How To Do a Content Audit - Step-by-Step |
| How To Do a Content Audit - Step-by-Step Posted: 12 Aug 2014 05:15 PM PDT Posted by Everett This is Inflow's process for doing content audits. It may not be the "best" way to do them every time, but we've managed to keep it fairly agile in terms of how you choose to analyze, interpret and make recommendations on the data. The fundamental parts of the process remain about the same across numerous types of websites no matter what their business goals are: Collect all of the content URLs on the site and fetch the data you need about each URL. Then analyze the data and provide recommendations for each content URL. Theoretically it's simple. In practice, however, it can be a daunting exercise if you don't have a plan or process in place. By the end of this post we hope you'll have a good start on both. Table of ContentsThe many purposes of a content auditA content audit can help in a variety of different ways, and the approach can be customized for any given scenario. I'll write more about potential "scenarios" and how to approach them below. For now, here are some things a content audit can help you accomplish...
A content audit case study Inflow's technical SEO specialist Rick Ramos performed an earlier version of our content audit last year for Phases Design Studio, who graciously permitted us to share their case study. After taking an inventory of all content URLs on the domain, Rick outlined a plan to noindex/follow and remove from their sitemap many of the older blog posts that were no longer relevant, and weren't candidates for a content refresh. The site also had a series of campaign-based landing pages dating back from 2006. These pages typically had a life cycle of a few months, but were never removed from the site or Google's index. Rick recommended that these pages be 301 redirected to a few evergreen landing pages that would be updated whenever a new campaign was launched—a tactic that works particularly well on seasonal pages for eCommerce sites (e.g. 2014 New Years Resolution Deals). Still more pages were candidates to be updated / refreshed, or improved in other ways. The resultsShortly after the recommendations were implemented the client called to ask if we knew why they were suddenly seeing eight times the amount of leads they were used to seeing month over month. Why we think it workedThere are several probable reasons why this approach worked for our client. Here are a few of them...
This improved the overall customer experience on the site, as well as organic search rankings for important topic areas that were consolidated. Since then we have refined and improved the process and have been performing them on a variety of sites with great success. It works particularly well for panda recoveries on large-scale content websites, and for prioritizing which eCommerce product copy needs to be rewritten first. A 50,000-foot overview of our processInflow's content auditing process changes depending on the client's goals, needs and budget. Generally speaking, however, here is how we approach it...
Each piece of the process can be customized for the needs of a particular website. For example, when auditing a very large content site with lots of duplicate/thin/overlapping content issues we may skip the entire keyword research and content gap analysis part of the process and focus on pruning the site of these types of pages and improving the rest. Alternatively, a site without much content may need to focus on keyword research and content gaps. Other sites may be looking specifically for content assets that they can improve, repeat in new ways or leverage for newer content. One example of a very specific goal would be to identify interlinking opportunities from strong, older pages to promising, newer pages. For now it is sufficient to know that the framework can be changed as needed in a way that could dramatically affect where you spend your time in the process, or even which steps you may want to skip altogether. Our documentsThere are several major steps in the content auditing process that require various documents. While I'm not providing links to our internal SOP documentation (mainly because it's still evolving), I will describe each document and provide screenshots and links to examples / templates so you can have a foundation around which to customize one for your own needs. Content audit scenariosWe keep a list of recommendations for common scenarios to guide our approach to content audits. While every situation is unique in its own ways, we find this helps us get 90% of the way to the appropriate strategy for each client much faster. I discuss this in more detail later, but if you'd like to take a peek click here. Content audit dashboard spreadsheetWe were originally working within Google Docs, but as we started pulling in from more sources and performing more vLookups the spreadsheet would load so slowly on big sites as to make it nearly impossible to complete an audit. For this reason we have recently moved the entire process over to Excel, though this template we're providing is in Google Docs format. Below are some of the tabs you may want in this spreadsheet... The "Content Audit" tabThis tab within the dashboard is where most of the work is done. Other tabs pull data from this one by VLookup. Whether the data is fetched by API and compiled by one tool (e.g. URL Profiler) or exported manually from many tools and compiled manually (by VLookup), the end result should be that you have all of the metrics needed for each URL in one place so you can begin sorting by various metrics to discern patterns, spot opportunities and make educated decisions on how to handle each piece of content, and the content strategy of the site as a whole. You can customize the process to include whatever metrics you'd like to use. Here are the ones we've ended up with after some experimentation, as well as the source of the data:
Our recommendations typically fall into one of four "Action" categories: "Keep As-Is", "Remove", "Improve", or "Consolidate". Further details (e.g. remove and 404, or remove and 301? If 301, to where?) are provided in a column called "Strategy". Some URLs (the important ones) will have highly customized strategies, while others may have been bulk processed, meaning thousands could share the same strategy (e.g. rewriting duplicate product description copy). The "Action" column is limited in choices so we can sort the data effectively (e.g. see all pages marked as "removed") while the "Strategy" column can be more free-form and customized to the URL (e.g. consolidate /buy-blue-widgets/ content into /buying-blue-widgets/ and 301 redirect the former to the latter to avoid duplicating the same topic). The "Keyword Research" tabThis tab includes keywords gathered from a variety of sources, including brainstorming for seed keywords, mining Google Webmaster Tools, PPC campaigns, the AdWords Keyword Planner and several other tools. Search Volume and Ad Competition (not shown in this screenshot) are pulled from Google's Keyword Planner. The average ranking position comes from GWT, as does the top ranking page. The relevancy score is something we typically ask the client to do once we've cleaned out most of the obvious junk keywords. The "Keyword Matrix" tabThis tab includes URLs for important pages, and those that are ranking for - or are most qualified to rank for - important topics. It essentially matches up keywords with the best possible page to guide our copywriting and on-page optimization efforts. Sometimes the KWM tab plays an important role in the process, like when the site is relatively new or unoptimized. Most of the time it takes a back-seat to other tabs in terms of strategic importance. The "Content Gaps" tabThis is where we put content ideas for high-volume, highly relevant keywords for which we could not find an appropriate page. Often it involves keywords that represent stages in the buying cycle or awareness ladder that have been overlooked by the company. Sometimes it plays an important role, such as with new and/or small sites. Most of the time this also takes a back-seat to more important issues, like pruning. The "Prune" tabIf it was marked for "Remove" or "Consolodate" it should be on this tab. Whether it is supposed to be removed and 301 redirected, canonicalized elsewhere, consolidated into another page, allowed to stay up but with a robots "noindex" meta tag, removed and allowed to 404/410... or any number of "strategies" you might come up with, these are the pages that will no longer exist once your recommendations have been implemented. I find this to be a very useful tab. For example, one could export this tab, send it to a developer (or a company like WP Curve), and have someone get started on most or all of the implementation. Our mantra for low-quality, under-performing content on sites that may have a Panda-related traffic drop is to improve it or remove it. "Imported Data" tabsIn addition to the tabs above, we also have data tabs that are in the spreadsheet to house exported data from the various sources so we can perform Vlookups based on the URL to populate data in other tabs. These data tabs include:
The more data that can be compiled by a tool like URL Profiler, the fewer data tabs you'll need and the faster this entire process will go. Before we built the internal tool to automate parts of the process, we also had tabs for GA data, Moz data, and the initial Screaming Frog export. If you don't know how to do a Vlookup there are plenty of online tutorials for Excel and GoogleDocs Spreadsheets. Here's one I found useful for Excel. Alternatively, you could import all of the data into the tabs and ask someone more spreadsheet-savvy on your team to do the lookups. Our resident spreadsheet guru is Caesar Barba, and he has great hair. Below is an example of a simple Vlookup used to bring the "Action" over from the Content Audit tab for a URL in the Keyword Matrix tab...
Content StrategyThe Content Audit Dashboard is just what we need internally: A spreadsheet crammed with data that can be sliced and diced in so many useful ways that we can always go back to it for more insight and ideas. Some clients appreciate it as well, but most are going to find the greater benefit in our final content strategy, which includes a high-level overview of our recommendations from the audit. Recommended exports and data sourcesThere are many options for getting the data you need into one place so you can simultaneously see a broad view of the entire content situation, as well as detailed metrics for each URL. For URL gathering we use Screaming Frog and Google Analytics. For data we use Google Webmaster Tools (GWT), Google Analytics (GA), Social Count (SC), Copyscape (CS), Moz, CMS exports, and a few other data sources as needed. However we've been experimenting with using URL Profiler instead of our internal tool to pull all of these data-sources together much faster. URL Profiler is a few hundred bucks and is very powerful. It's also somewhat of a pain to set up the first time, so be prepared for several hours of wrangling down API keys before getting all of the data you need. No matter how you end up pulling it all together in the end, doing it yourself in Excel is always an option for the first few times. A step-by-step example of our processBelow is the step-by-step process for an "average" client - whatever that means. Let's say it is a medium-sized eCommerce client with about 800-900 pages indexed by Google, including category, product, blog posts and other pages. They don't have an existing penalty that we know of, but could certainly be at risk of being affected by Panda due to some thin, overlapping, duplicate, outdated and irrelevant content on the site. Step 1: Assess the situation and choose a scenarioEvery situation is different, but we have found common similarities based on two primary factors - The size of the site and its content-based penalty risk. Below is a screenshot from our list of recommended strategies for common content auditing scenarios, which can be found here on GoInflow.com. Each of the colored boxes drops down to reveal the strategy for that scenario in more detail. The site described above would fall into the second box within purple column ( Focus: Content Audit with an eye to Improve and/or Prune, followed by KWM for key pages). Here is the reasoning behind that... The site is in danger of a penalty (though it does not appear to have one "yet") so we follow the Panda matra: Improve it or Remove it. The size of the site determines which of those two (improve or remove) gets the most attention. Smaller sites need less pruning (scalpel), while larger sites need much more (hatchet). Smaller sites often need some keyword research to determine if they are covering all of the topic areas for various stages in the customer's buying cycle, while larger sites typically have the opposite problem ---> too many pages covering overlapping topic areas with low-quality (thin, duplicate, irrelevant, outdated, poorly written, automated...) content. Such a site would not require the keyword research, and would therefore not be getting a keyword matrix or content gap analysis, as the focus would be primarily about pruning the site. Our focus in this example will be to audit the content with an eye to improve and/or Remove low performing pages, followed by keyword research and a keyword matrix for the primary pages, including the home page, categories, blog home and key product pages, as well as certain other topical landing pages. As it turns out, this hypothetical website has lots of manufacturer-supplied product descriptions. We're going to need to prioritize which ones get rewritten first because the client does not have the cash-flow to do them all at once. When budget and time is a concern, we typically shoot for the 80/20 rule: Write great content for the top 20% of pages right away, and do the other 80% over the course of 6-12 months as time/budget permit. Because this site doesn't have an existing penalty, we will recommend that all pages stay indexed. If they had a penalty already, we would recommend they noindex,follow the bottom 80% of pages, gradually releasing them back into the index as they are rewritten. This may not be the way you choose to handle the same situation, which is fine, but the point is you can easily sort the pages by any number of metrics to determine a relative "priority". The bigger the site and tighter the budget, the more important it is to prioritize what gets worked on first. Causes of Content-Related Penalties For the purpose of a content audit we are only concerned with content-related penalties (as opposed to links and other off-page issues), which typically fall under three major categories: Quality, Duplication, and Relevancy. These can be further broken down into other issues, which include - but are not limited to:
If you are unsure about the scale of the site's content problems, feel free to do step 2 before deciding on a scenario... Step 2: Scan the siteWe use Screaming Frog for this step, but you can adapt this process to whatever crawler you want. This is how we configure the spider's "Basic" and "Advanced" tabs... And the advanced tab... Notice that "crawl all subdomains" is checked. This is optional, depending on what you're auditing. We are respecting "meta robots noindex", "rel = canonical" and robots.txt. Also notice that we are not crawling images, CSS, JS, flash, external links.... This type of stuff is what we look at in a Technical SEO Audit, but would needlessly complicate a "Content" Audit. What we're looking for here are all of the indexable HTML pages that might lead a visitor to the site from the SERPs, though it may certainly lead to the discovery of technical issues. Export the complete list of URLs and related data from Screaming Frog into a CSV file. Step 3: Import the URLs and start the toolWe have our own internal "Content Auditing Tool", which takes URLs and data from Screaming Frog and Google Analytics, de-dupes them, and pulls in data from Google Webmaster Tools, Moz, Social Count and Copyscape for each URL. The tool is a bit buggy at times, however, so I've been experimenting with URL Profiler, which can essentially accomplish the same goal with fewer steps and less upkeep. We need the "Agency" version, which is about $400 per year, plus tax. That's not too bad, considering we'd already spent several thousand on our internal tool by the time Gareth Brown released URL Profiler publicly. :-/ Below is a screenshot of what you'll see after downloading the tool. I've highlighted the boxes we currently check, though it depends on the tools/APIs to which you already subscribe and will differ by user. We've only just started playing with uClassify for the purpose of semi-automating our topic bucketing of pages, but I don't have a process to share yet (feel free to comment with advice)... Right-click on the URL List box and choose "Import From File", then choose the ScreamingFrog export or any other list of URLs. There are also options to import from the clipboard or XML sitemap. Full documentation for URL Profiler can be found here. Below are two output screenshots to give you an idea of what you're going to end up with... The output changes depending on which boxes you check and what API access you have. Step 4: Import the tool output into the dashboardAs described in the 50,000 foot overview above, we have a spreadsheet template with multiple tabs, one of which is the "Content Audit" tab. The tool output gets brought into the Content Audit tab of the dashboard. Our internal tool automatically ads columns for Action, Strategy, Page Type and Source (of the URL). You can also add these to the tab after importing the URL Profiler output. Page Type and URL Source are optional, but Action and Strategy are key elements of the process. Our hypothetical client requires a Keyword Matrix. However, if your "scenario" does not involve keyword research (i.e. if it is a big site with content penalty risks) you can skip steps 5-7 and move straight to "Step 8 - Time to Analyze and Make Some Decisions". Step 5: Import GWT dataMatch existing URLs from the content audit to keywords for which they already rank in Google Webmaster Tools There may be a way to do this with URL Profiler. If so, I haven't found it yet. Here is what we do to grab the landing page and associated keyword/query data from Google Webmaster Tools, which we then import into two tabs (GWT Top Queries and GWT Top Pages). These tabs are helpful when filling out the Keyword Matrix because they tell you which pages Google is already associating with each ranking keyword. This step can actually be skipped altogether for huge sites with major content problems because the "Focus" is going to be on pruning the site of low quality content, rather than doing any keyword research or content gap analysis. Instructions for Importing Top Pages from GWT
Step 6: Perform keyword researchThis is another optional step, depending on the focus/objective of the audit. It is also highly customizable to your own KWR process. Use whatever methods you like for gathering the list of keywords (e.g. brainstorming, SEMRush, Google Trends, Uber Suggest, GWT, GA...). Ensure all "junk" and irrelevant keywords are removed from the list, and run the rest through a single tool that collects search volume and competition metrics. We use the Google Adwords Keyword Planner, which is outlined below.
Use the settings below when downloading the plan: Step 7: Tying the keyword data togetherAgain, you don't need to do this step if you're working on a large site and the focus is on pruning out low quality content. The GWT Queries and KWR steps provide data needed to develop a "Keyword Matrix" (KWM), which isn't necessary unless part of your focus is on-page optimization and copywriting of key pages. Sometimes you just need to get a client out of a penalty, or remove the danger of one. The KWM comes in handy for the important pages marked as "Improve" within the Content Audit tab just so the person writing the copy understands which keywords are important for that page. It's SEO 101 and you can do it anyway you like using whatever tools you like. Google Adwords has given you the keyword, search volume and competition. Google Webmaster Tools has given you the ranking page, average position, impressions, clicks and CTR for each keyword. Pull these together into a tab called "Keyword Research" using Vlookups. You should end up with something like this: The purpose of these last few steps was to help with the KWM, an example of which is shown below: Step 8: Time to analyze and make some decisions!All of the data is right in front of you, and your path has been laid out using the Content Audit Scenarios tool. From here on the actual step-by-step process becomes much more open to interpretation and your own experience / intuition. Therefore, do not consider this a linear set of instructions meant to be carried out one after another. You may do some of them and not others. You may do them a little differently. That is all fine as long as you are working toward the goal of determining what to do, if anything, for each piece of content on the website.
Another Way of Thinking About It... For big sites It is best to use a hatchet-approach as much as possible, and finish up with a scalpel in the end. Otherwise you'll spend way too much time on the project, which eats into the ROI. This is not a process that can be documented step-by-step. For the purpose of illustration, however, here are a few different examples of hatchet approaches and when to consider using them.
Step 9: Content gap analysis and other value-adds Although most of these could be put as optional items during the keyword research process, I prefer to save them until last because I never knows how much time I'll have after taking care of more pressing issues. Content gaps At Inflow we like to use the "Awareness Ladder" developed by Ben Hunt, as featured in his book Convert!. You can learn more about it here.
Content levels Landing page or keyword topic buckets Keyword relevancy scores Step 10: Writing up the content audit strategy documentThe Content Strategy, or whatever you decide to call it, should be delivered at the same time as the audit, and summarizes the findings, recommendations and next steps from the audit. It should start with an Executive Summary and then drill deeper into each section outlined therein. Here is a real example of an executive summary from one of Inflow's Content Audit Strategies:
We recommend the following actions in order of their urgency and/or potential ROI for the site:
Resources, links, and post-scripts... Example Content Auditing Dashboard Content Audit Strategies for Common Scenarios How to Conduct a Content Audit on Your Site by Neil Patel of QuickSprout How to Perform a Content Audit by Kristina Kledzik of Distilled Expanding the Horizons of eCommerce Content Strategy by Dan Kern of Inflow Distilled's Epic Content Guide The Content Inventory is Your Friend by Kristina Halvorson on BrainTraffic How to Perform a Content Marketing Audit by Temple Stark on Vertical Measures Why Traditional Content Audits Aren't Enough by Ahava Leibtag on Content Marketing Institute's blog Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read! |
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