As a private school marketer, you are creating a significant amount of content, which is excellent, but the question becomes, how effective is your content? Do you track each page or blog post? Do you develop or use a content plan or editorial calendar? Do you make adjustments based on your metrics?
Your content may be of high quality, but that doesn’t mean it’s the type of content your readers want to see.
The majority of private schools have content flaws. Either the content isn’t performing as well as it should, or the topics and keywords aren’t performing either.
Poorly performing website and blog content represent an opportunity to improve. The trick is understanding what content is lacking and what to write about instead. In this post, I will show you how to conduct a content audit for your private school website.
What is a Content Audit?
A content audit will help you keep track of your content and provide an in-depth analysis of each piece of content’s impact on your target audience (parents and students). A content audit also reveals how to improve weak content, such as which pages to update for higher conversion rates.
The content auditing process helps you collect and analyze your content assets, such as your private school’s web pages, blog posts, landing pages, and geographical pages. A full content audit will generate a content inventory and guide you on how to improve each asset, such as:
- What new content do you need
- What existing content needs updating
- What current content needs re-writing
- What existing content requires deleting
Benefits of a Content Audit
A content audit can improve your visitor experience while also helping increase traffic to your website. It will also help you determine:
- Which pages on your site are not optimized to improve your site’s search engine ranking
- Which posts need specific SEO enhancements
- Which posts that aren’t complying with the latest SEO techniques and guidelines
- What content topics will elevate your blog/website
- Ways to improve reader comprehension
- Outdated content
- Site navigation
- Which errors need to be corrected
How to Conduct a Private School Website Content Audit in 5 Easy Steps
Here are the five steps to conducting a content audit for your school’s marketing.
Step 1: Generate a List of Your Content
The first thing you need to do is take inventory of your current content assets. You need to compile a list of your site URLs and arrange them in a list format (preferably a spreadsheet or Google Sheet). You can do this manually if your site does not have many pages. However, if you have a larger site, you will need to use an app such as Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider Tool.
For sites with up to 500 links, Screaming Frog is free. If your site is larger than that, you should consider purchasing the premium version, which is well worth the money.
After downloading the software, enter your URL in the tool’s top bar. When you’re finished with your search, change the filter to HTML and export the results.
Delete any rows that have a non-indexable URL (Status Code 200).
If you find there are a large number of rows without URLs, you can use another option, such as a sitemap generator. However, if you do have this problem, it means you don’t have a good internal linking structure, and you need to address it as well.
Now you can generate, or you will have a list of your URLs, which you can put in a spreadsheet.
Step 2: Measure and Categorize Content
Now that you have an inventory of what content you have, it’s time to determine how well it’s performing.
Here is a list of metrics to consider tracking. Start by creating a column in your spreadsheet for each of them. You can also include any additional metrics that you want to consider.
Collect These From Screaming Frog
- Title
- Length of Title: Titles should be between 55-60 characters long to show up on Google, as this can affect your click-through rate (CTR). Note - If you are using Google Sheets, you can set up a conditional statement to help determine a go/no go for the length.
- Meta-description: If your traffic seems low, consider re-writing your meta description or summary of the page to attract more clicks. This should be about 160 characters long.
Google Analytics
- Average Organic Search Traffic Per Month: Go to Behavior, then select your page. Add a secondary dimension of “source.”
- Average Overall Traffic Per Month: Select a time period of 3-12 months. Go to Behavior, then select your page and calculate the average.
- Bounce Rate of Organic Search Traffic: Go to Behavior, choose your page, add a secondary source dimension, and look at the Bounce Rate metric beside the Google row.
- Average time on page of organic search traffic: Use the same report as above but look for the average time on page.
Self-Determination/Other Sources
- Category: What category did you assign this post, or should it be under?
- Focus Keyword(s): What was the keyword for this page? Note - You don’t don’t have to have one for all of your pages. Also, you can use SpyFu.com to help determine your keywords.
- Focus Keyword(s) Ranking
- Search Volume for Focus Keywords: This will allow you to prioritize your SEO efforts in the future better. You should get this from Google Keyword Planner or another keyword research tool.
- The Number of Backlinks: To get the number of backlinks to each page, use a tool such as Moz, Majestic, Ahrefs, or SEMRush and do this in bulk.
- The Number of Linking Root Domains: When you get the number of backlinks, you should be able to tell whether your backlink numbers are inflated (i.e., 10,000 backlinks from one domain).
- URL Rank: tools such as Moz, SpyFu, Ahrefs, or SEMRush all have different metrics to judge the overall quality of your school’s links. You will need to generate a report to get a rough idea of your page’s authority.
- Total Social Shares: Sharetally will help you collect these by the social network.
Step 3: Identify Future Content Topic Ideas
Keyword research and competitor analysis are the most effective methods for identifying potential topic ideas. A tool like SEMrush is commonly used to conduct competitor analysis.
I recommend creating a new spreadsheet to track content topic ideas, keywords, and search volume (use Google’s Keyword Planner to find these).
Step 4: Conduct a Gap Analysis
A gap analysis identifies content that is either missing or underperforming.
What you need to do is compare your current content list to your list of topic ideas.
Start by looking for:
- Matching or similar content
- Missing content (i.e., you have a gap)
- The amount of traffic your content is receiving
- High or low search ranking
- Potential search traffic
Step 5: Create a New Content Strategy
The final step in the content audit process is to develop a new content strategy based on the data you’ve gathered and analyzed.
Assign an Action Label
First, you need to create a new column in your spreadsheet. This is typically at the beginning of the sheet, and you will use it to record an action label based on your evaluation of your content.
Here are five potential action labels:
- Keep: this is the content you want to keep because it performs well.
- New: this is the content you will need to create and should be added to your blog.
- Merge: sometimes, similar content must be merged to create a better version.
- Improve: if you have underperforming or content that needs an update
- Delete: sometimes, if you have been at it a while, your content becomes irrelevant. In this case, you can and should remove it. Note: I don’t recommend removing any evergreen content unless you have thousands of blog posts or pages.
Priorities
The next step is to determine your priorities.
To accomplish this, you need to establish criteria to determine which gaps are the most significant and need to be dealt with first. Based on the metrics you gathered, such as the potential for SEO traffic, search volume, and so on, you will assign a priority from 1 to 10.
Add another column in your spreadsheet (next to your action label) and assign a priority number to it. Then look at your resources, tasks, and content marketing goals so that you can start filling in the gaps by priority.
Conclusion
Now that you’ve learned how to conduct a content audit, keep assessing your content by regularly performing a follow-up content audit (I suggest annually).
When done correctly, a content audit is a lot of work that leads to even more work in the form of taking action on your results. However, it is a highly effective method of consistently improving your ranking on the search engine results pages, which will help you gain more prospective families and new students.
If you need help performing a content audit for your private school, reach out to me today. I am here to help you and your school grow!
