When your website looks fine and you’re still publishing new posts, hiring a digital marketing agency to do a website content audit probably isn’t high on your list. At Rocks Digital Marketing, we know firsthand that a closer look will often reveal that some pages published in the past may not be producing the same results today. Maybe traffic has fallen, your business has added or changed services, or a growing site is becoming harder to navigate.
Top 4 Reasons Your Website Needs a Content Audit
Don’t worry, you’re not alone in falling for the “my website doesn’t need an audit” trap. It happens to every business at some point, and even a digital marketing agency like Rocks Digital audits our own website regularly. Here are four signs that your business could benefit from a content audit.
1. Your Organic Search Performance Has Declined
Google Search Console is often the best place to find a content problem. A look at the data can show a noticeable drop in impressions or big swings in average search position. You should also check for a lower click-through rate on pages that used to perform well. When assessing the numbers, it’s important to look at everything together. For example, fewer impressions could be caused by changes in search demand instead of being a content issue.
The screenshot below shows data for four articles from an allergy doctor client of Rocks Digital. Comparing results for these articles from the past 90 days to the same 90 days for the previous year shows a decline in impressions. Of course, fewer impressions mean fewer chances to click. Using Google Search Console to perform a content audit of your website helps find the pages that need a content refresh.
2. Google Changes Its Rules or Guidance
Google updates its algorithms regularly, but most updates don’t call for a full content audit. An audit makes more sense when an update lines up with a drop in search performance, or makes you question what’s already on your site. Take Google’s guidance on generative AI content. Using AI to write isn’t against the rules, but AI-generated content should still be reviewed for accuracy, trustworthiness and value to readers. If you’ve used AI to write blog posts that no one carefully checked, those posts may contain errors you don’t know about. These errors may be unknowingly causing your website to lose trust with search engines, answer engines, and even consumers.
Many Google updates highlight the importance of developing content that provides value to readers. You may have also heard about Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines. Google uses human raters to check how well its search results are working, but their scores do not directly raise or lower individual pages in search. Even so, a content audit after a major update will show if existing content still provides accurate, useful information.
When you have a quality digital marketing agency providing you with ongoing SEO services, you are less likely to be impacted by these changes. For example, at Rocks Digital, all the content we write and put on a client’s website passes through writing, review, editing, post-edit review, upload, and QA after being published. These many layers help us reduce minor errors and keep our work to a high standard.
3. Your Website No Longer Supports Your Business Services
While businesses inevitably change, their websites don’t always keep up. Over the years you may have added services, entered new markets, added new locations, or focused on a different customer base. However, this becomes a problem when the business website hasn’t been updated to reflect the changes. Your home page may still have older priorities in the most visible places, and the service pages could be promoting outdated information.
Any confusion in a potential customer’s journey could get in the way of a sale. This could be as simple as a blog post that promotes an old service, or a priority service page with limited content and no call to action. If your website has not kept pace with your business, a content audit can absolutely be of service to you.
Having old, outdated services on a business’ website can occur as time passes, so don’t be alarmed. When you sunset a product or service, remember that you need to audit your website, Google Business Profile, social media presence and the other online places where you have promoted the service. You do not necessarily have to delete every mention, though at a minimum you’ll want to add a notice that it has been sunsetted. And if you have a digital marketing agency, it’s extremely important to specify when you no longer offer or sell a specific service. Unless these changes are made, a non-existent service will continue to be promoted through social media, blog posts, etc.
We have several clients that come to mind here. Each had stopped offering a service, but did not update their website accordingly. One example is a client that once offered power washing services, and still had multiple old service pages and blog posts promoting it. Before the content audit, the company continued to receive inquiries and rankings for a service they hadn’t offered in several years.
Another example is a client with blog posts on their website promoting junk car removal, yet they had never offered this service. Their old digital marketing agency wrote multiple blog posts on the topic because it had a high search volume. And as could be expected, this brought the client lots of impressions and clicks to read about a service they could not deliver, as they never provided it in the first place. Not only did this increase their bounce rate, it unfortunately created unhappy potential customers.
4. Your Website Has Overlapping or Disorganized Content
Websites tend to get more complicated as new pages, blog posts and resources are published. And when the business doesn’t have a content strategy, site plan and content map, the website can quickly lose focus. Here are some signs to watch out for.
- Several pages repeat the same information.
- Different pages target the same searches or serve the same purpose.
- Visitors cannot easily tell which page has the answer they need.
- Blog posts are disconnected from the main services.
- Some pages have no clear purpose or place on the site.
When you notice these signs, it’s often worth pausing or slowing down new content publishing until you can understand what’s working, and where changes are needed. A content audit can show whether your pages still fit together the way they should.
At Rocks Digital, creating a site map is one of the first things we do when we onboard a new ongoing SEO client. This site map is used for many purposes, which we won’t go into just now. However, as it relates to content, the site plan helps us map out and keep track of new content that needs to be published, existing content as it is updated, and along with the content planning calendar, the timing on when we’re going to update something, audit, or write something new.
Do You Need a Content Audit for Your Business Website?
At Rocks Digital we help businesses make sense of their content and how well it’s working. Our website content audits find pages and content sections that are duplicated, outdated, missing valuable information, and just need to be updated (or refreshed, as we say). Call (214) 989-7549 or request a website evaluation.
