When’s the last time you took a good look at your website content?

If you’re like me, you probably can’t remember. That’s okay, because you’ve now taken the first step in your content analysis: recognizing the need for one.

Content Analysis 101

So, what is a content analysis and why should you be doing them?

In her article, The Ultimate Guide to SEO Content Analysis, Jill Conway describes an SEO content analysis as “a process that look[s] at the amount of traffic and rankings your site’s content currently attracts from search engines, giving you a baseline to determine what content needs on-page SEO improvement, what topical content is missing and what truly outdated content should be removed and redirected” (2023). 

Performing regular analyses informs you of the improvements you should be making to your site’s content. In turn, you’re able to not only maintain high rankings on search engine results, but also keep your content valuable for users.

You’re most likely going to want to conduct a content audit. Meghan Casey, author of The Content Strategy Toolkit, recommends that you look for things you can evaluate objectively (p. 7). This could mean a few things:

• Who your content is for
• What the intended purpose of your content is
• If there are broken links
• If certain pages aren’t accessible through the navigation
• If content has the appropriate metadata for SEO
• How easy or difficult to understand key messages

Whatever you’re trying to figure out about your website, your main goal is to find the problems in your content that give you the opportunity to improve. Here’s how I recently went about a content audit for The Jimmy Fund, a Dana-Farber Cancer Institute fundraising organization:

Content Audit Tools

About The Jimmy Fund

The Jimmy Fund has been around since 1948 and works hand-in-hand with Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. Through all kinds of community events and major fundraisers, they help support Dana-Farber’s mission to provide top-tier care and advanced cancer research for both kids and adults.

Their website is a direct reflection of the positive work they do and it’s clear that much time and effort has gone into building their database. While the available content is accessible and appropriate, I found some room for improvement.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider

I first looked to Screaming Frog to perform an initial website crawl. This software populated results in seconds, giving me a comprehensive view of the current state of Jimmy Fund website content such as page titles, meta descriptions, headers, and alternative text. 

While this analysis reported effective use of certain content, it also revealed issues such as the character counts of page titles and meta descriptions. This gap provides us the space to revise for SEO optimization.

Jimmy Fund page title analysis derived from Screaming Frog

WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool

To support the Screaming Frog findings, I used WAVE to get more insights about the Jimmy Find website’s accessibility functions. In a similar manner, WAVE was able to quickly search the site for errors like missing alt text, failing contrast ratios, and other WCAG (web content accessibility guidelines) slips.

Here, I was able to note that the organization does a great job of utilizing alt text on images. However, this software exposed major contrast issues between text on background that were too similar in color. This accessibility issue is another chance for improvement.

Jimmy Fund website accessibility errors populated by WAVE

You can access my full report below for a more thorough list of findings and content recommendations.

Overall, I believe implementing these changes will enhance overall website usability, improve SEO, and help the Jimmy Fund reach a broader audience for increasing fundraising and easing the impact of cancer on people’s lives.

Try It Yourself!

If you’ve made it this far, you’re already on the right path to improving your website’s content and SEO. Taking the time to perform an audit might seem daunting at first, but with the right tools, you can uncover valuable insights that will help your site perform better, be more accessible, and deliver a better user experience.

So, why not give it a try?