What is Audit Content? Detailed step-by-step instructions for Content Audit

Content creation and distribution is no longer a strange job for SEOs. However, being creative is not enough, you must regularly evaluate and review to improve your content, thereby promoting the website to increase its search engine rankings and also attracting a significant amount of traffic to the website. mine.

This method is called Audit content. So what is a content audit? How to audit content quickly and effectively! In this article, Hero SEO will learn with you in the most detail about this issue.

What is the concept of Content Audit?

In fact, there are still many SEO people who are still unfamiliar with the phrase Audit Content. Accordingly, a Content Audit, also known as a content audit, is a method of systematically reviewing, evaluating and improving the content on a business’ website. From there, SEOs will have a correct view of the website’s content strategy, and give a better orientation, what content needs to be improved, what content needs to be omitted.

The purpose of the Content Audit is to improve the quality of the website’s comprehensive content, bringing better value to users. Thereby boosting your ability to be at the top of the page in search results and attract more organic traffic to your website.

Purpose of Content Audit

Thus, the content above has clearly shown readers what the concept of audit content is. In the following content, we will learn in more detail the purpose of this SEO method.

Boost rankings in search results. 

Good quality content is an important factor that affects a website’s search engine rankings. Accordingly, if your content is valuable but cannot rank high on search engines, then you definitely need to review whether your content is search engine friendly or not. After the process of evaluating and improving the content, surely the chances of promoting the website to the first page of search engines will be greatly increased.

Improve old content

After a period of implementation, it is possible that your content has become outdated and you will necessarily need to remove or add new content, more suitable for users’ tastes. In addition to the content becoming stale, it is possible that your link is broken, important keywords are missed, or some other problem, for example. Therefore, content audit will be an important step to help you improve and bring new content to old content, better serve users.

Remove irrelevant content

Many websites often intentionally create trending content to drive traffic to the website. But these content will usually only be effective for a short time and of course, some of the content is not related to the field and industry of the website being exploited. Therefore, a content audit is an opportunity for you to remove all that inappropriate content, improving the user experience.

Eliminate duplicate content on the website

Duplicate content in the website can cause cannibalism, one of the penalties of the Google search engine. With Audit Content, SEO-ers will have to remove all the duplicate content, improving the value of the business website.

Content implementation planning

During the content audit process, businesses will know which content has been implemented and which content is still missing. As a result, a more accurate content deployment strategy in the future.

Classification of content that needs Audit Content

In fact, to fully understand the concept of Audit Content, you should refer to 5 more types of content that need to be improved in SEO. Accordingly, SEOs will, based on the number of words, traffic, reading time, rank, and relevance of the content, divide the content to be audited into the following 5 categories:

Poor quality content

Name on the text, poor quality content is understood as content that no user has access to for a long time (usually about 4 months) or Google can not “scratch” and rank any keywords. chief.

In addition, content with duplicate topics, cannibalism, or content with poor article layout, or content that implements keywords with the wrong target is considered poor quality content. quantity and need to conduct an audit.

Thin Content

When learning about the keyword “what is audit content”, we will come across a lot of content that mentions thin content. This is one of five types of content that need to be improved to improve the quality of your website.

In fact, thin content is often defined as content or pages that have the following characteristics:

• The page has too many ads, while the content is too little
• The page has almost no content, only menus, sidebars or footers.
• Pages with internal duplicate content.
• Page has duplicate content with external content.
• Pages have a duplicate rate of 70% – 80%.

Irrelevant content

Irrelevant content is the type of content that does not bring any value to the business, the supplementary and rising content accounts for a large proportion or the content has no relevance or similarity to the field or industry in which the business operates. business is doing business.

For example: Your business is specializing in the business of water purifiers, for example, but before implementing content about “summer women’s perfume”, surely this content about perfume should be removed. because it has nothing to do with the industry you are in.

Content Under Performance

When it comes to what Audit Content is, we certainly cannot ignore a small branch of it, which is Content Under Performance. Accordingly, this type of content is defined as content that ranks from the top 6 to the top 20 (or 25), or content that has a significant decrease in traffic due to the Google Update search engine or due to competitors. competitor.

Content High Traffic

Finally, high traffic content is one of the five types of content that needs improvement. In fact, the traffic is too high, but it is not properly optimized and does not bring many benefits to businesses. Therefore, you should also conduct a content audit and optimize properly, thereby bringing more value to your website.

Tools for Audit Content

In order to help readers better understand what Audit Content is as well as how to audit content in the most detail, in this section Hero SEO will share with you the tools that are commonly used by SEO-er today.

Screaming-Frog: This is a website crawling tool and is considered the most comprehensive tool to serve Audit Content. With a free account, this tool can provide users with more than 500 website URLs. However, to use it for the purpose of Audit Content, you should pay a fee to be able to own the special features of this tool. In particular, Screaming-Frog can provide all the necessary elements for content audit such as Title, URL, Meta Description, Headings 2, 3 and the number of words of the content.

URL Profiler: This tool is required to pay a fee, but on the contrary it will give you details about the number of visits, bounce rate, time to stay on the page, serving well for the Content Audit process.

Ahrefs: This is a tool that is no stranger to SEO-er. Although you need to pay to be able to use this tool, you can analyze your competitors easily and serve well for your content audit process.

Google Search Console: This is a free tool from Google that helps SEOs to conveniently monitor traffic, volume, and ranking of content on their website.

Detailed instructions on the content audit process

In the article What is Audit Content today, Hero SEO will guide you through the basic steps to be able to Audit Content in the most systematic and effective way. Normally, Audit Content will be divided into 3 basic steps: collecting data, classifying content and providing solutions for each type. With each step, we need to do more small steps to bring the best results for our website.

Data collection

Once you’ve completed your account purchase, signed in, and set up a basic Screaming-Frog account, you’ll need to expand the functionality of this tool so that it can better serve your data collection strategy by connecting Search Console API and declare Google Analytics.

You make the connection as follows:

• Open Screaming-Frog -> click Configuration -> continue to select API Access -> connect to Google Analytics. Then you proceed to enter your account into the existing account frame -> Connect to new account -> Select the Google Analytics management account -> finally click allow.
• If you want to connect to your Google Search Console account, do the same.
• Don’t forget to choose Date Range as 3 months or more!
• To crawl, you enter your website domain into Screaming-Frog’s search bar and then click Start. You wait for the tool to finish running, then press export file (Export file).
• In the downloaded Excel file, proceed to filter the data as follows:

• In the content column: You filter and keep the columns containing “text” to audit content.

• In the Indexability column: You keep the cells that contain “Indexable” and remove the “non-index” columns.

• In the Status column: You proceed to filter and keep the cells containing “200” and remove the cells containing “404”, “500” or “redirect 301”.

• After filtering the above criteria, you delete the remaining columns and keep the following columns:

• Address
• Title 1
• Meta Description
• Word Count
• GA Session
• GA Avg Session Duration
• GA Bounce Rate
• Position

Content Classification

The second step in the Content Audit process is to classify content according to the 5 categories mentioned above.

We will proceed to filter by the following content types: Thin Content -> Irrelevant Content -> Content High Traffic -> Content Under Performance -> Poor quality content.

Thin Content

To filter Thin Content, do the following:

• Filter the Word Count column from top to bottom.
• If your website is in the service industry, then articles under 1200 will be marked as Thin Content.
• Conversely, if the business makes a commercial website (Ecommerce), the number of words below 100 will be Thin Content.

Irrelevant content

For this type of content, you can read the title (Title) and the description tag (Meta Description) to determine which articles are not related to the industry or field in which your business is doing business.

Content High Traffic

To determine if that content belongs to High Traffic, you can rely on the GA Session column that we filtered above. Usually content with high traffic will have a GA Session of 200 or more. So if any content has a GA Session column over 200, you can mark that content as Content High Traffic. However, depending on the industry and field, this data will change, not fixed.

Content Under Performance

After filtering the above 3 types of content, you proceed to determine the content under Under Performance based on the Position column (ranking position on the Google search engine). Accordingly, you should filter out the content with a ranking position of 6 – 20 and mark it as content Under Performance.

Poor quality content

After identifying the 4 types of content above, the remaining content is poor quality content.

Offer improved solutions for each type of content

One of the important factors when it comes to knowledge of “What is Audit Content” is the provision of improved solutions for each of the above types of content.

Thin Content: To give the right direction to improve this type of content, we have 4 cases as follows:

• Case 1: The page has no traffic, no links and no good keyword targeting. In this case, we should remove the article by deleting it and then 301 redirecting and the internal links pointing to it.
• Case 2: The page has no traffic, no backlinks, but the keyword target is good. In this case, we have two solutions as follows:

• If the page has articles with similar keywords and encounters cannibalization, we proceed to merge the articles together.
• On the contrary, we will proceed to improve the content such as reviewing the article outline, related content or internal links, …

• Case 3: The page has a lot of traffic, a good keyword target, with or without backlinks, then we proceed to improve the content as in case 2.
• Case 4: This case is related to Content Entity.

• Content Entity must be like that, such as warranty, policy, company information, etc., remains the same.
• Content Entity is not as good as the business image, you can improve (update content) by adding text.
• Finally, let’s merge the content Entities with the same content.

Irrelevant Content: For this type of content, there are also 3 cases.

• Case 1: The page has no traffic, no backlinks, then delete the post.
• Case 2: The page has links and valuable traffic, if the conversion rate is stable, it will stay the same. Conversely, if there is no conversion, there are two options as follows:

• If the content cannot be adjusted, delete the post and redirect 301 to the related article.
• Conversely, adjustments can be made by improving and reworking relevant content.

Content High Traffic : We consider 3 cases as follows:

• Case 1: Consider whether the content is reusable (optimize onpage, add images, internal links,…). If possible, reuse, otherwise keep the content.
• Case 2: If the page has a low engagement rate, then improve the content. Engagement metrics can be viewed using the GA Avg Session Duration column.
• Case 3: If the page has a low conversion rate, then proceed to improve the content as in case 2. Determine the conversion index based on the GA Bounce Rate column.

Content Under Performance: With this type of content, we can consider the following two cases:

• Case 1: The page used to have high traffic but then it dropped. The solution is to improve the content and adjust the date, then optimize more internal links.
• Case 2: Page has position in search results from top 6 to top 20. Reuse content, optimize onpage and internal link.

Poor quality content: It can be said that the direction of content improvement of this type of content is the most complicated. To help you understand the best direction to improve, we will share with you the following 4 cases:

• Case 1: The page has little traffic, no backlinks pointing to it, and there is a phenomenon of cannibalization, you proceed to combine.
• Case 2: If the page has duplicate content, delete the article and redirect 301 to the most relevant page.
• Case 3: Landing page is not appropriate, target keyword is not correct. In this case, you can completely rebuild new content or optimize and improve old content to save time and effort.

• Case 4: Target good keywords but little traffic, no backlinks pointing to. For this scenario, you perform the following content enhancements:

• First check if your content meets the standards such as unique content, content that is better than the competition, content with the right intent.
• If you already meet the standard, you continue to optimize onpage for content.
• If you have already optimized the onpage, you should check if the article is worth the topic cluster group. If it’s not worth it, keep it and
• If it’s worth it, research additional topics (if not already), then review cluster content articles, optimize onpage and internal links.
• After building a topic cluster, you wait about 5 months for Google to understand exactly what you want to convey. If after that time, it still does not bring good results, you need to conduct offpage and entity optimization.

So, above are Hero SEO’s sharing about what Audit Content is as well as the basic to detailed steps to be able to audit content effectively. Hopefully, through this article, you can understand the importance of Content Audit for getting your website to the first page of search and attracting traffic to your website. Finally, if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact Hero SEO right away for a quick response from an expert.