‘I don’t have enough good clothes to wear!’
That’s what most people say while shopping for new clothes. And it’s a different thing that they have a closet packed with many barely used outfits. But they don’t have the patience to search and reorganize their cupboards and find clothes that would still look good on them.
Often, the state of a website is no different than that of a wardrobe. Most of us treat content the way we treat clothes- we keep buying new ones and stack them above the old ones. Likewise, your website might be replete with old content that is still informative and relevant, yet you keep on hunting for brand new content ideas.
If you spare some time and go through your existing content, you will realize that a lot of it can be repurposed. But how would you know what changes you should make to the content?
This is where the role of a content audit comes into play!
Content Audit- Why it Matters?
Creating meaningful content involves a great deal of creativity and research, and that is why it comes with a hefty price tag. You should consider the possibility of using the content for a longer period to justify the amount spent.
A content audit is similar to reorganizing your closet. You go through all your garments and find many of them to be in good shape. Some of them need a few tweaks; you might have to fix a button or mend a loose seam. Or you make new outfit combinations from old pieces. The activity demands your time, but shopping for new clothes take more time, in addition to money. If you rearrange your closet frequently rather than waiting for it to be in a complete mess, the time and effort involved drastically reduces.
Similarly, if you sift through your old content at regular intervals, you will find that a lot of it is still useful. A content audit will pinpoint the changes you need. Accordingly, you can rewrite your old content to vibe with your audience or make minor updates to make it relevant in the present context.
If the idea of auditing and recrafting content sounds too superficial to you, allow us to explain some of the costs incurred when you skip this critical process.
1. Dip in Revenue
The number of visitors to a blog post goes down with time. And if we consider a high-performing blog post, the traffic decline would translate into a substantial loss of revenue.
Let us understand this better. The average conversion rate for landing pages across different industries is 2.35 percent. If we talk about top-ranking posts, the conversion rate stands above 5 percent.
We assume that your blog has 200 posts, and each post gets around 400 views per month. If the average order price is $40, your blog posts are fetching you $75,200 per month.
What if the average views drop to 200 per month? You would incur a fifty percent loss in revenue. You can avoid the monetary decline by making small but frequent updates to your old posts to ensure optimum traffic.
2. Loss of Credibility
Your audience might doubt your competence if your content is several years old, especially if they are searching for the latest information that helps them make crucial decisions. For instance, if you run a blog that gives financial or legal advice, the audience will frown at outdated content. At the same time, making a few updates to reflect changes to policies or laws will keep the content functional and cement your image as a trusted source of information.
In some industries, spreading misinformation attracts heavy penalties. Your outdated content could become a source of false information, so it’s wiser to keep your content updated and be on the right side of the law.
3. Drop in Search Engine Rankings
Fresh content is a necessity for a high search engine ranking, and regular content audits help you maintain that. First of all, updating your existing content is an easy way to fulfill the search’s engine demand for new content.
Second, you need search engine optimization to attract the target audience. However, placing keywords at the time of content creation is not enough. Over a time period, market trends change, and so do the most searched keyphrases. You must identify and incorporate new keywords in order to draw more traffic.
Third, the rules of the SEO game change with time. Once or twice a year, Google introduces major changes to its search engine algorithm. For instance, the BERT update in 2019 had a major impact on how the search engine interprets longer search phrases. A content audit will help you modify your content to keep pace with these changes.
There are some additional and not-so-obvious benefits of digging into the content goldmine that’s already present on your website. Let’s talk about them.
Updating Your Content- How it Helps?
Deciding new topics to write about is quite time-consuming. If you are tired of constantly wearing the thinking cap, make things easier by repurposing the old content. Even when you have to add new content, you will be aware of the ground you have already covered, and you can avoid spending on repetitive content.
Creating brand new content requires good research and writing skills; it’s an expertise that costs you money. Many businesses want to reduce spending due to the impact of the pandemic. If you have already paid a hefty amount to content creators for their services, why not get more value from that money by using the content for a longer time?
Your old blogs might link to other webpages that no longer exist. It’s a bit annoying for a reader to click on a broken link and reach nowhere, but you can prevent this by keeping your content updated.
You were a novice when you first launched your blog, and you had a limited budget. Now when you go back to your old posts and read them, you squirm at the evident grammatical errors. You can improve the quality of your old posts by updating them and removing errors- grammatical or otherwise.
Before you make changes to the existing content, it’s important to go for audit check-ups to assess the health of your website. There are three types of audits which are useful for websites.
Types of Audits
SEO audit– It focuses on the search performance of the content. It evaluates factors that affect the search engine ranking of the website.
Content audit– It aims to improve overall content quality and focuses on parameters like the accuracy of the information, formatting, CTA usage, etc. in addition to SEO factors.
Performance audit– It looks into the performance data of the content and facilitates strategic decision-making for content creation process.
It’s important to rope in an expert to do a content audit to identify the effective changes that you could make to your content. Even slight modifications like updating the keywords boosts your search engine ranking significantly, when done correctly.
So consider adding a content audit to the to-do list of your content plan, and reap more benefits by overhauling your existing content.
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