If it comes to content, you will no longer be unfamiliar with what content is.
However, for many people, including SEOers and "newbie" marketers, what an audit is, and how important is an audit of content, not everyone can master it.
In this article, I will guide you through the process of doing a content audit for your website in detail.
The first part of the article includes the method of getting data and how to filter data, fill in the excel file. Next, part 2 will cover how to classify and provide actionable solutions.
But first, I will help you quickly understand the concepts related to audit content . Let's start!
What is Audit Content?
1. Audit Content Concept
As you probably already know, SEO Audit is the process of checking and evaluating the status of a website.
SEO audit helps identify problems that need to be improved, offers solutions as well as directs website development strategies.
Content Audit, or similar content audit, is the process of analyzing the overall content of a website.
A content audit helps to completely change the quality of the website's content, providing more value to readers, while increasing the quality of the website and improving its search engine rankings.
So is it difficult to audit content? How to audit content?
I will go with you step by step and in as much detail as I can.
Let's go!
2. Identify content that needs improvement
Depending on the product and user insten, each website will choose a different content style. However, in general, there are 5 types of content that every website needs to avoid:
a. Poor quality content
What is poor quality content, I will answer for you shortly:
Content that has not been viewed by visitors for a long time (over 4 months) or does not rank for keywords at all.
Duplicate content will lead to cannibalization – articles on the same topic compete with each other.
The content is not well optimized because you have not researched the user, the outline is not good, the user intent has not been correctly identified.
Content target is not the right keywords. For example, the information article re-targets the service keyword.
b. Thin content
Duplicate internal content when copying one or more articles on your domain.
Duplicate external content when copying one or more articles on someone else's domain.
Not exactly a 100% duplicate, but a 70-80% duplicate.
The page has almost no content but only menu, footer and sidebar.
The page has more ads than content.
However, some product pages of e-commerce are forced to duplicate content or write short content, such as the computer market, mouse, keyboard will have the content as the correct parameter. Many content is forced to duplicate large (less content), such as content about businesses such as contact and recruitment pages.
c. Irrelevant content
Usually a website has 3 main types of content:
Main content: accounting for 75%
Additional Content: 20%
Content is up (trending in the field): 5%.
For example, GTV's website has the main content of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and inbound marketing accounting for 75%, supporting content related to social media marketing and business accounts for 20% and other topics such as blockchain.
So content is irrelevant when:
Content is not related to the topic that your business is interested in.
The rate of supplementary content and content is increasing too much.
Content does not bring value to the business.
d. Under performance content
Are the contents:
Being in the top 6-20 (sometimes 6-25)
Before, there was good traffic, but for reasons such as Google update or strong competition, the traffic decreased compared to before.
e. High traffic content
Isn't it strange, why content with high traffic needs an audit.
Simply put, good is not perfect. High traffic content is getting a lot of traffic and if it is well optimized, it will have more traffic.
Or the page has high traffic content but high bounce rate, you should also have some solutions to improve.
AUDIT CONTENT . STEPS
1. Data entry
First you need to access Screaming Frog and proceed to buy an account to be able to use important features to help audit content .
The paid version will have more useful features
Once the account purchase is complete, you just need to download Screaming Frog and proceed to log in.
To set the standard settings for Screaming Frog, choose Configuration → Spider → Basic and click the settings as shown below:
Click to install Scream Frog according to the instructions
On the Render tab, select Old AJAX Crawling Scheme. Continue setting Advanced tab settings as shown below:
Click Advanced according to the instructions above
The remaining tabs are left to default. Some other settings:
Configuration → robots.txt → Setting → Respect robots.txt → Show internal URLs blocked by robots.txt → OK.
Guide to choosing robots.txt
Configuration → User Agent → Googlebot Smartphone (because Google algorithm will give priority to scratch mobile version first)
Guide to choosing a phone crawling algorithm
So you have completed the basic Screaming Frog installation step.
Next we will extend the tool's functionality by connecting to the Search Console API (formerly Webmaster tool ) and declaring google analytics.
If you do not know, I will briefly talk about what is Google Search Console?
Search Console is a tool to show the status and performance of the website while Google Analytics focuses on analyzing user and traffic objects.
To connect the API, go to Configuration → API Access → Google Analytics → Enter account in the existing account box → Connect to new account → Select GA management account → Allow.
Follow the picture to connect Google Analytics with Screaming Frog
So Screaming Frog has been successfully connected to GA. You can continue to select the project in the Property, View and Organic Traffic sections.
Do the same thing when you want to connect to Search Console.
In addition, in these two tools, you should note to select the time interval at the Date Range tab. Here you should choose a survey period of 3 months or more to have enough analytical data.
Survey period of 3 months or more is enough data for analysis
That's it, the connection step is complete.
To get data from Screaming Frog, enter your website domain in the search bar and then select Start.
Screaming Frog interface
You can track the scratch progress through the Crawl bar.
The crawl speed is fast or slow depending on the device configuration and wifi quality.
After the tool has finished running, you can proceed to export the excel file all the data.
At this time, the filter tool of excel will be a great assistant to help you classify and narrow the survey scope. Filter by these basic criteria:
Content column: choose whether the object of analysis is an image or text content. For example, keep the cells that contain text when you only want to audit content .
Status column: keep the cells with status 200, because 404, 500 error URLs or 301 redirects are not the main object for content analysis.
Indexability column: delete Non-index cells.
After filtering the data, you only leave the following columns:
Address
Title
Meta description
H1
Word count
GA Session
GA New User
Bounce rate
GA Avg Session
Clicks
Impressions
Position.
Switching to the classified Content sheet, you need to know the following information:
URL Thin Content
After filtering the data for the second time, sort the page by word count from low to high.
Articles with 800 words or less will be graded as Thin Content.
That is, the content is too short, does not guarantee quality, needs improvement. Unless the number from the homepage is low, it's not a big deal.
Note: the word count in Screaming Frog is based on the number of words in the code, so it will count all the words of the menu bar, sidebar, footer ... on the website.
Therefore, in order for the article to achieve unique content quality of 800 words or more, the word count must be over 1000 words.
However, you also need to consider user intent because not all websites need too long content.
Duplicate content
Duplicate content is one of the serious content errors that affect website SEO effectiveness .
Screaming Frog can detect duplicate errors in title, meta description and H1.
Screaming Frog helps detect Duplicated Content in many different locations
Content under performance
Another criterion to include in the data file is content under performance , to filter articles with potential keywords to rank well.
This data can be exported from Ahrefs and Search Console, but I still prefer to get it from Search Console.
So how is data from Ahrefs and Search Console different?
With Ahrefs, for example, any of your URL A is ranking for 372 keywords, but the results will only show the performance of the highest keyword.
While Search Console will average the performance of 372 keywords to give top page results, so it will be more objective.
Search Console calculates the average results of the keywords
To select Top pages in Search Console, you will filter the data by the last Position column in the sheet, only taking the rank from 5-20.
How to filter content under performance.
Number Filter > Between and enter from 5 to 20 to select content under performance.
URLs tend to decrease
After observing the traffic results on Ahrefs and Google Analytics, you filter out the trending URLs for further analysis and offer improved solutions to get back to the top.
In the content audit sheet , you begin to enter the specific information exported and filtered including URL, Action, Content Type, Title, Word count, RD, GA Session, GA Bounce rate, GA time onsite, Clicks, Impressions and Position.
RD is referring domains, you can get data from Ahrefs → Best by links → Export → Use vlookup to find RD with corresponding URL in Content audit sheet .
2. Content filtering needs improvement
You already know how to recognize problematic content that needs to be improved. However, with a website with many articles, how to filter out those content without going through each article one by one?
Please open the data file from Screaming Frog and follow the steps below!
Import data from Screaming Frog into the audit sheet as follows:
* Note: only choose to analyze content pages (text), status 200, good index.
During the content audit, depending on the project, you can flexibly remove some unnecessary columns.
For example, this time, I kept only the data including URL, action, content type, title, word count, GA session, Bounce rate and Average session duration.
As mentioned we will have 5 types of content.
Before going into content classification, you can completely rely on the selected URL to pick out poor quality URLs and handle it quickly by deleting the article, 301 redirect or noindex.
For example, in the case of pagination in the category, the best way is noindex.
How to filter Thin Content
From the word count, you can already filter out the type of thin content.
However, depending on the market segment, the number of words considered as thin content varies.
In fact, some projects do not need too much content, but mainly need images such as fashion, electronic equipment, household appliances, etc.
For example, if you normally convert a 700-word article as thin content, for these markets an article of about 500 words is already qualified.
In case the thin content is a business entity article, the action will be "keep it" or "do nothing", because as I said above, this is a feature of each page, can not require too much writing.
How to filter High traffic content
Next, based on the GA session column, you can further classify high traffic content, this metric is also based on each field that is rated high or low.
To further categorize, you can use URLs or titles to categorize content that is not related to your business.
Now I will show you 2 ways to filter out under performance content .
How to filter Under Performance Content
Method 1 :
Go to Ahrefs → Organic keywords → Movement → Export file to fully observe the movement of keywords up or down in recent times.
The output data will be accompanied by a specific date, now you rely on the date column to filter out the URLs after the website milestone has dropped or dropped sharply to analyze the website.
For example, before July 2019, your organic search was still very good, but from July 1, 2019, the traffic decreased gradually.
Then you will choose to get the URL from July 1, 2019 or later. After removing duplicate data, you will have a list of URLs, compare this list with the URL you are analyzing to filter out under performance URLs.
You don't have Ahrefs?
Don't worry I will show you another method of finding under performance.
Method 2 :
Google Analytics → Conversions → Funnels → Organic search.
To compare which articles are trending down compared to the previous period, you choose the time frame of the highest traffic and the biggest drop.
Note: it is important that these 2 time periods must have the same number of days, for example, they both take the same data of 30 days or 31 days.
For example, with gtvseo.com, I will choose 61 days of greatest decrease in traffic (March 1 to April 30) and 61 days of growth again (August 1 to 30).
However, you should limit the selection of a number of time frames where traffic in your field will grow suddenly. For example, if you are selling mooncakes, your traffic (should be) tends to increase sharply around August, September.
Based on the data in the Change section you can see how the traffic is increasing or decreasing. You can also easily export this data like Ahrefs.
Use Excel's extremely powerful feature to filter out URLs August - September:
Obtained results:
As for the traffic results in March and April, you just need to VLOOKUP.
To find URLs with poor performance, simply use the following IF formula: = IF(C2<B2;true).
After filtering out the URL with the result true, this is the list of URLs that have dropped traffic or under performance.
Using the VLOOKUP function, compare this list with data from the previous Screaming Frog to mark on the audit file URLs whose content type is under performance.
Articles classified as low-quality content will be those that do not output session data, bounce rate, duration (usually due to the newly created URL) or have little traffic.
So you have classified all 5 types of content that need to be improved.
3. Solution
After classifying the content, I will give a solution to each content problem:
a. Poor quality content
Case 1: Little traffic, no backlinks, cannibalization phenomenon
For articles with little traffic, no backlinks and cannibalized (ie the same topic or target keywords) you can find a way to combine these articles and optimize the content into a complete article.
Case 2: Duplicate content
For low-quality content due to duplicate content, it is best to delete those articles and 301 redirect to the most relevant page. Don't forget to adjust your internal links as the deleted post will become a 404.
To detect broken internal links, you can use powerful tools like screaming frog or website auditor .
Screaming frog can help you crawl 404 links → click on any link A → inlink → the tool will display pages pointing to link A. So you just need to review these links to remove link A.
Case 3 : Target wrong keywords on inappropriate landing page
If from the beginning you have targeted the wrong landing page due to the wrong keyword group.
For example, with what SEO keywords are, you should group them with keywords that define SEO, SEO to write an overview to introduce this topic.
But you go to the group with the keyword seo services.
When grouping the wrong keywords at the beginning like that, you can delete the wrong article and rebuild the content from scratch or consider optimizing from the old article to save more time and effort.
Scenario 4: Target is very good but does not bring traffic and has no backlinks
At this point, you will check that the content has met the criteria of outline, image ... or not.
In this step, you can refer to GTV's content video series to ensure good optimization of important factors such as satisfying user intent, creating superior and unique content compared to competitors.
After checking the website content meets the standards, you continue to check the onpage. If the onpage is already well optimized, continue to look at topic cluster.
If you've been following GTV long enough, you'll know that I often apply topic clusters in a silo structure to build a network of sub-articles that support the main articles in the upper tier.
However, before proceeding to build a support article, you need to consider whether SEO keywords are too difficult to necessarily do or not.
Because when building the content below, you also have to invest in outline, write articles, edit, link ... no less than the main article.
If you think this investment is worth it, don't hesitate to immediately refer to GTV's articles on research support content.
Or you can review the content on the website to see if you can take advantage of any articles to include in the content cluster.
Don't forget to build a network of internal links for content clusters and optimize onpage to ensure the best results.
When you have built content according to topic cluster, you need to wait about 5 months for Google to properly understand the content on your website and give it a better top rank.
After that time, if the results are still not satisfactory, you can optimize offpage / entity to push these articles up.
>>> More reference: What is Pillar page?
b. Thin content
Case 1: The page has no traffic, no backlinks, no good keyword targeting
In case the page does not bring any value, it is best to remove the article from the website by 301 redirecting and deleting the internal points pointing to that article (similar to the instructions above).
Case 2: No traffic, no backlink but good target
If the page targets good keywords with high search volume, you should check the cannibalization ability. I mentioned how to deal with cannibalization in the low-quality content section.
You will combine articles with the same target keyword into one strongest article, then optimize the outline, content and onpage.
If the article targeting the keyword is not the same as any other article on the website, you should find a way to optimize the content such as review outline, optimize onpage such as internal links, related content ...
Case 3: Lots of traffic, with or without backlinks, good target
This is the simplest case, you just need to add content to not be judged as thin content anymore because this can become a ticking time bomb for Google to penalize your website at any time.
Case 4: Entity
Entity content is the contact page, recruitment, introduction, privacy policy ... can not write too long content. With such mandatory content, you can keep it. But try to optimize as much as possible.
For example, on gallery pages that share business images, you can also add a few lines of text to thicken the content.
Or if you have many business entity articles on the same topic, you can combine these articles to ensure quality length for the content.
c. Irrelevant content
Case 1: Run ads
If the content is not relevant for advertising purposes, you should tag this page noindex so that Google does not crawl it.
Case 2: There is a conversion
Pages with unrelated content but have a conversion rate ie users make a purchase on it, you should keep it even if possible.
Case 3: No traffic, no or backlinks
You can delete the post and do a 301 redirect to the most relevant article and remove the internal link as instructed above.
Case 4: There are backlinks and traffic
Some unrelated articles bring in a lot of traffic but are of poor quality.
For example, you sell watches but write an article about how to crack windows 10. This article is searched by many people, but it does not help you find customers to buy watches.
In this situation, you test if the traffic generated converts, then rewrite more relevant content for the page.
Conversely, if this traffic brings nothing but numbers, you should add an extra step to evaluate if you can navigate to other more relevant content before deleting and 301 redirecting.
d. Under performance content
*Note: only applies to articles published > 4 months.
Case 1: Top keywords 6-20
With these keywords, you can find ways to promote higher rankings by optimizing onpage or content.
In terms of content, you can try GTV's new trick called reusage content.
Case 2 : Used to have high traffic and backlinks
You should review the content and update if necessary. Or you can use the reusage content process in this case.
After republishing the article, you need to adjust the date of the latest content on the website to push the article to the top pages of the category.
Also, don't forget to optimize your onpage and apply an internal link theme using relevant anchor texts.
e. High traffic
If engagement is not good (time on site, bounce rate) then you need to find ways to improve these metrics.
To optimize high traffic pages even better, you can still apply the process of reusage content as above.
And finally, to recap, here is a Flowchart of the Content Audit Process .
On average, the website needs to audit the content once every 3 months to ensure comprehensive web quality
Content Audit Process
#gtvseo #gtv_seo #kiem_tra_content_tren_website
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