Content Audit: The Exact Steps We Follow

There are many ways to approach a website from an SEO point of view but knowing what order to do them in is often the part that requires experience. One might tackle a content audit first but in our experience, we've found that sorting out all the technical matters first is the way to get more from the strategies to follow. In other words, with a sound foundation, your content audit will have far more return. Once you've read through this, make sure you read our guide on what to do next!

What You'll Learn

• How to extract all the pages on your website.
• Discover which pages could get you more visitors.
• How to make your pages more valuable.

The Story

A few years ago we were approached by a company that operates in a competitive industry and they needed assistance in increasing the number of people coming to their website and inquiring about their services. They want to grow their business and they recognise that search engine optimisation (SEO) is a fantastic way to do so. We spent a lot of time talking with them about the business, understanding how they operate and how their target audience operates. From this, we were able to get started on their website with the first point of order being the technical side. We're not going to look at all the technical changes we did today or what we have been doing but rather we are going to walk you through our next move. Based on our track record below, the results speak for themselves:

The results really do speak for themselves and now it's time to look at what to do next to keep this momentum going. The next strategy we are going to roll out is a content strategy. We've wanted to do this for a while but other matters with higher priority have taken the front seat. We are now in a position to look at the content and we are going to run you through how we go about doing this. You're welcome to follow along and give this a try on your own website if you wish. Want us to do a content audit for you? Click here to contact us.

The Strategy

We've noticed that Google is looking at websites in a topical sense more and more these days. What we mean by this is that Google looks at a website and wants to see that all the content on the website points in the same direction. For example, if you have a blog on gardening and there happens to be a blog post from a year ago about a new car that the author bought, this is off-topic and would be best removed to ensure that the website stays on point. By going through all the pages and isolating content that needs to be removed or changed, we grow this same direction position that we are trying to achieve. Here's how we go about this.

#1 Finding The Pages

The first step of this process is to find all the pages that we're going to work on and we're going to do this using Google's Search Console. Log into your Search Console account, click on "Search Traffic" and then "Search Analytics". From here you want to select "Clicks", "Impressions", "CTR" and select "Pages". Like this:

Below the chart, you'll see a list of all the pages on your website and that's what we're going to be working with. One thing we would recommend is ordering the Impressions column from highest to lowest as we want to deal with the pages that are getting a high impression count but a low click-through rate (CTR). In other words, the potential clicks are there but we aren't getting those clicks and we need to find out why. Maybe it's because we're not appearing high enough in the search results, maybe it's because the meta title isn't enticing enough or maybe it's something else altogether. Below is an example:

#2 Exporting The Pages

Once you've got your pages ordered, scroll right down to the bottom and look for the "Download" button and give that a click. You're able to download a CSV file or move the data straight into Google Docs. We decided to use a CSV file as we wanted to use Excel to handle the data manipulation. Once you've downloaded the CSV file and imported it into Excel, highlight all the data and then choose Insert > Table and that will give you the following:

Note: For the sake of our client's privacy, we will use our own website for example purposes. It's important to convert the data into a table as it will give you the ability to order columns with ease.

#3 Formatting The Sheet

We love conditional formatting here at iMod Digital so we immediately started to format the cells. One of the best things you can do is order the impression column from highest to lowest (as we did earlier) and then use conditional formatting to highlight the pages that have a very low CTR. In other words, we want to find pages that are getting a high number of impressions but a poor number of clicks as these are the pages we are going to need to work on. Follow these steps:

1. Order the impression column in descending order.
2. Highlight the CTR column.
3. Click on "Conditional Formatting" in Excel.

Here are the options you want to choose: Note 1: You don't have to use 2% for this, you can play around with numbers that suite your website. Note 2: You may need to manipulate the CTR column depending on what Excel version you're using. At this point your spreadsheet will now look something along these lines:

#4 Action Points

Our next step is to add an additional column called "Action". Afterall, we want to bring actional insights to this process so that we can make changes and better the website. In this action column we want to have the following actions available to us:

• Keep - Page will remain as is.
• Remove - Page will be removed.
• Evolve - Page requires more work.
• Review - Page requires greater investigation.

The aim here is to understand what all the pages with a CTR lower than 2% require. This process does require some practise and experience but to give you an idea of what we're looking for:

• Keep - The page has a good or okay CTR, we don't feel that we need to update it and are happy to keep it as is.
• Remove - The page is off topic, let's rather remove it from the site altogether to keep the site on topic.
• Evolve - The page has a low CTR but receives a lot of impressions. We need to investigate the meta data, text on the page, perhaps add some media, create internal links and include some call to action's. Essentially, we need to make the page better than it currently is!
• Review - It isn't clear on what the page requires to make it better but the CTR is low and the impressions are high so we know that there is opportunity, let's flag it for later.

If you're handing this strategy over to a copy team, then they will be able to work off the action column. If you're doing it yourself, the action column will keep you aware of what requires doing. Tackling all these tasks will take time if you're doing it properly, you need the action column to keep on track. Here is an example: Click here to download a copy of our spreadsheet in case you want to compare and see what's what.

#5 Traffic Analysis

A step that we feel is incredibly important if you don't have a copy team or are pressed for time is to look at how the pages are currently doing in terms of traffic. In order to do this we're going to use Google Analytics' Site Content feature. Let's walk through it: Let's look at the "amp mobile first index seo" page - We've marked it as evolve but we need to determine if this is worth evolving. We know that the topic is old (over a year old) and that it may not be worth evolving as it's a topic that's done. So we log into Google Analytics and we're going to look at whether the page actually gets visitors. Here are the steps

• Log into Google Analytics.
• Click on "Behavior" > "Site Content" > "All Pages".
• Set your date range from the date the page was published until today.
• Search for the page, in our case, "amp-mobile" should find it.

The end result is as follows: Immediately we can see that the few months following the launch of the blog post it received traffic but essentially no longer does. In this example, we would probably look to remove the post from the website because it's not getting any traffic and because the topic is very dated it's impossible to evolve into something valuable. If we had a case study on the topic, we might create one and then link to this post and visa versa to tie it together but that exercise will take a lot of time, time which is better used on other pages. Action: Remove page. You want to repeat this process for the pages that you want to evolve, don't waste time on pages that are outdated, off topic or clearly never going to be valuable again. On top of this, if you track conversions in Google Analytics for your website, you definitely want to take this into account as well. If you have a page receiving conversions that has a low CTR and high impressions, investing in this page is a sure way to increase the number of leads that your website generates and that's what this is all about!

#6 Links

In some cases, there will be pages on the website that should be removed but do contain links from other websites. We never want to lose a link to our website, even if the links doesn't bring any visitors. In this case the post may be removed but we need to 301 redirect the post to another page on the website. This is important as we want those back links to still be of value and not point to a dead page. When doing a 301 redirect to another page it's crucial that the page being redirected to is on topic. In other words, there's no point redirecting to a page where the person arriving doesn't find information of relevance. This might mean you need to create new content and if that's the case it's a great opportunity to create a valuable updated resource on your website. You can then reach out to the owner of the website that linked to you and inform them of the change.

#7 Go Forth

Once you've got your document ready and you've managed to isolate those posts that you want to make changes to, it's time to action everything. Our suggestion is to handle the content in packets rather than trying to address it all at once. Pick 10 pages that show good signs of outcomes should you invest time into making them better and run with those pages first. Once they are done and in place, then move onto the next 10. We cannot stress how important it is to rather approach this slowly than quickly, the aim isn't to hurry through all the pages to finish but to rather see each one as an opportunity and to slowly go through them, getting wins for each one you do. This process has worked countless times and is one that truly does result in great growth. Whilst performing this exercise slowly, you will also get an idea of which pages are most valuable to your business and in turn this information will fuel additional content to be created for the website but that's a whole different topic for next time! If you perform this strategy and get some good results, please let us know in the comments below. Or, if you get stuck or need a hand, drop us a comment and we'll do our best to help you along. Update: A Guide: Improving CTR and Positions with your website

Download a PDF of this strategy: