What Does a Content Audit from Green Ivy Creative Look Like?
A website content audit is super-helpful when it comes to identifying pain points and potential for growth. It’s a good idea to have your site audited annually (at least) to ensure that it’s functioning well for you and your users. When we take a deep look into your website, we’ll look for content gaps, technical red flags, and anything else that may be slowing down your site or otherwise potentially holding it back from performing at its best.
Identify What’s Going Well
The word “audit” might make you a little nervous. You may think we’re going to come in, take a look at your website, point out all the problems, blame you, and walk away. That’s not the case! Yes, we will be pointing out problem areas, but when we do, we’ll also offer realistic solutions. So be prepared to hear some possibly hard truths, but don’t be afraid we’ll leave you high and dry with nowhere to turn. Plus, we always start an audit by pointing out the things that are working for your site because those factors are important. They also help give us a great spot from which to move forward when we think about possibly repurposing content that already exists.
Perform an SEO Structural Audit
A lot goes into search engine optimization (SEO) and therefore, a lot goes into our SEO structural audits. This is essentially a mini-audit within our overall audit (because we love to be thorough). Here, we’ll investigate your page titles and meta descriptions, plus your heading and URL structure. All of these impact your overall SEO performance.
Explore Accessibility
Tons of factors can affect the accessibility of your site. We keep our audits largely to inspecting the following:
Image Alt Text
Alternative text (alt text) describes photos clearly and concisely so that search engines and screen readers (devices used by people who are visually impaired to visit websites) can understand what’s in the photos.
Linked Text
Whenever text is linked on a website, it should accurately describe where a user will be taken if they click the link. This is also helpful when it comes to screen reading devices because it lets visitors know what to anticipate.
Keyboard Accessibility
A website shouldn’t have any “keyboard traps,” meaning that a user should be able to tab through each link on the pages of the site in case they aren’t able to use a mouse.
Color Contrast
It’s important that your website meets the color contrast standards set by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). In short, visitors should be able to clearly read the content on your website and identify links.
Investigate the Technical Content Performance
The larger the website, the bigger this section of your audit will be (and the longer it will take to perform), but it’s worth it. We’ll look at the average content length on each page and search for duplicate content. This can help us think about whether pages could be rearranged, edited, or even removed for a smoother user experience.
Do Some Keyword Research
In a perfect world, we’d be running your digital marketing campaign and keeping up with your keywords (what’s ranking well, which terms to focus on, etc.). For now, we’ll focus on the keywords garnering the highest click-through rate (CTR) and those with high impressions but no clicks. This helps form a content strategy in the future.
Run a Site Speed Test
Faster websites perform better overall. It’s that simple. Users will abandon a website if it’s not loading fast enough and Google may even penalize you by ranking your site lower than similarly optimized sites that load faster. We’ll look into factors that may be contributing to a slower site speed and how to remedy them.
Evaluate Your Audience
Last, but certainly not least, we’ll take a look at your site traffic. Who’s visiting your website, how are they getting there, and how are they interacting with the site? Could users be getting lost on your site or frustrated on a certain page and leaving learning more? All of these questions and more are explored in the audit.
Schedule a Website Audit
There is, of course, much more to our audits than this, and depending on your needs, we’re happy to look into specific issues. The overall goal is to provide you with as much information as possible so you can make informed decisions about how and where to update your website. And yes, we can perform any or all of those updates as well, so contact us to schedule your website content audit today!