In today’s world, content is king. However, when it comes to keeping your reader (and Google) happy, it’s much more about quality than quantity. Waffle-y, inaccurate, or irrelevant content will do your website more harm than good.
A content audit is essential for any website refresh or redesign. All of your website’s content must be analyzed. Then, based on performance metrics (such as traffic and conversion rates) and content quality, that content should be kept, improved, consolidated, or removed.
Questions you should ask yourself about your website design and content:
- Is this information up to date?
- Is anything overlapping or duplicated in other content?
- Does this content meet accessibility standards?
- What content is (and should be) ranking for which keywords?
- Which pages are strongest and which are weakest?
- Does this content have an appropriate readability level?
- How can I tweak and improve this?
Problems you should be looking out for:
- Little or no traffic
- Low conversion rates or social shares
- Poor quality content e.g. grammatical and spelling errors, wrong tone, too many keywords, and unhelpful or invalid information
- Duplicate content
- Accessibility errors
- SEO errors
Web Governance platforms, website content inventory lists, SEO tools, UX design tools, and analytics tools are some ways to locate the content on your website. Rewriting or moving poor quality content is one of the best things you can do to improve Google’s trust in your website and raise your Quality Score. It’s all about improving the user’s experience and your brand’s identity.