As more competition in every niche continues to emerge, ensuring that your content is up to par is crucial in maintaining an audience and generating traffic. Search engines increasingly analyze every piece of content on websites, using this information to determine just how authoritative and trustworthy each website is in the aggregate. While some websites may have excellent content, virtually no website is without some proverbial weak links.

Content audits are an excellent way of discovering just how effective your content is at attracting visitors and generating the kinds of interactions you desire. This week, we’ll be looking at the benefits and features of content audits, starting with why they are such a good idea for brands.

Identify Weak Points

Setting aside the direct SEO implications that come with auditing your content, one key benefit is discovering exactly which types of content perform best on your website. When assessing the performance of each page and post, you’ll likely find patterns and behaviors from your audience that suggest clear preferences for specific types of content. With this information in hand, producing better content going forward becomes much easier. You’ll be able to avoid pinging servers with content that – while may require effort – doesn’t live up to expectations.

Additionally, discovering which pages and posts are performing the worst can give you an opportunity to improve or outright eliminate these weak points in your content portfolio, thereby improving your overall SEO profile.

Organize and Improve Navigation

For websites and blogs that have been live for some time, the accumulation of content becomes inevitable. For visitors, navigating through hundreds or even thousands of pages and posts can be frustrating – especially if they are seeking information on specific topics or ideas. Content pruning isn’t a bad idea when the content in question isn’t performing well or has clear flaws. Content audits can help you discover which items should be altered or removed, which presents an opportunity to thin out your offerings and streamline overall navigation and search quality.

Rank Better

There are hundreds of factors that search engines use to analyze your broader website and determine exactly where it should rank in various SERPs. While a few low-performing posts and pages isn’t a death sentence, content audits can and often do discover numerous examples of inferior content that could be harming your performance in search results. Whether this is thin content, duplicate content or otherwise good content that was optimized for a different set of algorithms from the past, discovering these examples and being able to act accordingly will ensure you’re not pinging servers with inferior signals. Ultimately, you’ll have the choice of either improving this content or removing it altogether, thereby improving your overall SEO profile.

Content audits may be time-consuming and challenging, but they produce many benefits and rewards for those who utilize them. By identifying weak sources of content, you can improve your overall look and feel, eliminate potentially damaging content and inevitably rank better in the SERPs you choose to target. With this information in hand, you can now decide how to proceed regarding this common tactic.