In e‑commerce, stay­ing ahead of the com­pe­ti­tion requires more than just a well-func­tion­ing and visu­al­ly appeal­ing web­site. With con­sumers demand­ing engag­ing, infor­ma­tive, and rel­e­vant con­tent, busi­ness­es must ensure that their dig­i­tal pres­ence reflects these expec­ta­tions. At this point, a com­pre­hen­sive con­tent audit can make all the difference.

A web­site relaunch is a piv­otal moment for any e‑commerce busi­ness. It sig­ni­fies an oppor­tu­ni­ty to revi­talise its brand iden­ti­ty, enhance user expe­ri­ence, dri­ve con­ver­sions, rede­fine its online pres­ence, and re-estab­lish itself as an indus­try leader.

These goals can­not be achieved with­out car­ry­ing out a con­tent audit along­side a web­site relaunch. By incor­po­rat­ing con­tent audits into the relaunch process, web­site own­ers can unlock the full poten­tial of their brand’s con­tent, cre­at­ing a cohe­sive, engag­ing, and cus­tomer-cen­tric dig­i­tal experience.

In the fol­low­ing arti­cle, we’ll delve deep­er into the key steps of a con­tent audit for web­site relaunch­es, explore the sev­er­al rewards brands can achieve, and pro­vide prac­ti­cal tips to ensure the suc­cess­ful inte­gra­tion of the audit’s find­ings into the relaunch strategy.

What is a content audit?

A con­tent audit serves as a com­pass, guid­ing com­pa­nies through the com­plex process of iden­ti­fy­ing, eval­u­at­ing, and opti­mis­ing exist­ing con­tent assets. It involves a thor­ough analy­sis of the web­site’s con­tent inven­to­ry, encom­pass­ing every­thing from blog posts and prod­uct descrip­tions to land­ing pages and mul­ti­me­dia elements.

Con­tent audits look for gaps, prob­lems, and bro­ken ele­ments with­in the con­tent of web­sites and seek to resolve these issues in sev­er­al ways.

Why conduct an audit on your website’s content?

By con­duct­ing a con­tent audit as part of a web­site relaunch, busi­ness­es can gain invalu­able insights into the strengths, weak­ness­es, and oppor­tu­ni­ties with­in their con­tent ecosystem.

The pri­ma­ry objec­tive of a con­tent audit is to ensure that the web­site’s dig­i­tal pres­ence aligns seam­less­ly with the busi­ness’s objec­tives, tar­get audi­ence, and brand mes­sag­ing. It typically

involves iden­ti­fy­ing out­dat­ed, redun­dant, or under­per­form­ing con­tent that may hin­der the relaunch’s over­all success.

Though this process can be intense, it has sev­er­al sig­nif­i­cant benefits:

• The web­site’s con­tent archi­tec­ture is stream­lined, ensur­ing log­i­cal and intu­itive nav­i­ga­tion that enhances user experience.
• SEO defi­cien­cies are iden­ti­fied, help­ing elim­i­nate aspects that aren’t search engine friendly.
• SEO oppor­tu­ni­ties are dis­cov­ered, includ­ing key­words, meta tags, head­ings, and oth­er on-page elements.
• It can con­tribute to the devel­op­ment of an improved con­tent mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy that is bet­ter aligned with indus­try trends and cus­tomer preferences.
• Con­tent is improved over­all in qual­i­ty and relevance.
• Usabil­i­ty issues, out­dat­ed infor­ma­tion, and redun­dant con­tent are iden­ti­fied, which is cru­cial if user expe­ri­ence needs to improve.
• All con­tent can be made uni­fied so that it reflects the brand’s voice, tone, and val­ues consistently.
• Eval­u­at­ing con­tent in light of new busi­ness goals means busi­ness­es can make informed deci­sions about what con­tent needs to be cre­at­ed, mod­i­fied, or removed to achieve their desired outcomes.

Over­all, a con­tent audit is a cru­cial part of relaunch­ing a web­site as it pro­vides valu­able insights into your con­tent’s per­for­mance, SEO poten­tial, user expe­ri­ence, brand con­sis­ten­cy, and goal align­ment. It enables you to make data-dri­ven deci­sions to enhance your web­site’s effec­tive­ness and dri­ve bet­ter results in your dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing efforts.

Let’s dive into what’s involved.

7 steps to conducting a content audit

1. Define what you hope to achieve

Before your web­site relaunch, clear­ly out­line the goals and objec­tives you hope to achieve. Think about how your web­site’s con­tent can tie into these goals and deter­mine what spe­cif­ic aspects of the con­tent you want to assess (such as qual­i­ty, rel­e­vance, SEO per­for­mance, or engage­ment metrics).

2. Take an inventory of your content

Com­pile a com­pre­hen­sive inven­to­ry of all the exist­ing con­tent on your web­site. Make sure you include blog posts, arti­cles, prod­uct descrip­tions, land­ing pages, videos, and any oth­er rel­e­vant con­tent assets.

3. Evaluate the quality and relevance of your content

Take a look at your inven­to­ry and assess the qual­i­ty of each piece based on what­ev­er cri­te­ria are impor­tant to you. You may want to do this on Google Sheets or Excel and cre­ate sev­er­al columns for dif­fer­ent scor­ing and categorising.

You may look at things such as:

• Accu­ra­cy
• Read­abil­i­ty
• Gram­mar
• Over­all effec­tive­ness in deliv­er­ing the intend­ed message
• Tidi­ness of formatting
• Rel­e­vance (accord­ing to the web­site’s pur­pose, busi­ness objec­tives, and cur­rent trends)

Dur­ing this process, make sure you mark any con­tent you believe to be out­dat­ed, redun­dant, or no longer aligned with your brand messaging.

4. Analyse SEO performance and engagement metrics

Next, you’re going to take a look at your inven­to­ry’s SEO per­for­mance and engage­ment met­rics. These could be:

• Page views
• Time on page
• Bounce rate
• Engage­ment rate
• Click-through rate
• Con­ver­sion rate
• Social shares
• SERP rank­ing position
• Num­ber of backlinks
• Key­word usage
• Meta tags
• Head­ings

At this stage, you want to iden­ti­fy high-per­form­ing con­tent and con­tent that may require improve­ments to increase user engagement.

Now that you’ve got a bet­ter idea of the health of your body of con­tent, make sure you’ve filled in your spread­sheet and applied fil­ters so you can organ­ise the dataset you’ve created.

5. Identify any gaps in your content

Look­ing at your body of con­tent, con­sid­er what top­ics you haven’t writ­ten about, details you haven’t pro­vid­ed, and new research you haven’t pre­sent­ed. Con­sid­er what your cus­tomers may want to know and what will sup­port their needs.

Take a look at your busi­ness objec­tives again and think about how your con­tent can reach these goals in new ways.

You’ll also need to con­sid­er your con­tent’s SEO health, and key­word research is a must. Use a tool such as Ahrefs to dis­cov­er key­words you’re not tar­get­ing. These can form the basis of new blog posts or videos that could real­ly boost the over­all SEO for the whole site.

6. Sort your content into categories

The final stage in under­stand­ing and improv­ing your body of con­tent is sort­ing it into cat­e­gories or themes. This can help with dis­tri­b­u­tion plans (e.g., you may have four top­ics that you pub­lish con­tent for on a 4‑weekly basis) and site organ­i­sa­tion (i.e., cre­at­ing spe­cif­ic menus or top­ic pages).

You may also want to cre­ate SILOs or clus­ters for your con­tent, both of which are types of inter­nal link­ing strate­gies. This may require an SEO con­tent spe­cial­ist if you’re new to the con­cept, but it’s fair­ly sim­ple once you under­stand it:

(SILOs and clus­ters are a way to link spe­cif­ic blog posts togeth­er. The fin­ished prod­uct helps search engine bots to crawl your site in a more organ­ised way and strength­en your top­ic author­i­ty in the eyes of search engines, as the site is clear­ly ded­i­cat­ed to offer­ing a wealth of infor­ma­tion on a spe­cif­ic topic.

Sites can have mul­ti­ple clus­ters that are sep­a­rate from each oth­er, linked by one “mas­ter” blog post that sits at the top of SILO maps. This “top-lev­el” page may be a gen­er­al guide which con­tains sev­er­al links to more detailed blog posts on sub-topics.)

7. Create an action plan and implement your changes

Based on the find­ings of the con­tent audit, devel­op a clear action plan out­lin­ing the nec­es­sary improve­ments required for each piece of con­tent and any new ideas. You might like to pri­ori­tise the list of tasks based on their impact, effort, and feasibility.

Exe­cute the action plan by updat­ing, opti­mis­ing, or remov­ing con­tent as need­ed. Keep your orig­i­nal objec­tives top-of-mind to ensure that all changes align with the goals of the web­site relaunch.

The find­ings of your efforts may be rel­e­vant not just to the site relaunch but also to your con­tent mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy going for­ward. So, make sure your writ­ers, edi­tors, and any­one involved in con­tent out­put are aware of any changes you’d like to make going forward.

The importance of user experience (UX) in content audits

You might think of con­tent audits as a way of boost­ing SEO per­for­mance or sim­ply a part of relaunch­ing your web­site. How­ev­er, a fun­da­men­tal part of con­tent audits is their pos­i­tive impact on user expe­ri­ence (UX), and this can’t be ignored.

Not only is a con­tent audit the per­fect time to con­sid­er the UX of your site, but improved UX is a nat­ur­al by-prod­uct of get­ting things organised.

If you’d like to improve the UX of your site, you can use the oppor­tu­ni­ty pro­vid­ed by a con­tent audit to enhance things such as nav­i­ga­tion, acces­si­bil­i­ty, and over­all user satisfaction.

Here are some things to con­sid­er if you’d like to use your con­tent audit to boost UX:

• Cat­e­goris­ing your con­tent may give rise to sev­er­al top­ics, which you can list in your nav­i­ga­tion menu. This can help guide users to find the con­tent they’re real­ly look­ing for rather than mak­ing them search through a chrono­log­i­cal list of blog posts.
• A con­tent audit can help iden­ti­fy any usabil­i­ty issues on your web­site, such as bro­ken links, con­fus­ing nav­i­ga­tion, or slow page load times. Address­ing these issues can make your web­site more user-friend­ly and improve the over­all UX.
• By eval­u­at­ing the rel­e­vance and qual­i­ty of your con­tent, you iden­ti­fy areas where your con­tent may not be meet­ing user needs or expec­ta­tions. Whether it’s out­dat­ed infor­ma­tion, irrel­e­vant con­tent, or over­ly com­plex arti­cles, improv­ing your con­tent can make it more use­ful and engag­ing for users.

How can you boost SEO with a content audit?

Improved SEO is a key rea­son why busi­ness­es con­duct con­tent audits. So, how can you ensure you use this time wise­ly to get the best results? Here are our top tips:

• Make sure you check for bro­ken links and slow load­ing times; these are eas­i­ly fixed and have impact­ful results.
• Ensure that your web­site is mobile-opti­mised so you can get clos­er to hav­ing a ful­ly opti­mised site.
• Direct your efforts to dis­cov­er the best way to for­mat your blog posts, using meta and H tags correctly.
• Con­sid­er imple­ment­ing an inter­nal link­ing strat­e­gy to boost top­ic authority.
• Research key­words relat­ing to your niche to branch out your reach and fill gaps in your body of content.
• Look out for any image files that are too big; they could be impact­ing your site’s loading

You might need to repurpose your content

There’s no shame in repur­pos­ing (or ‘recy­cling’) your con­tent! As long as you don’t com­plete­ly pla­gia­rise your own work, repur­pos­ing con­tent can be extreme­ly ben­e­fi­cial to your web­site. Plus, it saves time, effort, and money.

If you dis­cov­er gaps in your body of con­tent, you may find that repur­pos­ing some­thing from your YouTube chan­nel or social media pages is just the tick­et. Alter­na­tive­ly, if one of your aims is to reach a new or changed audi­ence, switch­ing up the for­mat in which your con­tent is deliv­ered is one way to reach them.

Evi­dent­ly, repur­pos­ing con­tent has its place, and you might find that you’ll need to use it when uncov­er­ing gaps or chal­lenges when con­duct­ing your con­tent audit.

Tools that can help with your content audit

If you want a bit of out­side help with your audit, there are a range of dif­fer­ent tools and resources that can aid the con­tent audit­ing process. Here are a few to consider:

• Gram­marly (help­ful for check­ing the cor­rect­ness, clar­i­ty, and deliv­ery of your articles)
• Ahrefs (help­ful for key­word research, cre­at­ing con­tent clus­ters, and analysing back­link profiles)
• Yoast SEO plu­g­in (help­ful for tech­ni­cal issues as well as con­tent opti­mi­sa­tion on Word­Press sites)
• Scream­ing Frog (help­ful for spot­ting tech­ni­cal issues and map­ping out inter­nal link­ing structures)

Although these tools offer some great fea­tures, they won’t be able to do the whole con­tent audit them­selves. You’ll still have to gath­er the inven­to­ry and make judge­ment calls on what’s work­ing (and not work­ing) for your brand.

Who can you collaborate with to help with your content audit?

Some­times tools aren’t enough, and you want some pro­fes­sion­als on board to help you. Here are some roles you may want to con­sid­er hav­ing on board:

• Con­tent Writer
• Con­tent Editor
• SEO Spe­cial­ist
• SEO Blog Strategist/Content Manager
• Web Design­er
• Web Devel­op­er
• Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing Manager
• Social Media Manager
• UX Design­er
• Graph­ic Designer
• Data Ana­lyst
• Project Man­ag­er

Of course, you could always con­tact us here at pur­ple­plan­et to help. We have a large team of experts who can help with a range of tasks dis­cussed in this blog post. Click the link below to get in touch.

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