Is your company website meeting all your goals? Is it providing search engine visibility? Furnishing you with leads? Providing useful information for potential clients and customers, ensuring they are well-educated when they pick up the phone to call you? Is your business website enhancing your company’s online reputation?
Hopefully, the answer to all of these questions is yes—but it is still smart to ask these questions periodically, making sure you’re focused on maintaining a strong content strategy. Just asking the questions isn’t enough; you also need to go through your website to perform a content audit, making sure all the key website components are in place.
What’s a Content Audit?
The concept of a website content audit isn’t something that the Grammar Chic, Inc. team made up, though we do provide website content audits for our clients. Wikipedia has an entry on website content audits, and it defines the process as “an accounting of all currently published Web content,” also calling it a “cornerstone of content strategy.”
The Wikipedia entry lists some fairly technical things you can do to evaluate your business website, including some SEO checks and the use of a content inventory sheet. We’ll add that, for those who really want to get intense about content auditing, you might call up your Google Analytics and try to track down which pages of your site get the most traffic and have the most desirable bounce rates, all of which can clue you in to which pages need the most work.
Qualitative Content Analysis
Even for business owners who aren’t quite so SEO-savvy, though, there are some quick strategies you can implement to make sure your on-page content is up to snuff.
– Check to make sure that every page of your website has a strong call to action. We’ve written about the importance of this elsewhere.
– Also ensure that you have your company contact information on every page of your site. This makes it easier for customers and prospects to reach out to you, no matter which section of your site they are browsing. Additionally, Google looks at info like your phone number and address to sort your company by geography, making sure it shows up in local search queries.
– Make sure that every page of the site has a strong, compelling SEO title. (This is the title that will be displayed at the top of your Internet browser.) If the title is cut off, then it’s too long; shorten it to make sure the entire message gets out.
– What are some of the keywords you’re trying to hit with your website content? Make sure your keywords show up on every page, but also that you’re not shoehorning too many of them in unnaturally.
– Do you have pictures? A picture of your CEO of your team, placed on your About Us page or elsewhere, can go a long way toward personalizing and humanizing your site.
– Is the navigation logical? Are there any broken links, or sections of the site that are not easily reached? These are issues you’ll want to fix!
– How is the length of your text? Are longer pages broken up with bullet points and subheadings?
Performing a content audit is vitally important, but it will also take some time: You need to go through every page of the site, and be truly rigorous in your scrutiny! To find out more about website content auditing, contact Grammar Chic today. Visit www.grammarchic.net or call 803-831-7444.
The Red Ink 