How to Audit a Website’s Content for Improved Audience Engagement

People get sick, vehicles develop faults, and websites become ill too. When people get sick, they know instantly; when vehicles develop faults, the owners know almost immediately; but when websites become sick, the owners may never know at all for years on end.

Only quality site checks and content audits can reveal how sick a website is and what needs to be done to clean it up.

How to audit a website’s content is largely dependent on the website’s architectural structure, its business objectives, and its individual owners. The bottom line however is that purposes will be defeated and businesses will decline if a website’s audit is not properly carried out to determine its health and relevancy to changing business climes. And not just anybody can audit a website, only accredited and licensed professional website auditors can do a good job.

What is Web Content?

Many people make the mistake of referring only to the written texts or readable parts of a web page as content. Such people join others to shout “content is king”. But nothing could be farther from the truth. Many things constitute content on a web page, and some of these are –

• Written texts – articles, blog posts, news, etc.
• Photos and images and illustrations
• Videos
• Product pages
• Layout designs and graphics
• Optimization campaigns – SEO, social media, paid ads, email marketing, and other related efforts.

All these stringed together are what make a web content. Now there are good web content and there are bad web content. When an aspect of any of the above listed content is bad, then it affects the efficacy of the other components – compromising overall business objectives. The only solution is to carry out a proper website audit and clean up the bad content. For a website audit you can visit Omega SEO

Website Audit and Site Cleanup

A proper website audit or content cleanup shoul not be limited to some suspected files or pages. It should include the entire website for optimal results. To this extent, the following are some of the bad content that should be cleaned up during a thorough website audit –

• Auto-generated tag pages
• Irrelevant, ineffective and unnecessary content categories
• Dated posts, pages or resources
• Service pages or legacy products
• Hidden doorways that detract from the website’s solid configuration
• Subdomains, forums and staging domains among others.

It is very important to periodically carry out website audits and site cleanup to increase user engagement, reduce bounce rates, optimize search engine activities, and to comply with search engines’ regulations.

How to Audit a Website’s Content

How to audit a website’s content is quite an extensive job and best outsourced to experienced professionals. Auditing a website’s content comes in various stages and substages, and these are listed below –

1. Gathering needed web pages and data inputs

• Pull all website’s urls for review and analysis
• Assess analytics data to analyze user page visits, bounce rates and conversion rates
• Review individual backlinks to determine their worth and relevancy
• Check out server log files to understand search engine activities

2. Checking and reviewing urls manually

• Here individual urls are manually reviewed to analyze organic traffic, bounce rates, conversion rates and backlinks to know what to update, redirect or delete

3. Making final decisions on what to do with remaining urls

• Here you get recommendations to review a content or page for quality; leave content or page as it is; redirect url to a similar url; or altogether delete page or url; or even set no-index or canonical tag for the url.

Auditing a website’s content is a necessity for a site’s growth. Not all web audit firms can do this thoroughly but Webris got your back in that aspect. Audit your web’s content right away and enjoy quality site health that brings business rewards on all objective fronts.