Search traffic was and remains the cheapest source of attracting customers to a website. At the same time, the research & development of search engines and increasing competition in any market segment leads to the fact that even the most promoted and optimized websites eventually begin to lose traffic. Therefore, constant website monitoring, site traffic analysis, along with its source segregation, is required.
Due to the introduction of new algorithms, search engines often overestimate the quality of web resources, which means that even the most high-ranked web sources in SERPs may begin to lose their positions. In this case, it’s recommended to conduct a website content audit, this works both for young and long-time resources, which tend to decline in traffic from search engines.
If customers don’t visit your website that often anymore, don’t place their orders, or unsubscribe, it’s time to pay attention to your website’s content. Most likely, the problem lies in its poor quality, which has to be improved to attract more traffic. Quality web pages contribute to higher ranking in SERPs.
To address these issues, don’t rush to rewrite all your texts. Instead, consider using an accessibility checker to ensure your website is easily navigable and user-friendly for all visitors.
Don’t rush to rewrite all your texts. Read on to find out valuable information, tips, and subtleties of checking your website’s content using a remote team in 2021.
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Table of Contents
What is a Remote Website Content Audit
A remote audit is identical to a traditional on-site audit, but the auditor interacts with you online. This audit option can still cover reviewing documents and records, interviewing employees, going around buildings and facilities, and presenting results using a number of technology platforms, including:
- Web streaming technologies like Webex, Zoom, MS Teams, GotoWebinar;
- Live streaming video-chat programs and apps in smartphones or tablets (e.g., WhatsApp, Skype, Vibe, Cisco WebEx, Jami, Talky, WeChat, or Facetime);
- VR/AR glasses, and mixed solutions like Xperteye, Microsoft HoloLens 2, Magic Leap One, etc.
A professional remote team should select a basic audit technology that is compatible with your requirements and test its functionality prior to the audit.
Remote website content audit benefits
- Keeping the previously approved audit schedule;
- Flexible approach – a remote team agrees and selects the necessary technology that suits your business;
- Simplified interaction with a global network of experts;
- Involvement of your remote team members, regardless of their location;
- Acquiring new auditing skills and using modern technology.
Remote Website Content Audit Tasks
As mentioned above, the ability to perform a remote audit allows you to execute your audit program in a way that suits you and at a time that is convenient for you. Through the use of immersive, full- or partial-presence technology, expert teams, and qualified auditors will assess your compliance with the standard, engaging your team members throughout the process regardless of their locations.
You can incorporate remote auditing into your current audit programs and take advantage of a flexible, consistent approach that allows you to engage teams from different locations in the most effective way.
You’ll be able to assess the marketing effectiveness of resource content. A competent content evaluation provides the owner with an analysis of the current situation, including information about the pros and cons of information foundations.
A website text audit will help solve the following issues:
- Determine reasons for search engine sanctions and indicate methods to eliminate them;
- Find web pages that can be merged, redesigned, or deleted;
- Evaluate the effectiveness of filling the resource in the context of its inner pages, develop a content strategy;
- Find new opportunities for development.
The website check also allows you to create a real map of keywords to lead online users to your resource. You will have the opportunity to optimize specific site metrics and the business project as a whole.
Options for Conducting a Remote Audit
There are two basic approaches to conducting a remote website audit:
1) The auditor performs the audit from a remote location.
2) The auditor conducts a remote audit of your production site while staying with you on another production site. This audit may include negotiations, meetings, documentation and record reviews, and monitoring processes and activities with your team. Remote work monitoring ensures that the audit is thorough and comprehensive, allowing for a detailed evaluation of your operations and processes.
Regardless of the approach, and given the individual requirements for each audit, different dev teams use different technologies to provide a full audit with full or partial immersion in production processes. This provides the most efficient and safe ways to obtain/collect data and build invaluable expertise.
Audit Stages
More often than not, a text audit is a compilation and examination of a large spreadsheet that contains Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) with scores. However, solely automated methods are not able to provide high ranks for your resource in SERPs.
Thus, let’s move away from automated audits with special services and talk about human attention.
Effective auditing is to evaluate the most representative part of the resource content and user interaction with it. After all, in the end, it’s visitors that matter the most. The main stages of the audit include quantity, quality of content, web-analytics, and others to be discussed below.
Remote audits can be used at almost any stage of the certification process (although this is individual for each case/standard) and include three main steps.
Step 1. Planning
Once you’ve hired a team of remote workers, Your chosen audit team should find the right audit approach that works best for you, collaborating with you from the outset. You discuss the implementation of the proposed approach with the team, considering your specific requirements and technology infrastructure to ensure efficient work. Once you approve the chosen approach, set the audit date, and the lead auditor should start the detailed audit planning process.
Thus, the planning phase includes agreeing on the technology to be used, along with audit methods and the final audit plan confirmation.
Step 2. Conducting a remote audit
The success of a remote audit depends largely on the stability of your Internet connection, which should ensure good voice and video communication between you and the auditor. This is also important for supporting documentation and information collection via interviews, documentation and record reviews (via live-streaming), and monitoring production processes and employee performance.
Amidst these crucial steps, the integration of reliable time tracking software becomes paramount. Time tracking software enhances the precision and efficiency of data collection, offering real-time insights into employee activities. This digital tool not only facilitates seamless communication between you and the auditor but also contributes to a more comprehensive evaluation of operations.
All data obtained gets reviewed and is then used to support audit conclusions and recommendations – the only difference is that it will be done using remote methods.
Step 3. Drafting the report
In addition to the information contained in the standard on-site audit report, remote audit reports will also include detailed information about the remote audit methods used, in order to confirm the effectiveness of the audit and the achievement of its objectives.
Web Analytics
This step provides information about who is using the resource and how. You need to order a content audit to consider the following indicators:
- Page adaptability. How good your website looks on a smartphone and other mobile devices? Is it 100% adapted and convenient to use? What CA percentage uses smartphones to visit your website’s pages?;
- Visitor commitment. This indicator allows you to understand the interaction of users with the resource;
- Most popular/visited web pages of your website;
- Search phrases (e.g. paid keywords will provide more traffic).
Website Content Quantity and Structure
Speaking of quantity, it’s quite difficult to determine the right balance between visitor needs and search engine requirements. You don’t want to overburden your guests with large amounts of information. However, if there is too little text, the search engine may consider your website irrelevant. In terms of SEO text audit, the optimal number of words on a web page is about 250.
As for structure, look at the site through the eyes of the user. What is the first thing he sees? Home page, blog, services, products – determine which type is most important. If the resource is advertising, it should not dominate the text. Search engines are punished for this.
Remote Website SEO Audit and Content Quality
This stage is the most subjective. After all, your and your visitor’s understanding of the quality of your website’s content can be fundamentally different. Therefore, if we are talking about a selling resource, you should pay attention to the quality of set tasks. Namely, how efficient your product/service descriptions are, how fast your site visitors can find what they need, etc.
The intelligent call to action is essential, as well. You have to remember that a web page is not a book – people take a quick glance at it, highlight what they need, so use subheadings, lists to facilitate reading and a proper web design.
Apart from having an intuitive website interface and efficient descriptions to help your visitors navigate through your site it is also important to be visible to users when they search for the product or service you are offering. That is why you should clearly understand your level of search visibility, how to analyze and measure it, and focus on the actual score impact of your efforts.
How Often Should You Conduct a Website Content Audit
Unfortunately, a website content audit is not a one-time procedure, especially for large resources that are constantly filled with new material. An audit can be classified as routine work that needs to be done. You should conduct a website content audit in the following situations:
- After a certain period, e.g. three months, for actively filled projects and once every six months to a year for sites that publish or update materials infrequently;
- When traffic “subsidence” is detected for no apparent reason;
- When you launch new search algorithms;
- When you need to increase the efficiency of the resource.
No matter how well the website’s content was optimized at the launch of the site, over time, the resource may lose credibility because of it for a variety of reasons.
All errors and omissions can be roughly divided into two large categories:
- Technical errors in layout, markup, and settings.
- Problems with content, including, as an objective, its quality, which can be evaluated using various online services, and subjective, consisting of its logic aspect, presentation style, and customer utility.
Website Content Audit in DIY Style
When SEO experts perform a website audit, a lot of criteria are assessed, and their discrepancy, sooner or later, can lead to a loss of traffic and, consequently, low website positioning in SERPs.
For effective website operation, you will need to perform market analysis, SEO-audit, usability audit, technical analysis, and content selling properties analytics. A comprehensive content audit may include dozens of tasks but the following are some of the most important:
- Check server response codes, correct redirect settings, and page load speed;
- Check for broken links;
- Eliminate duplicate pages;
- Check for complete meta tags of pages, their relevance, and uniqueness;
- Adjust the robots.txt file properly;
- Check your website’s Sitemap;
- Analyze responsive design quality;
- Check spelling errors;
- Check the uniqueness of the text content;
- Check pages that dropped out of the index;
- Set and fix pages flagged as poor quality;
- Evaluate traffic flow to your pages;
- Elaborate commercial pages;
- Structure the blog section and make proper linking from informational articles to commercial pages.
The list of the key stages can go on and on but for now, let’s focus on the tools you will need for work automation.
Website Audit Software Tools to Use
When conducting a website audit, you can find a great number of free and paid software solutions. Today, we shall focus on the main ones, which are simply indispensable for proper content auditing.
Google Search Console. These website analytics tools will provide plenty of information that will help assess the quality of your web pages, find gaps, duplicates, and broken links, check usability on mobile devices, increase indexed pages, connect, view, and check your sitemap and a robots.txt file, detect Google sanctions in relation to the website. As for alternatives, you can also use Yoast, Moz Pro, SpyFu, Serpstat, SE Ranking, Act-On, Ahrefs, Semrush, Siteimprove.
Content parsers that download the content of your website with all its meta tags and allow you to quickly identify duplicates and blanks in descriptions. To perform parsing and subsequent analysis of the website, we can recommend free Google apps, WebFX, Dareboost, Web.dev, and old but still kicking Xenu.
The following paid parsers may help even better:
- Screaming Frog;
- Netpeak Spider;
- Webhose.io;
- SEOptimer;
- Dyno Mapper;
- Site Analyzer;
- Dexi.io;
- Scrapinghub;
- Parsehub.
To check your page load speed, you can try the following services:
Now, in order to check your website’s content uniqueness, the following services and software solutions will help you conduct deep, page-by-page analysis, as well as process the entire website. These authoritative services are as follows:
You can also visit Online-Spellcheck.com or use Small SEO Tools to proofread your texts.
This is by no means a complete list of tools that can be used for website content auditing. Therefore, if you are inexperienced with them, and your website loses traffic and profits, you need to find and fix the problem faster, i.e. by contacting a specialized online service.
Conclusion
As we can see, a website content audit is a voluminous and difficult process for someone who does not have the necessary experience in this area. However, you can always try the DIY style, if you have enough free time and a desire to learn the technology. Otherwise, the project is already losing traffic, it’s much more reasonable to address professionals. They will quickly audit the content and provide detailed recommendations on how to improve the situation with your website, or, otherwise, offer another option for profitable cooperation.
