In every digital marketing team, a content audit is a common event. Every once in a while, the need to analyze the entire content published on the website comes to light. While most smart marketers schedule content audits at regular intervals, others have to jump into one when their rankings on SERPs begins to fall.
What is a content audit?
In simple words, the analysis of the entire content published by a website is called a content audit. A content audit is done not just to evaluate the qualitative aspects of the content on a website, but certain quantitative metrics as well which play a key role in helping a website in ranking higher on SERPs. In some cases, a website may develop its own criteria for a content audit depending on its intent behind writing it.
In digital marketing institutes, students are briefed about how content is supposed to be evaluated. A content audit is different from simple evaluation simple based on the numbers. While simple content evaluation may be restricted to one or two write-ups and metrics, a content audit is much more wholesome and presents a clearer picture of the positives and negatives.
In this article, we will discuss some important metrics marketers should keep in mind while performing a content audit.
Bounce Rate and Average Session Time
The bounce rate is a big factor in determining the rank a given content gets on search engines. A high bounce rate suggests that people do not enjoy the content of a website and quickly go to another website.
During a content audit, analysts can basically check which pages of a website have a particularly high bounce rate. These pages can then be analyzed further based on other metrics to find why the bounce rate is high.
Average session time, like bounce rate, is highly suggestive. Healthy average session time is indicative of the fact that people are taking their time to read the content. A high session time indicates that the content is good enough to have the attention of the average user for a longer span of time.
Backlinks
If a given piece of content is getting a lot of backlinks organically, it means it has managed to resonate with the target audience. Many websites have high performing pages that bring backlinks without the use of any link building technique.
As long as the backlinks a webpage has are relevant, there is nothing marketers really have to worry about.
User Retention
Finally, user retention is a metric that says a lot about a website.
For businesses invested in using their website for meeting key marketing objectives for the long term, the need to become a trusted brand is apparent. User retention is a great statistic that tells marketers the percentage of people who are trusting its content and by extension the brand. Over a long period of time, user retention becomes an absolutely essentially metric during a content audit.
In Conclusion
In this article, we cover some basic points the metrics to evaluate during a content audit.
About the Author – Gaurav heera is a digital marketing executive and trainer with over a decade of experience in the industry. He currently works at Gaurav Heera Academy, an institute known for its digital marketing training in Delhi.
