When it comes to driving traffic to your website, you don’t need to invest all your effort in making new content.
There might be existing content on your website that can help you get more traffic for your business.
All you have to do is find those articles and optimize them
Last year, we got an inquiry from a brand that is a ‘B2B Communication Platform’. They wanted to get more traffic to their website. Their main concern was their growth stagnated even though they published a good amount of content.
As a Content Marketing Agency, this was our expertise.
Instead of helping them produce more content, we did a content audit on their website and improved some of their old pieces.
Guess what? Our strategy resulted in 10k+ new monthly visitors within 10 weeks, as some of their old articles started ranking on Google.
If you want to see such traffic spikes on your website and grow your online business. Then, please book a call with us
What is a Content Audit?
A content audit is like a cleanup for your website. Where you will closely examine all the content on your site, including the pages and blog posts, to see which pieces of content are performing and which aren’t.
From an SEO standpoint, content audit needs to done regularly. The sweet spot is once every quarter or 6 months.
Our biggest reason for doing content audits is to:
- Look for underperforming content and optimize it to achieve new gains.
- Find content that is hurting your SEO and remove those pieces.
There are other factors to consider during a content audit but they depend on each website and the metrics a business is focused on.
Before doing a content audit, I recommend setting a goal first. This could be improving website traffic, increasing leads, or better conversions. Then, focus on the right metrics based on your goals, like page views, bounce rate, and session time.
When our client came to us, their main concern was traffic. They wanted one thing: more traffic with less effort to reduce the load on their team and make their existing content count.
How We Did The Content Audit
Content audits are challenging in SEO because you’re trying to analyze each page for its keyword and you require multiple tools to do it. It can be a daunting task too, if you’re dealing with a website with a ton of content.
All struggling websites with lots of content and low rankings must do regular content audits.
In this article, we will avoid using industry jargon like Content Inventory, Status Code, Content Catalog, or Category Hierarchy.
As we started the project, our primary task was to find underperforming articles to work on. Here’s how we did it:
1) Took Their Top 10 Ranking Pages That Were Generating Traffic
We use two tools in most content audits: Google Search Console and Ahrefs. We found a way to maximize the best features on these two platforms.
First, we sorted the top 10 ranking articles from our client’s website using both tools. Then, we made a list of those URLs and listed competitors for every keyword.
We analyzed the top 5 competitor articles to find optimization angles we can use. These include Meta Title and Meta description optimizations, Content Keyword Optimization, and any SEO-related stuff, like building backlinks.
After spending hours on competitors’ pages, we almost gave up, but when we looked at our client’s other existing content.
We found that our client had duplicate content on their website and 404 pages hindering their search rankings and we did some 301 redirects of 404 pages to improve page rankings. (I’ll get into more detail on how and why we did this below.)
2) Took Content That Was Ranking Between 10–40
After sorting out the opportunities for top-ranking pages, we looked for the underperforming articles, which we call ‘Low Hanging Pages’.
Identifying potential low-hanging blog posts is our forte. Using tools like Ahrefs, we analyze blog posts ranked between positions 10 and 40 on Google Search for their primary keyword.
We went after these posts because Google seems to have picked up this content and likes it, but not enough to make it rank in the top 10.
Then, we went through our checklist to sort out potential content that might make it into the Top 10. A little work on these articles with optimization and backlinks meant they’re more likely to rank higher.
This is also the audit strategy we used to get 200k+ monthly visitors for one of our clients. Usually we use it for clients with lots of content that needs to be ranked on Google.
What We Did After The Content Audit To Optimize
Once we had the two sets of articles — one that was ‘Top Ranking Pages’ of the website and one that was ‘Low Hanging Pages’ of the website — we used tools like SurferSEO, RankMath, and AI tools like Claude to optimize these two sets of content.
1) Removing 404 pages and merging duplicate content pages
As we found that some of the top-ranking content on our client’s website wasn’t ranking? This was because of duplicate content, which means there were multiple articles written for same searches and neither articles could reach the top position because of the duplication.
Our client had multiple articles targeting the same keywords. For instance, one of their blog posts talked about ‘What is Cultural Communication?’ and the other one was ‘How To Improve Cultural Communication’.
We combined both pieces of content to make sure the website didn’t have duplicate page issues. We used AI tools like Claude AI to create a comprehensive outline for a smoother reading experience.
After merging duplicate blog posts, we took a list of 404 pages on the client’s website and redirected them to either an updated or relevant page using the RankMath SEO plugin.
Merging duplicate content alone helped our client’s articles reach the Top 3 rankings for dozens of keywords. This raised their single blog post traffic from 8k to 12k monthly visits within 10 weeks of our content audit.
2) Content Optimization For The Low Hanging Pages
After optimizing the top-ranking pages of our client’s website, it was time to optimize the low-hanging pages.
Using tools like Ahrefs and SurferSEO, we optimized these low-hanging pages with the following steps:
- Finding relevant secondary keywords using Ahrefs.
- Analyzing the content score on SurferSEO for each article.
- Optimizing the articles using SurferSEO suggestions. We did this by editing or rewriting the content until it got a content score of at least 70.
- Adding internal links for better site structure.
- Updating meta titles and meta descriptions for the articles.
- Updating the images along with the content if needed. Then, with all the website’s blog content updated, we submitted the new sitemap to Google Search Console.
We found 20+ low-hanging pages during this optimization spree, and it took us 2 weeks to optimize them.
Seven of the 20 articles that were optimized were ranked in the top 5 search results. In total, these articles added 7k+ visitors to our client’s website.
Our continent audit, in total, resulted in an additional 10k+ website visitors for this client.
Wrap Up
Further down the line, we ran digital PR campaigns for our client. This was after they got an additional 10k+ monthly visitors. Those campaigns grew their business even more.
We see a lot of websites needing help to get traffic despite their best efforts to publish content for months, if not years. Such businesses and brands should focus on regular content audits to see what’s working and not working on their website.
This article aims to spread awareness about content audits — a topic not discussed enough in real detail.
We hope you gained enough insights to do content audits to increase traffic and grow your business.
If you want to see such results for your website and grow your online business
Please feel free to book a call with us to grow and scale your business