How a Content Audit Reveals Whether Your Website is Hurting Sales

There are many reasons to conduct a website content audit, but the most important is this: to ensure the money you spend on content is actually supporting sales. For most businesses, this means supporting and growing sales.

A content audit allows you to map your website to your business goals. It will detail not just what you have on your site but also how each piece of content is performing.

When you know what really supports your sales efforts and resonates with your customers, you can work similar content elements into your ongoing content strategy. Without that knowledge, even the most talented writer is working in the dark.

Why poor-fit content quietly undermines sales

Developing content that is “wrong” for your business is costly, not just because good content takes time and resources to create, but also because you won’t reach the people you need to influence and engage.

The quantitative content audit

At The Red Stairs, we always begin content audits with a quantitative review. Our intent here is to create a site inventory.

• List of pages
• URLs
• Number of words per page or post
• Author and publication dates
• List of media such as PDFs, videos, forms, etc.
• SEO information such as keywords, alt tags and metadata

The quantitative audit gives us our first look at what is going on and where you are seeing the most activity.

It provides high-level information about where website visitors are spending time, the types of content and stories they are digesting, and what they are skipping.

The audit confirms whether your content is taking you in the desired direction. However, in our experience, quantitative audits often raise more questions than they answer.

• Why is one story so much more popular than the others?
• How can you be on the first page of Google results, get good website traffic and still have so few sales?
• Why does a highly trafficked story have such a high bounce rate?

The qualitative content audit

When you find yourself asking a lot of “why” questions, it is a sign that you need to take a deeper dive into the words and pictures that make up your website.

Our qualitative content audit provides a systematic approach to evaluating the words, pictures and other content elements. This process begins with developing a list of evaluation criteria.

We can read for just about anything. Is the content well presented for web readers? Is it relevant to the target audiences’ needs? Is there something about the content that is sabotaging your sales?

• Some typical qualitative queries include:
• What does your content say?
• Is the information correct and up-to-date?
• Are you using the right style and tone?
• Are there off-putting typos, grammar errors and other quality problems?
• Is it useful, valuable and interesting to the target reader?
• Is information easy to find or is the site difficult to navigate?

We conduct the qualitative audit using a structured review system that allows us to score and compare content consistently. After importing the raw quantitative data from an Excel spreadsheet, we create a review and scoring card that lists everything we want to check.

The results of the quantitative and qualitative reviews provide a snapshot of the website’s quality and effectiveness. It highlights what is working and what is not working. It reveals what content needs retiring, valuable sales insights about what really interests your readers and prospects, information gaps you are not addressing and more.

A content audit that evaluates content from a sales perspective can show not just content problems that need correcting but also reveal opportunities for you to bring your website into alignment with your sales goals.