In B2B marketers’ never-ending quest to boost their websites’ rankings, attract leads, and earn conversions, a number of different tactics have been discovered.
Everything from keyword optimization, link-building, and schema markups have been revealed as powerful techniques for earning Google’s affection.
Yet, many B2B marketers shy away from – or don’t even know about – one of the most powerful methods available for improving SEO. In fact, withoutrunning a content audit, your site could continue suffering no matter what you do.
3 Ways to Execute a Content Audit Quickly
The idea behind a content audit is simple: you need to audityour content to find out what has to go.
After spending so much time and money on creating your B2B company’s content, why would you ever want to go back and start permanently deleting some of it?
Simple: it appears to help boost your rankings.
That’s because, if your B2B company is like most, you’ve probably posted a lot of content to your site over the years. Looking back, not all of that content probably hit the mark, either. You most likely have a number of webpages that have never even been visited. You have blog posts that didn’t gain any traction on social media or receive comments.
According to Google’s own analysis, “having many low-value-add URLs can negatively affect a site’s crawling and indexing.”
In other words, unpopular pages are hurting your chances with Google.
Here’s how to change that – fast – with a content audit.
1. Find Your “Bad” Posts
The first step of your content audit is to check your analytics to see which blog posts have done absolutely nothing for you. In other words, which ones haven’t brought in any organic traffic or social media views?
If they’re older than a year, we’re considering them “bad” posts.
Anything that hasproduced results – no matter how little – can stay for now.
Go a little easier on your webpages. If they’re service/product pages that may improve conversions once you finish your content audit and start seeing more traffic, consider leaving them in place by now.
2. Decide Which Posts Can Be Improved
This will most likely take a while, but the next step is to look through those bad posts and decide which should be permanently deleted and which have the potential to be improved.
Some will probably be completely outdated. For example, if your blog post was about predictions for the coming year and it didn’t get any attention, delete it. There’s no point to trying to revamp that one. If you wrote a blog about a product, service, or methodology that’s no longer available, that can go, as well.
On the other hand, if you realize that some of your content was a bit thin, but you think the topic was a good one, you’ve found opportunities for improvement. Simply adding to the word-count of a post can often do a lot for increasing its rankings. Could some of your posts use new subsections?
Linking out to external sources can go a long way toward improving your content’s rankings, as well. Look for opportunities to cite sources to high-authority sites.
Speaking of which, you want to go through everylink on everypage of your site to check and make sure it’s not leading to a dead end. Sending your visitors to “error 404” pages because of broken links will hurt your chances with Google.
Fortunately, platforms like Screaming Frog will make this mucheasier and quicker to do.
3. Check Your Conversion Funnels
A good content audit shouldn’t just be about increasing your traffic, either. Now would be a great time to look through your various conversion funnels, as well.
Are parts of your funnel dropping the ball? Maybe it’s at the very top simply because it’s not bringing in any traffic. Maybe the middle of your funnel is leaking because prospects aren’t getting the information they need.
Whatever the case, look for opportunities to improve your results. It might mean adding more content or even taking some of it away. You could find that entire pages need to be replaced to fix the problem.
A Content Audit + Hushly = More Conversions
After a single content audit, you shouldsee improved traffic. It’s not like eliminating pages that weren’t helping could ever hurt.
However, make content audits something you do twice a year, and you’ll keep seeing your results improve.
For even better results, let Hushly help. Our platform works with the content you already have – the good content, anyway – to increase conversions by at least 51% – guarantee. Contact us today to see how.
