Starting your content audit from within your company goals can help identify the areas with greatest impact; such as eliminating underperforming content or auditing for conversions.
After your content audit has yielded its findings, create a spreadsheet to record and track action items such as deleting content, updating it or even rewriting it.
1. Analyze Your Keywords
Start a content audit by identifying target keywords. This will allow you to understand which pages don’t rank well for certain terms and identify new opportunities to draw organic search traffic.
For best results when selecting target keywords, take the first step of examining data in both your Google Analytics and Search Console accounts. This will give you a clear picture of both how well your website is currently performing as well as what to anticipate moving forward.
Once you have identified key words, they can help evaluate the SEO performance of each page on your site. A tool like Semrush makes this task simple by checking current rankings of each content piece – this gives an indication of where they typically rank for their target keywords that can then be compared against average rankings per content section (using SUM functionality).
By doing this, you can evaluate your content’s current rankings and decide how best to improve them. This may involve looking at its current number of backlinks as well as whether each piece has been optimized for on-page SEO.
As part of this process, it’s crucial that you set goals based on your findings. This could involve increasing production of high-performing content types or revising underperforming articles to better meet audience needs. Furthermore, it would be wise to identify any gaps in your content that require filling with new or updated information – this will ensure your pages remain up-to-date and useful for readers and increase organic search traffic as a result.
2. Review Your Page Structure
When auditing content, it’s essential that you consider more than keywords alone when conducting an evaluation. A website crawler such as Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider tool can help identify existing pages on your site as well as broken or missing internal links – this tool is especially effective at quickly finding any pages missed by keyword analysis as well as existing pages that might have been missed by your keyword analysis.
Once you have an inventory of existing pages, organize them into tabs and begin evaluating their performance. You can do this by sorting by various metrics such as pageviews, engagement rates and entrances; you could also implement a color-coding system so it’s easy to see at a glance which pages are performing well vs which ones need improvement.
Set new goals for your content strategy! For instance, if tutorials and how-to guides are driving significant engagement and conversions for your accommodation site, perhaps doubling down on them going forward might be effective.
If certain pages aren’t performing as you expected, perhaps focus on optimizing their contents for search engines or creating fresh material to attract more visitors.
With all this data at hand, you should be able to formulate an action plan for your content strategy moving forward. This plan can be as detailed or simple as needed – just ensure it shows clearly where SEO and content marketing efforts will be focused in the near future. Also include deadlines so there is a sense of accountability!
3. Review Your Images
Images can help visitors gain an impression of your accommodation and increase search engine rankings, so it is vital that they are of high-quality and up-to-date. Remember that guests only spend seconds reviewing photos before making a decision; to maximize first impressions make sure your pictures showcase the property in its best light while including any distinctive features such as flowers or fruit bowls that set it apart from competitors.
Review your content periodically with an eye toward improvements that could be made, for instance by looking for keywords missing, pages out-of-date, duplicate content that might be negatively affecting search engine rankings and more. While not strictly necessary, taking this step is certainly worthwhile and advisable to ensure a good online experience for visitors and search engine rankings alike.
Once your qualitative audit is complete, it’s time to act! With your audit results in hand, take note and use them to inform which elements to keep, clean up or eliminate. Use this knowledge to alter your content marketing plan accordingly to ensure it delivers value for both brand and audience alike.
Conducting a content audit may seem like a tedious chore, but its results will pay dividends in terms of creating an effective online marketing strategy. There are tools available that can make this task simpler, including Screaming Frog. This free tool offers data-driven insight into your content’s performance – perfect if conducting one in preparation of website relaunch!
4. Review Your Meta Descriptions
As part of your content audit, it’s also crucial that you review meta descriptions. Meta descriptions are an integral component of on-page SEO that can significantly boost search engine optimization for hotel websites, appearing when their pages appear on SERPs and also impacting visitor intent to click through to your hotel site.
When writing your meta description, it’s essential to keep your target audience in mind. For instance, if your hotel boasts an intriguing history and amazing beer bar, make sure you include this information in the meta description to target those most likely interested in what your offerings have to offer and reduce bounce rates while increasing bookings.
Once you’ve reviewed your meta descriptions, create a prioritized list of content updates. This will allow you to determine what needs to be updated and when; be sure to consider your available resources and content production capacity when setting a timeline for updates.
Utilise your data to identify which pieces of content are performing well and make sure to incorporate those techniques into future content marketing strategies. For instance, if how-to guides with high word counts are performing well on your site, focus more time and energy creating this type of content in the future – this will increase organic traffic and ultimately more bookings for your accommodation business. There’s probably a good reason Julie Andrews never sang about content audits and spreadsheets — they don’t quite fill us with warmth like whiskers on kittens or raindrops on roses! However a successful content audit can grow your accommodation business website organically!
5. Review Your URLs
Setting goals before conducting a content audit is essential to successfully navigating it and measuring its outcomes, while pinpointing any areas for improvement.
Once your goals have been established, the next step should be an audit of existing content. Start by identifying your top performing pages and understanding why they’re doing well – this will allow you to better determine the types of posts to focus on in future.
Locate which pages are falling behind, to gain a clearer idea of which content works best at attracting new traffic and bookings, as well as which need a boost to ensure optimal performance.
Use Semrush to evaluate how well your pages rank for relevant keywords by entering your website URL and choosing “SEO” as the search engine. Once done, you can see both their current ranking position as well as their average one – be sure to record this information in your content audit spreadsheet!
Checking the number of backlinks each page has is also worthwhile, to ascertain whether a lack of backlinks is impeding its performance. To do this, use Semrush and navigate to its “Indexed Pages” report.
Once you have collected data, it’s time to evaluate your content pieces and assess which should remain, be edited or updated, and which pages need to be deleted. Keep your audit organized by using a spreadsheet with appropriate formatting and structure – such as keeping open-ended cells at a minimum while including drop down functions for quantitative metrics.