A content audit is the process of evaluating your website pages for strengths and weaknesses with the aim of improving them. The process helps you to determine the content to keep, which one to update, and which one to do away with. When doing the audit, one of the important steps is to check the performance of your keywords.
Since keywords are the backbone of any content, their performance will likely affect the overall performance of pages. Therefore, you cannot effectively do a content audit without considering insights from your keyword research. On top of that, the keyword research data can help you show areas to improve in your content.
What a Content Audit Will Show
Some of the things you will see in a content audit are:
- Your most successful page
- Topics and ideas that your audience love
- Pages performing below expectations
- Blogposts that need editing.
Why Content Audit is Important
There are several reasons you need to do a content audit. These are:
Identify Content That Needs Repurposing
If you have valuable and up-to-date information, it can contribute to the usability of a site, visitor ranking and search ranking. However, you don’t need to create new content from scratch when you can repurpose your current content.
Improve Site Performance
By doing a content audit, you can tell which pages have little traffic or conversion. You will also see the content that needs to be improved or edited. When you pinpoint the content gaps, you can see how to improve it to add value to the readers.
Keep Your Content Up-To-Date
The internet is always changing, and new trends are coming up. Some keywords that were popular yesterday may not be worth following today. When you do a regular content audit, you can have a site with evergreen content. This will help readers get the most up-to-date information. It can also help to show search engines that you actively maintain your site.
How to Use Keyword Data in Content Audit
One of the areas that content audit focuses on is on-page SEO. Some issues that on-page seo audit considers are the title tags, meta descriptions, header tags, and keyword usage.
Checking Keyword Usage in Content Audit
When doing your content audit, you should ensure that the keywords your pages target match the search intent. Also, check if the right keyword density is used well. The keyword should not be underused or overused, which can lead to a Google penalty.
Track Keyword Position
Another important element of a content audit is tracking the position of your keywords. This can help you determine if your site is bringing your desired results or not. Remember also to check if a certain keyword is improving or declining.
Keyword Trends for Outdated Data
You can also use trend data on a particular keyword to determine if certain content is outdated or irrelevant. If people are no longer interested in a keyword, you should either remove that page or update it.
Monitor User Engagement
Keyword data can also help you track key user engagement metrics. These include time on page, conversion, and bounce rates. You can then use the information to optimize your content depending on user behavior and preferences.
Find Content Gaps
Keyword research can also help to identify if there are gaps in your current content. By checking into Google Search Console, you can see if there are keyword opportunities that can be used to create new content or update exciting pages. You can then use content gap analysis to create ranking articles.
Content Performance Metrics
Analyze different metrics such as page views, conversions, time on page, and bounce rates. Use these metrics to determine the top-performing pages and the underperforming ones.
Optimize for the User’s Intent
You can use keyword research data to determine if your page responds to the search intent. You can then write blog posts for the top-of-the-funnel keywords with low-intent keywords. This way, you can align your keyword research with the stages of the buying process.
For the mid-funnel keywords that have a high intent, you can create dedicated landing pages. At the bottom of the funnel, you can use transactional keywords. When you do that, you can have content that converts users at any stage of the buying process.
Include Additional Keywords
As we have mentioned earlier, each page of your site should respond to different search intent to help with page relevance. When doing a content audit, you want to ensure that you improve the chances of your pages appearing for the different search queries. You can do that by including semantic phrases in your content.
This can help as Google considers these terms in determining what a page is about. Ensure that the keyword is used in all the key parts. These include the title, meta description, headers, image tags, and more.
How to Interpret Your Content Audit Data
After you find great data through keyword research, you need to interpret it. Analyze your site metrics as a whole to get an understanding of its overall performance. Check if there are certain patterns and whether some metrics are interconnected. Ask yourself these questions to answer:
- Is some content generating more traffic than others?
- Do you notice pages where the traffic, conversion, or other metrics are declining?
- Is there content bringing a lot of traffic but with low conversion?
- Are there general patterns, such as low engagement rates?
You can then interpret the data as follows:
- Pages with high traffic but low conversion. It could be that you haven’t optimized your content well.
- High traffic pages but high bounce rate/low engagement rate. Users may be interested in the topic, but their search query isn’t well answered.
- Pages with Low traffic but high conversion/engagement. This can be a sign of poor content optimization
Also, remember that the different stages of the sales funnel can affect conversion.
Conclusion
Keyword research can help you get important data on content audit. From the keyword usage on a page to understanding the obsolete pages, there is a lot that your keyword data can help you with. Use this guide to see how to use keyword research data in your content audit.
