Content Audit and Content Editing: Optimizing Texts and Website Structure
If you want to improve the rankings of your pages in search engines, you should start by having your content revised and optimized.
Quality content is essential for a webpage to rank. This is the main factor that determines how much time visitors spend on your website and how many of return.
As a first step in the redesign process, it is therefore recommended to revise the content first, and have the graphic design created for the revised and updated site and page structure.
Optimization of page copies
- proofreading (eliminating spelling mistakes, typos, word repetitions, etc.),
- optimization of the wording (making the text easy to read, eliminating redundancies, making sure it is relevant throughout, ensuring a logical structure—all while preserving the message and the author's individual style),
- optimal structuring of the text (so as to make it easier to skim through and understand the text, with descriptive headings added at the right places and at the right level),
- pointing out parts of the text that could be expanded (where and how you should add information to make the content more useful or understandable to a wider audience).
Optimization of website structure
- filtering out redundant or irrelevant pages, and pages with little information (thin content),
- suggestions for adding pages (category pages, sub-pages) that significantly improve the structure,
- merging pages with little content and thus are less efficient in themselves into a more robust new page, or incorporating their content into other, relevant pages,
- making two (or more) separate pages from content that can be found on a single page but would be more effective on separate pages,
- moving parts of page copy that are not or less relevant in its original location to pages where it is truly relevant,
- making the internal link structure more user and search engine friendly,
- suggesting ways to optimize the navigation (main menu, secondary menu, footer menu).
It is best to hire external help to do the content revision.
Why?
Because it is difficult to read your own writing through the eyes of visitors and see as much opportunities to improve it as an unbiased reader.
The same is true for structure: it is often very difficult for the content writer to step back from the site enough to see the opportunities to improve the linking structure (to make the link structure map the conceptual hierarchy), or even to discover missing pillars of the structure.
We do the revision work in a separate document, not on the live website.