A website content audit will improve your sales

There are many reasons to do a website content audit but by far the most important is to make sure the dollars you spend on content development are really improving your business. 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 blind.

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 meta data

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 that are digesting and what they are skipping over.

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 when we develop 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 needs of the target audiences? 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 do the qualitative audit in FileMaker, a database program. After importing the raw data from the quantitative phase 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 give you a quality and effectiveness snapshot of the website. 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.