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We talk about spring cleaning our physical spaces but it’s just as important to apply the same practices to our online world. During AWeber’s April AWeberHour Twitter chat, they spoke with 5 amazing content experts. They shared some advice on how bloggers and marketers can improve their online content by regularly performing content audits. The word “audit” tends to translate to loads of time and effort. Time, for many businesses is a rare commodity. It doesn’t have to be a “mind-numbing odyssey”. Below are some tips to help you clean up and optimise your online content.
What is a content audit?
It’s important to define what a content audit really is. To put it simply, it’s a quantitative inventory of your content combined with a qualitative assessment of how you content is performing. It’s a lot more than just creating a list of all the pages, blog posts, photos, documents and videos you have on your website. Yes, making a list is part of the process. More importantly, it’s assessing how your content is performing. This helps you know what to keep doing, what to improve and what to scrap.
Why should you care?
Imagine if a broken link or missing metadata is keeping Google from indexing your site. This means no one will find your website if they’re searching on Google. If it’s not on Google, it doesn’t exist. That could spell ruin for any business.
What if you’re spending most of your time talking about Topic A, when your audience would prefer topic B. This translates to your audience growing disinterested and going elsewhere.
How do you know your content is effective if you’re not reviewing it on a regular basis?
By doing a regular audit of your content, you’re able to not only identify things that are broken on your site but you’re also able to identify trends in what your audience values which give you more direction with your strategy and business.
How to perform a content audit?
An audit does not have to be a daunting, time-consuming or labour intensive exercise. While there’s lots of elements to it, they can be easily broken down into manageable chunks.
5 content blind spots and how to avoid them
While you’re going through your audit, here’s some of the common areas that get missed. There’s a list of them below:
So, now you know the basics on content audits. Go ahead and try it out.