Doing site audits and technical audits for sites regularly I was wondering if there was a blog audit? Because I was thinking there needs to be! Of course, there are blog posts about this and in particular, content audits. There is a blog post for everything out there. Before I started doing a search into what is already out there related to blog/content audits I started to think about it myself.
Why would a blog audit even be worthwhile?
There is so much content out there, knowing that the blog content that is being created is good, informative, valuable and useful content for some person out there but also visible to search engines. This can be tricky because with artificial intelligence tools helping with aspects of creating content now, a human still needs to go through it and make that decision as to whether it’s “good, informative, valuable and useful” or satisfies “EAT”, conveys expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, for some other human out there BUT also take into consideration that a search engine also recognizes the content as “good, informative, valuable and useful”.
Then I started to wonder, what would I want to include in a blog audit?
What type of post or structure of post is it?
- A listicle?
- Tutorial or how to posts
- Checklist
- Industry news
- Current events
- A case study
- An interview
- Product review
- Comparaison post (X vs Y)
- Resource post
- FAQ
- Glossary
- Roundups
- Recipe
- Rants
- Recycling of older content
- Guest post
- Quizzes
- Aspirational post
- Video tutorials
- Current events
- Infographics
- Humorous post
- Inspirational stories
The list of types of posts is huge! And it depends on the blogger/business what type of post(s) they prefer. You can find 40 Different Types Of Content You Can Create For Your Blog by the Blogging Wizard.
I think most businesses will have a blog as part of their site and create posts that related to their industry and their business that would fall under a business blog type. Then there are other blogs that are a business. In this case the entire site is made of “blog posts”. For example,
A personal blog
– someone just sharing their thoughts and doing it for themselves, at least that’s how it starts. Some bloggers even go to that point where the are doing it full time. But that isn’t very common. An example would be Cookie and Kate for vegetarian recipes. Bloggers Passion gives their list of the Top 12 Popular Personal Blogs to Follow in 2022 With Examples.
Personal Brand Blog
– A thought leader in a particular industry who are intentionally developing building themselves as a brand. For example, Bill Nye The Science Guy. Here are 18 effective personal branding examples done right from webflow.
Business Blog
– A blog that is part of a site that is mainly about a particular business. E.g.dog walking business. Here are 10 Amazing Large Company Blogs to inspire Your Content marketing by the Marketing Insider Group. The Points Guy is an example of this.
Affiliate blogs
– bloggers who sell goods and services. They may write product reviews, how to posts and product tutorials
Niche Blog
– there is a primary topic that is found throughout the posts. For example, health and fitness, personal finance are common niches that you can find blogs on. Here is a list of 7 common blogging niches.
What is the objective of the post/content?
An example would be to create a blog post with content that supports one of the services or products that is offered by the company. Of a blog post of why their products or services are among the best in the industry? In these cases it may be to try and drive more traffic to certain service or product pages. Or to get visitors to the site to convert into an inquiry whether it’s a phone call or email or text message.
How are we going to measure that objective?
That’s where having tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console and Google Tag Manager set up can help with measurements. We can measure how many times the post was clicked, how many impressions it got, the bounce rate from the page, it visitors visited other pages after visiting the blog post or vice versa, if a visitor converted in some way while on that page e.g. clicked an email button, or a phone number or “buy now” button.
Is it easy to find the blog?
If the blog post is new, it’s probably now ranking very high for search terms yet. When a visitor does make it to your side, is it easy to find the blogs? Is there internal linking from other pages on the site to relevant blog posts? Is the blog itself easy to find on the site. I believe this would fall under the user experience, UX, on the website as well as on the blog post itself. Here are 13 Great Tips to Improve Website User Experience from NinjaSites and site speed optimization is number 1! UsabilityGeek provide 5 Guidelines For Improving Your Blog’s User Experience. Font choice is number 1 on this list and of course I had to look up the best font choices for blog posts which returned more posts on fonts that I could have imagined! Roboto seems to be a favourite.
Then there’s all the SEO stuff to make the blog post visible to search engines.
SEO stuff to be considered when writing a blog post
I’m not sure of all the SEO things to consider but below is a short list that comes to mind:
Keywords: group of focus keywords to write the content around.
Headings: H1 – h6 headers depending on the content of the post
Title tag: for the webpage for the blog post
Meta description: for the webpage for the blog post
Slug: for the webpage
Linking: both internal and external linking from the post. I think a call to action would be included in as one of the links
Images: how many and size
Alt text: for the images
Page load speed: I think would tie into the images and their sizes as images seem to usually be a big factor in page speed.
I’m sure I’ve missed some aspects of SEO that have not been included but the above is a good start.
Summary
With any piece of content the goal is to convey the three components of “EAT”, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. This isn’t always easy but to also make the content, especially a blog post or webpage, visible to a search engine, can be challenging. An audit of the written content or blog post can’t hurt. The main areas I was thinking would be worth looking at when auditing a blog post would be:
Intended audience.
- Who is the intended audience for this post and what is their intent?
Post type.
- There is a long list of different post types above. Depending on the audience, their intent, the industry and many other factors, choosing the appropriate post type may make a huge difference.
Objective of the post.
- How is the objective being measured? Has the objective been met?
Visibility of the post.
- This would include the user experience once they’re on your site or on the post itself. Is it easy for the visitor to find your post and the information they are looking for? What SEO tactics are being used to increase the visibility of the post or webpage?
Lots to consider when writing a post and that doesn’t include the research and the actual writing!
References:
- 40 Different Types Of Content You Can Create For Your Blog, blogginwizard, Nicole Bleu, Last Updated, June 2022, URL: https://bloggingwizard.com/content-types/
- BEST FONTS FOR BLOGS: 20 FONTS THAT GRAB READERS’ ATTENTION, Niche Pursuits, Jessy Faraday, Last Updated April 2022, URL: https://www.nichepursuits.com/best-fonts-for-blogs/
- The Complete Blog SEO Checklist & Audit (2022 Update), Nomadic Software, Ben Rea, July 2022, URL: https://nomadicsoftware.com/blog/blog-seo/
- How Often Should You Perform a Content or Blog Audit in 2022?, Portent, Travis McKnight, Jan 2022, URL: https://www.portent.com/blog/author/tmcknight
- How to Run a content Audit (2022 Update), URL: https://neilpatel.com/blog/content-audit/
- How to do a content audit in 2022, URL: https://ahrefs.com/blog/content-audit/
- What is a Niche Blog?, URL: https://www.wise-geek.com/what-is-a-niche-blog.htm
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