By: Lori Smith
This whole month I’ve been posting about content auditing. It’s the
one task I don’t see many bloggers talk about let alone perform. Yet
it’s, one of the most important practice’s any blogger can do to
improve their business.
A thorough content audit can improve brand clarity, traffic,
subscribers, and conversions. Yep, it can do all that and more.
Tracking analytics for traffic is only one way to measure the success of
your business. But, it’s not the only metric you should be evaluating.
Analyzing the effectiveness of your content is equally important if not
more so.
By conducting a content audit, you will gain insight into your
audience’s specific wants and needs. An audit can help you see what
adjustments are needed, in order, to create better-targeted content
which will translate into more traffic and sales.
Content auditing is not easy by any means, but with a little time and
patience, it’s something that’s doable on your own. I promise you, the
benefits far outweigh the downside.
For my last post in the content auditing series, I’m sharing some of
the best tools for conducting your, own content audit. Did, I mention
they’re either free or offer a free trial?
Content Auditing Tools
XML Sitemap Generator
This handy tool will provide a list of all the pages on your site and
check for broken links.
Quick Sprout
Quick Sprout is a great tool for analyzing your site’s SEO. You receive
an SEO score and recommendations for improving your site. You can
also see your impact on social media. It was founded, by Neil Patel,
king of SEO and content marketing, so it’s one of the best.
Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider
This nifty program will crawl your website and provide a report of SEO
insights necessary for a content audit.
Google Analytics
As you already know, there’s a lot of information you can extract from
Google analytics. You can see which pieces of content are driving the
most traffic.
Content Insight
This awesome tool creates a complete content inventory for you
which is one of the first steps in the content audit process. Although it
is a paid service, they do have a free trial.
SE Ranking Website Audit
This is another SEO analyzer that offers some excellent tools. You’ll get
comprehensive website audits, site ranking, competitor analysis,
backlink monitoring, and keyword suggestions. Again, this one offers
a free trial, but it’s paid service, is super affordable.
Site Analyzer
You can use this tool to evaluate the effectiveness of your website
and identify any problems that, need to be fixed.
WPromote
An easy to use tool that will give you a quick comparison of your
website versus your competitor’s.
Woopra
This tool provides real-time analytics of segmentation, retention, and
funnels. You get an intuitive profile of each user that visits your site.
SEO Site Checkup
This comprehensive tool will analyze your entire website with 45
checks in 6 different categories.
DIY Content Audit Spreadsheet
Last but, definitely not least is my own, content audit spreadsheet. It’s
a simple DIY spreadsheet you can use to record your findings. Click
below to get instant access.
Conclusion
No content audits aren’t easy. They aren’t fun either, and they take a
lot of time. But these free tools can automate at least a part of the
content audit process. This makes the job a little less daunting, and
it’s one of the best investments you can make in your business.
To sum up this series on content auditing, it comes down to working
smarter not harder. Taking the time to analyze your content on a
regular basis will help you better reach your ideal audience and
improve your marketing.
Writing in-depth high-quality articles takes time. When you can
maximize that time writing content that’s more targeted, then that’s
a win for sure.
When it comes to gaining insight into how your business is, really
doing, there’s no better way to determine this than with a content
audit.
How’s your content performing? Let me know in the comments
below.