You must be super excited to publish new content for your audience. But it is only a part of what makes your WordPress website successful.
When you keep adding new articles to your collection, your older posts become less valuable for your audience, and they do not rank very high. It can be helpful if you use a WordPress content audit. But what is it actually?
A content audit is when you review your old posts and figure out what you need to update. If you need to improve the content or remove any information, you can then do it.
So when do you know that it’s time to audit your older posts? Focus on whether the organic traffic on your website is falling and if your readers are spending less time on your pages. There can be many reasons for it, but you can fix them with a content audit.
You can follow the guide below to refresh your WordPress content so that your readers are always satisfied.
Start by Understanding What Your Existing Content is Providing
Just because you have some older posts does not mean you have to immediately start editing all of them. You first need to know which of your pages need to be edited. This is because you will get better results if you make your decisions based on your website’s performance.
You can start by listing down all of your published posts. Then you should review how much traffic each of them is getting, which includes the number of people commenting and sharing your posts. You can study the search rankings and understand which posts are getting fewer visitors.
While reviewing, you should also see if your articles are still providing answers for your reader’s questions. If they do not provide any value, then you definitely need to edit them.
You can also use an AI checker to make sure that you are maintaining the tone that makes your readers connect to your content.
Your goals should be to identify the areas which you can edit to make your articles more valuable now than they were.
Review Your URLs and Site Structure Before Updating Anything
Now that you have figured out which articles you need to work on, your next step should be to check whether these posts are put in an organized manner on your website.
When your articles are organized under the right categories, your visitors will be able to find them easily and engage more with the posts.
You can use several ways to categorize them. For example, if you have three or four articles that you have written about your travel experience to different parts of the world, you can group them together so that your readers can easily browse from one to the other.
After that, check whether you have used SEO friendly URLs. Your URLs need to be clean and provide proper descriptions so that your content is easier to understand. However, do not make the URLs too long, and you can also skip numbers because that is not really important.
While you are at it, check whether your readers are being properly redirected to your other articles through internal links.
Refresh Outdated Information Instead of Writing Everything Again
While doing a content audit, you might think you need to rewrite your articles that are not performing well. However, if you look at it from your readers’ point of view, most of your posts have a strong base, and you just need to update some of the information.
What you can do is start by checking whether you have included any statistics, as they tend to get outdated fast. Next, try to find any recommendations or products you might have mentioned that people cannot find in the market anymore.
This is because even if your readers find your content helpful, they will lose confidence in your overall advice if they cannot use the products you recommended.
Also, you should check any charts and images you have used which people will not find relatable anymore.
You might think auditing your content is difficult but it can be very easy if you focus on the details that your readers notice the most.
Keep Your Audience for Longer by Improving Readability
Think about a person who is trying to install a software on their computer and they have come looking for help on your website. Now you have given them the most informative article on how to do it, but it is so difficult to read that your audience does not understand anything.
If this happens a lot, your readers will not engage with your posts anymore.
For your review, read each of your articles as if you are a visitor reading it for the first time. You should check whether the paragraphs feel too look and also if the ideas are flowing naturally from one part to the other.
To make it easier for your readers, you can go on and simplify any language you thought would be difficult for them to understand. Make your headings very clear and describe everything by breaking them down into details. Simultaneously, write a conclusion that can assure your readers.
You will not achieve your goal by using difficult language or complicated headings if your audience does not feel like you are helping them. If your content is helpful your readers will automatically stay for more.
Strengthen Your Internal Links So Every Article Supports Another
When you build a WordPress website, you will want your audience to spend more time browsing it. But if you redirect them to another website, then they might not come back to your page again.
The best thing you can do here is link your content to one another. Suppose you are writing a blog about healthy recipes. You can very casually leave a link to your old yogurt dressing recipe in one of the paragraphs that talks about using healthy sauce alternatives.
This way, even if your audience was not visiting the older post earlier, now they will be able to link it to another recipe and visit the page again. You can add more hyperlinks to increase engagement of the posts that are not performing so well anymore.
At the same time, you can check whether in your past articles you had included links that do not exist anymore. You can simply fix that by creating another post or linking to a different article that is also helpful.
Update Your Search Optimization but Do Not Forget Your Readers
As you do a content audit, you can take the opportunity to enhance the visibility of your older posts. You can use keywords that you did not use before and make your posts informative.
However, your primary goal is to make sure that your audience finds value in your articles.
This is because the search engines love when you can make content that answers the queries your audience has. So any improvement you make should be for your readers.
You can start by reviewing your page title and meta description because these things need to encourage your audience to read the rest of your article. If you think they sound too generic, then you can rewrite them so that your readers understand your content better.
After reading through the articles, think of the keywords you used before. Sometimes it might help if you use words that will fit in more naturally with the topic of your article. As you balance SEO with how much value you can give your readers, you have the winning shot.
Remove or Merge Content That You Think No Longer Adds Value
You do not need to keep every article you have ever written on your website. The library of your content will grow, and you will see that you have subconsciously written articles that are the exact same question your readers are asking.
So when you actually want to do a WordPress content audit, you need to go through your articles and see if they are similar. What you can then do is combine some smaller articles into a bigger post under one heading.
This way, you will not have to rewrite anything, but you would be using the content you have already written.
Other times you will find some articles you had previously written that just do not make any sense anymore. For example, you might have an article titled ‘How to Prepare Yourself for the Coldplay Concert in 2023.’ If you look carefully, it is 2026, and Coldplay are not on tour anymore.
Under these circumstances, it is just better for you to delete the post completely because it will be impossible to edit so much information, and besides, it will not be valuable to your readers anymore.
Final Thoughts
You need to constantly work hard to make your WordPress website successful. Yes, you can write new articles, but you also have to edit some of the older ones.
What will make your content audit better is to start with reviewing the articles you have. Once you find out what is making these posts underperform, you can then take steps to fix it. Sometimes you will need to update information, and sometimes you can just delete the whole thing.
Another smart move you can make is by including links of your older posts in your newer articles. That way, people will be able to click the hyperlinks and engage with the other articles.
What is most important is that you make the posts valuable for your readers. If you make the articles easier to read, they can keep coming back to your website.