Is it time for an audit of your website?

No matter how good the content is on your website when it goes live, your work there is never done. Changes in services and staff all need to be reflected on the site. Your site also needs to evolve as your competition changes, and it needs to stay current with the best practices for search engine optimization (SEO).

Keeping up with all of this is possible, but even the best health care marketing teams benefit from an outside perspective on their website content now and then.

That's where a health care content audit comes in.

How a content audit can help your website

A content audit's scope and deliverables should be customized to your organization's needs. But here are four questions any audit can answer:

What's on your website right now? Content can build up on your site over time—especially if you have a large organization and multiple people have access to your content management system (CMS). On a large website, there might not be any one person who is aware of all the content that exists.

An audit can help create an inventory of pages and provide you with a source of truth.

How does your content perform? An audit will help you understand where people are going on your website, how they get to the content and what they do once they're on a page. As part of this, an audit will often look at search engine performance and how well you rank for different keywords.

What can you do to improve? This is one of the most valuable deliverables from an audit—and sometimes the findings are surprising. For example, an audit might reveal that a high-traffic page that ranks well in search isn't actually bringing in prospective patients from your community. The recommendation for improving that page might involve repositioning the content to target local search terms. As a result, traffic may go down, but conversions may go up.

An audit might also reveal that a page that gets very little traffic is actually performing as well as it can, considering the level of community interest in the topic.

These are things that just a surface level look at the data doesn't always reveal.

What should your priorities be? The data and analysis provided by a content audit should allow you to create a road map forward and establish priorities based on the opportunities available and your organization's goals.

Set yourself up for success

If you're considering an audit for your website, these tips can help you get the most value possible from the project:

Consider outsourcing. Audits can take considerable time and resources. Hiring a vendor with experience doing audits can not only provide you with a valuable outside perspective, it can also allow your marketing team to stay focused on other priorities.

Set goals in advance. Knowing what you want the audit to achieve will help shape the approach and scope of the project.

Be realistic about your resources. Often, a full website audit is the right choice. But audits can be smaller in scope too. This can be helpful if your budget is small and you need to save resources to implement the audit's findings. In that case, it might make more sense to audit a few key service lines rather than your entire site.