Learn about content audit and ways to remove underperforming content

High-quality and informative content is a key to digital marketing success. After all, the saying ‘Content is King’ wasn’t coined for nothing. Delivering excellent content is a subtle way to help readers find the information they are looking for. But the question remains how to make the most out of it?

Content is a valuable resource for every website if it is well managed, optimised, updated, and repurposed efficiently. In fact, apps with the best cross-platform framework 2022 and high-quality content have the best chances to compete in the online market. However, without purpose or aim, the ‘thing’ that’s meant to be ‘king’ can become unmanageable and overwhelming.

So, how to manage your content properly? The answer is content audit.

What is a content audit? 

A content audit is a well-organised documentation of all your website content, allowing you to analyse, repurpose and optimise existing content for maximum growth. Once you have collated all your content, now is the time to assess why the content is not performing well. This may include optimising, creating, updating, repurposing or even deleting content to streamline and improve your content marketing efforts.

Why audit your content? 

When conducting a content audit, your goal should be to look for content improvement opportunities to better connect with your target audience. Your content should be able to address audiences’ queries, concerns, and questions. A visitor that feels supported will start forming a relationship with you.

Auditing your content is one of the best ways to optimise your website content. It can help boost your website reach via effective SEO techniques and highlighting existing errors, such as broken links. This further improves your site’s SEO along with user experience.

How to do a content audit? 

The time spent running a content audit and pruning thin, duplicate, or low-quality content is highly underrated. You can learn how to do this in Kevin Indig’s guide to SEO Pruning with Semrush, but it is based on building a spreadsheet that helps you identify underperforming URLs.

Below is the illustration of the same. The URLs highlighted with red colour are typically the underperforming ones.

Once you have audited your website’s content, you can take action based on the following:

Keep- No action is required for well-performing pages. So, keep these pages.

Improve- Do edits or improvements on moderately performing pages with the aim to boost their performance.

Merge- Two or more pages are combined into a single page to give a better user experience.

Delete- The outdated and non-performing content should be deleted. 

Content audit is something that most website owners should do regularly, depending on the quantity of content they publish. This helps them to enhance their content quality and get the most out of it. With the above tips and tricks, you will be able to achieve the same.