In this case study you’ll learn how a content audit contributed in 3 months to:
- Increase quotes by $1.148.811 when compared to the previous 3 months
- Generate 117 quotes from organic google search
- Drive an additional 3.169 organic sessions a month
How we Increased Quotes by 50.9% and Organic Users 39% in 3 months by removing 45% of a website’s content
- We identified pages worth keeping , pages that needed improvement and pages that should be removed
- Created a plan to improve the content worth updating and a plan to redirect or delete the content worth removing
- Delivered specific instructions for the marketing team on how to improve the content worth improving on their site
- Delivered specific instructions for the developers on how to redirect or remove the content from the website
- Monitored results to make sure everything went according to plan.
What’s a SEO Content Audit?
A SEO Content Audit is the process of evaluating the existing pages and content of a website from an SEO perspective to determine which pages are bringing value and which pages are limiting or negatively affecting the website’s performance in google search.
The result is a list of pages to keep, a list of pages to improve and a list of pages to remove, as well as instructions on how to do each of those tasks.
Ok, so back to our case study
The Client
Our client is an established Australian Manufacturer that’s been in business for over 7 years. Working across all verticals, their B2B company had approximately 3.5M revenue the previous financial year.
The Results
During the 3 months after implementing the findings of our SEO Content Audit we drove an additional 3169 sessions (34.6% increase) compared to the previous 3 months
Looking at Google Search Console we can see how impressions and clicks increased compared to the otherwise stable performance across the last 12 months.
Most importantly, click improvements were seen across the board, meaning both money pages and informational pages experienced the rewards
The Audit
After assessing the website we concluded 71 pages weren’t bringing in any SEO, UX or business value.
In fact we realised they were acting as an anchor to this website’s growth and they had been for many years.
Precautions taken
Because our client’s website had only 155 pages, we took extra precautions before handing in our recommendations.
Because we were planning to remove 45% of the content of a small website, we took precautions and worked with the client to publish a dozen of new long form articles before removing those pages.
The idea behind this was to somewhat preserve the word count of the website and compensate for the massive loss of content.
This process normally isn’t necessary for big websites, and may have not been necessary for this one (we’ll never know), but we saw this as a win-win situation where the new content should benefit the client in the future beyond the role it played for this content audit.
Key Takeaways
- Content audits are usually overlooked for small websites, but when done right they can work just as well as they do for bigger websites.
- Taking extra precautions is a good idea when removing content from small websites
- The impact of improved organic performance in google search can be massive, even for a well established business who’s been in business for many years.
- To date, our client’s website has experienced a positive response from the two verified Google Updates (including a core update) since the audit was implemented.
