How a Content Audit Can Help Improve SEO, Conversions, and Traffic Generation

When was the last time you took a good look at the content that resides on your company website?

If you are like most businesses, the answer is somewhere along the lines of “rarely to never.”

Unless your marketing department is actively performing content marketing, there’s a good chance that the content you originally wrote—everything from your home page to your blog posts—is either outdated or not optimized for traffic and conversions.

Read on to learn more about how and why a content audit is critical to driving new leads and sales from your company website.

What is a Content Audit?

An audit looks at the content on your company website and determines if it’s meeting your goals. For example, perhaps you want to increase conversions on your product pages that only describe the item and nothing more. The process would identify that page and make recommendations on how to improve and optimize for more sales.

Once the audit is complete, it will tell you what pages you should keep “as is,” and which ones you should update. Articles with outdated information, low-converting pages, and those with statistics are ideal candidates for updating. This can also have an SEO benefit as Google will see these new updates and could increase the organic ranking of the page.

Content Decay

The term “content decay” can refer to content that is no longer relevant or has seen declining traffic over the past 12 months. Google loves fresh, updated content, and could lower your rankings in favor of another website that has newer information. This is something that happens naturally over time—the way to fix it is to update and optimize the poorly performing web page or blog post.

Content decay can also take place on your internal webpages. Perhaps you’ve added a new product, service, or updated your company policies. If your website is lacking that information, your visitors will be left in the dark. Company information is essential as well—phone numbers, social media handles, and other contact information should be reviewed in the audit to ensure that it’s up-to-date and relevant.

What Else Can an Audit Improve?

In addition to helping prevent and eliminate content decay, an audit can help improve conversions, plug content gaps, and improve your overall SEO:

Improve Conversions—Great content can also persuade the reader to perform a specific action, such as fill out a contact form or pick up the phone to give you a call. In other cases, it can provide valuable information about a product or service that you sell. This can help the buyer feel like they’re making a more informed decision.

Plug Content Gaps—Content gaps are often defined as what your website users are searching for but cannot find. A content audit can help fill in that gap by looking at what your website offers your users currently and finding opportunities to improve.

This can be done by looking at your site analytics to see what keywords people are using to find you on the internet. Competitive analysis can also help by looking at what your competitors are doing and incorporating their strategies.

Once the analysis is completed and the content gap filled, you should notice a lower bounce rate and more time spent on individual pages as internet searchers can now find the information they seek.

Improve Organic SEO—Google tends to show a preference for content with relevant information. An audit will help identify which pages could stand to benefit from an update or optimization, and that could lead to increased organic rankings.

The audit will also point out which pages have “thin” content and need to be either updated with new content or deleted to help prevent a penalty given to the site by the Google algorithm.

Content Auditing & Creation in Dallas

A content audit is a great way to breathe new life into old content. It can help identify gaps and make suggestions on improving the overall value that your visitors will get.

The Witmer Group has been helping Dallas businesses for well over ten years. We offer a wide range of digital marketing solutions and can create a customized marketing strategy that will help your business remain competitive.

Give us a call today at (214) 865-9484 or contact us via our website to learn more about the various marketing and data analytics services we offer our Dallas clients.