worst of your website – page views, engagement metrics and external links.
We haven’t included conversion rates on these pages as you wouldn’t expect all of your pages to have conversion goals, and there are other factors besides content that can significantly impact conversion.
This doesn’t mean that you’re not allowed to look at conversion rates though!
Page views
- Which pages have the most page views? What do they have in common?
- Which pages have the least page views? What do they have in common?
- Are there any pages with very low page views that you don’t need to keep?
Bounce rates
- Which blog posts/articles have the best engagement rates? What do they have in common? (Expect many blog posts to have high bounce rates though, if you’re using bounce for engagement)
- Besides blog pages, which pages have very high engagement? What do they have in common?
- Besides blog pages, which pages have very low engagement? What do they have in common?
External links
- Which pages have earned a significant number of external links – that is, inbound links from other websites? What do they have in common?
For bonus insights, performance metrics can be extremely useful to cross-check against content length, but keep in mind that what you find are correlations and not causations. These findings should give you a basis for experimentation, not absolute truths.
What do you do after your content audit?
A content audit should be used to assess the overall content health of a website, but the information should also inform decisions to keep, improve or remove individual pages.
One system we use at Kwasi is called KKTR – Keep, Kill, Tweak, Re-do.
During your Content Audit, you should give each of your pages one of these four statuses:
- Keep (as is) – pages that are already great the way they are should stay that way.
- Kill – pages that aren’t well executed, aren’t relevant to your persona and don’t contribute to your goals can be killed off.
- Tweak – pages that are relevant but could be a little better or a little different should be tweaked slightly. For these pages, small changes could have big results.
- Re-do – pages that are relevant but aren’t well done should be given an overhaul.
Transforming data into insight
The final phase of a content audit is reviewing your findings to identify trends and patterns across your whole website. You can then convert this data into real insights, like weaknesses, opportunities, gaps that need filling and learnings you can take from your strongest areas.
At Kwasi, we combine all the insights from the outcomes of our digital persona, customer journey mapping and keyword research work to lay the foundations for innovative content strategies that drive meaningful results.
If you want to know more about understanding the state of your content and how you can transform it to better meet your audience’s needs and start smashing your business goals, we’re not hard to find.
