Website Content Audit: Purpose and Necessity

What is a website content audit?

Content auditing is the active entry of all website content and its components into one large list.

Why do you need a website content audit

The main goal of a content audit is to create a list of the site's content.

We recommend that you record your content audit data in spreadsheets as they are quite flexible and do a great job of managing large amounts of data.

This list of available content will come in handy at various stages of project development. If you're redesigning the site's information architecture, you'll keep coming back to this list to remind yourself of the details of each page. The list is also used to discuss content management and editing with the author.

Having a complete list of content is not the only benefit of a content audit. By using an audit you get a much better understanding of the content. You can discover things you didn't know existed, track down duplicate material, and uncover all kinds of links in content.

Perhaps the list of content to be removed is the most useful result of a content audit.

Audit of website content includes:

• Goal: Understand the reason for the audit.
• Scope: Specifies the areas of the site that should be captured.

After defining the purpose and scope, the main information about the content should be noted:

• Unique content ID
• Title
• URL
• File format (HTML, PDF, DOC, TXT)
• Author
• Meta description
• Keywords
• Important dates (date of creation, editing of the publication)

There are three main types of site content audits:

• Full content description:

A complete list of every item on the site. It can include a description of all pages as well as all of their assets (such as downloads and videos)

• Partial content description

A list of a subset of the site's content. A partial description may include, for example, content added in the last 6 months.

• Sample Content: A condensed set of site content examples.

Content audit required

• Determining the sequence of filling the site with content
• Establish a framework to analyze existing gaps between planned and existing content.
• Preparing content for editing, deletion, or migration.

By transforming a content inventory into a content audit, you have a powerful tool to further understand your site. Because it contains quantitative and qualitative data, content auditing allows you to analyze the structure of content page by page more deeply.

Who can audit site content?

Any person who has an understanding of how content is created, organized and displayed can perform a site content audit, namely:

• content strategists and marketers;
• website developers and managers;
• information architects;
• SEO managers.

But in order to increase the efficiency of content audit, it is necessary to invite a team of professionals to work. This is expedient because the purpose of the site content audit is not just to collect data, but also to analyze the information to make optimal decisions about the further content of the site.

The importance of site content audit

Content auditing is critical to understanding and evaluating the effectiveness of content in achieving business goals, meeting user needs and performance factors. Performance factors include content search engine optimization or web analytics.

Order a content audit

We combine powerful software with our experts' diagnostics for a deep content audit. Our content experts will apply their knowledge of modern SEO rules to every page of your website.