Your audit should examine whether or not your content is consistent with your business goals. Simply put, your findings from your content audit will help you drive your strategy and priorities in the future.
All organizations need to periodically perform an audit that involves a large amount of content either on their website, mobile site, or other projects.
In this article, we want to discuss points to keep in mind as you’re auditing to help you retain your website visitors and to increase traffic to your site.
1) Have Relevant Content
You should continually refer back to these questions during your writing process to ensure that your content will be as relevant to them as possible.
Also, remember that relevant does not mean predictable and repetitive. You can improve the relevance of your content and gain loyal customers by having your sales team pay attention to frequently asked questions that can then be answered in your content as a result.
It is essential to update and review your content to make sure the information is not outdated or needs to be revised.
When you investigate, you might be surprised to find pages or content that were relevant years ago but somehow, they were never removed or updated on your website.
2) Have a Clean Website Structure
Search engines have a difficult time determining which information and pages are most important and how to structure them that it is easy to find.
To make it easy for your viewers, list important pages in your navigation and use internal linking to direct your content to other relevant sources. You should make it easy for your users to get to the core page of the site if they wanted to do so.
3) Use Testimonials To Your Advantage
Instead of having an entire page that rounds up all your testimonials or a cross-section of your best ones, organize them by subject.
For example, if you receive a review regarding a specific product and how simple it was to use, place it on the products page.
Just remember that if you receive a negative testimonial, respond by owning up to your mistake and let the user know that you are already working on the issues stated to improve the customer experience.
You should describe to them the great lengths the organization will undergo to provide them and all customers with high-quality services and products to them in the future.
4) Write Concrete CTA’s
Typically, many different departments are handling a website with various purposes in “their” section of the site or blog. Usually, each division focuses on both the needs of the customer and the needs of their organization.
This means, your website should contain clear calls-to-action which capitalize on the necessity for your site to elicit action. Effective Calls-to-Action include clear benefits, continuous conversion momentums, and compelling reasoning.
For example, if a new product or service has recently become available, add a prominent “New Arrivals” or “New Services” button. It is very effective to make important buttons stand out on your page by changing the color of the text or making it a more prominent button on the page.
Additionally, it may be helpful to create some urgency by adding a promotional element.
By creating a sense of urgency, your users will feel that their current actions are more significant than all other potential activities available to them in the future.
5) Replace Any Missing Content
To solve this problem, try comparing areas where there is a lot of content to where there is less and try to balance them out. Furthermore, it is important to have content that addresses each stage of the process, no matter how brief or self-explanatory the step is.
For example, a site may have plenty of content regarding purchasing a product, but it may lack information about the shipping process or order fulfillment.
There can be a strong presence of press releases but no photo or video displays. To avoid this from occurring, make sure your visitors have a high awareness of each of the stages on your site.
Additionally, make sure to define technical words in your content. You can’t expect for all of your viewers to understand the terminology that you may use on an everyday basis. Simply, eliminate the jargon that might be excessive for your audience.
6) Ensure High-Quality Results
This is where you must evaluate where users have spent most of their time and where do they go and at what point do they leave?
Are they taking the actions that you planned and anticipated? This data can reveal what is working on your page and what loses a customer’s attention.
This is the time where you should pull in search statistics to reveal what might be bringing in and maintaining the traffic to your page. You can then analyze which posts stand out from others and what information has been giving your business the top results.
This may include figuring out which day of the week is best to publish a new blog post, what length of post your visitors prefer, or what topics people are most attracted to.
At this point, it might be helpful to add a call-to-action for an email sign-up or product trial for your users to become more involved with your website.
Lastly, collaborating with the various departments involved will help facilitate the information gathered and new skills that may help position the content team to move in the right direction.
7) Optimize Every SEO Element
The content audit for an SEO should include a full inventory of all the content elements on a domain. The process is essential to advance the apparent trust and eminence of an area.
When performing a content audit, you should review the title, keywords, headings, and image tags.
By keeping track of different keywords, optimizing the images on the page, and double checking all SEO elements related to your site’s content, you should be able to determine the changes needed to improve your website’s performance.
You should examine whether target keywords are used on the page and whether or not headlines are optimized for search. Search engine optimization starts and finishes with the content on your website.
Your content audit should fundamentally evaluate what content results in the best practices in search.
Content Optimization: An Ongoing Process
Your content should be clear for your visitors, and you should analyze what content drives the desirable result. Content audits are subjective, so you should make sure your content is relevant and engages users.
To Wrap It All Up…
Try to give your content value and view it from an outside perspective. Ask yourself, “Would I find this interesting if I were a stranger reading it?”
Use your customers’ feedback to improve your content as well. Analyze this feedback, and adjust your content accordingly.
Chainlink Can Help
As content audit experts for our clients, we help them analyze their content to ensure it is effectively written to increase traffic for their websites. We also provide valuable insights into your target audience, preferences, SEO elements.
If you don’t have a centralized data warehouse for all of your important customer data, we’ve got you covered. Our Chainlink Data Warehouse stores every single customer’s online interactions, so you can monitor activity at each touch point across channels.
Want to learn more about Chainlink’s technology-first, uniquely effective digital marketing services?
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