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Todd Bailey

Todd Bailey is Vice President of Digital Strategy at WebiMax, a leading SEO company with 500+ clients and 150+ employees as well as Lead Contributor at SEOservices.com

Todd Bailey has written 21 articles for SB Informer.

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The Benefits of Doing a Content Audit of Your Site

Todd Bailey

August 28, 2012

When devising an online marketing strategy, it's easy to get wrapped up in all the different ways to get your name out there. Is my Facebook page up and running? Have I gotten a sufficient number of followers on Twitter? Am I getting the number of high quality links that I would like to have? These are all legitimate and important questions. However, in trying to use as many tools as possible to get eyes on a business' homepage, many business owners forget to put a sufficient amount of effort into the homepage itself.

This is why it's a good idea to do a thorough audit of your site's content every once in a while. A good audit is time consuming, so you'll probably only do this once every year or so. If you've been using the same website for your business for over two years and have made few changes to it in that time, it is strongly recommended you run a content audit.

How does one go about this? First, you have to gauge whether or not you're confident in your ability to judge your content. If you wrote it yourself, this can be a difficult question. Perhaps you might find it beneficial to hire a copyeditor or work with a firm that provides content writing and editing services. Now that that's settled, it's time to get into the details of the audit.

1. Get a list of all the URLs on your site

This is the most time consuming part, but it is essential. Figure out exactly how many pages are on your site and the status of them. Are any of the URLs broken? Do they have content on them?

2. Do you need all those pages?

If it feels like your site has an excessive number of pages, consider doing a little clean-up work. Are there some "deep" pages that receive no traffic? If they aren't integral to your business, you might as well get rid of them. If there is pertinent information on them that could fit with the theme of a better performing page, just transfer the content there.

3. Do you not have enough pages?

This is the opposite problem. Do you have all the information you want your visitors to know crammed onto the homepage? This makes for a poor user experience. No one wants to read 3,000 words in one sitting, never mind scrolling down through all of it. Break up your information across multiple pages by theme.

4. Is your content up to date and useful?

Make sure all your content is well written and current. If you see things like "2010 is projected to be a great year…" it's time for a rewrite. Above all, make sure you have content that your visitors will find interesting to encourage them to keep coming back or use your services.

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