Content Audits for Improving Website Structure

Your website's structure—its information architecture—is the foundation of its user experience and its SEO performance. A logical, intuitive structure makes it easy for users and search engines to find your content. A disorganized, chaotic structure can lead to user frustration and poor search visibility.

Over time, as you add more and more content to your site, it's easy for this structure to become messy. A content audit is a powerful tool for taking a step back, analyzing what you have, and making strategic decisions to improve your website's overall architecture.

How a Content Audit Can Improve Your Site Structure

A content audit is the process of creating an inventory of all your website's content and analyzing its performance. In the context of site structure, the goal of the audit is to:

• Identify all of your existing content assets.
• Group related content together into logical categories.
• Identify opportunities to create a more hierarchical and organized structure, often using the "topic cluster" model.

The Content Audit Process for Site Structure

Step 1: Create a Content Inventory

The first step is to get a complete list of every single page on your website.

• How to do it: The easiest way is to use a website crawler tool. You can crawl your site and export a list of all your URLs into a spreadsheet.
• What to include: Your spreadsheet should have a column for the URL and the page title of every page.

Step 2: Gather Key Performance Data

For each URL, you should pull in some basic performance data to understand how valuable the page is. This should include:

• Organic Traffic: (from Google Analytics)
• Backlinks: (from Google Search Console or another backlink checker tool)

Step 3: Categorize Every Piece of Content

This is the most important step for improving your structure. Go through your spreadsheet and assign a primary topic or category to every single piece of content.

• Be consistent with your categories. You are trying to group your content into logical "silos." For example, for a marketing agency, your main categories might be "SEO," "Content Marketing," "Social Media," etc.
• This process will help you to see how your existing content is distributed across your main topics. You might find that you have 20 blog posts about SEO but only two about social media.

Step 4: Identify Your "Pillar" and "Cluster" Content

Now, you can use this categorized list to start planning your topic cluster architecture.

• Identify Your Pillar Topics: Look at your categories. These will become the core "pillar" topics for your new site structure.
• Identify Your Cluster Content: The individual blog posts and pages within each category will become your "cluster" content that supports each pillar.
• Identify Gaps: This process will also reveal the gaps in your content. Do you have a pillar topic with very little supporting cluster content? This tells you what you need to create next.

Step 5: Plan Your New and Improved Site Structure

Based on your analysis, you can now map out your new, improved site architecture.

• For each topic cluster, you will have:
  • One main pillar page (this might be an existing, high-level page, or you may need to create a new one).
  • Multiple cluster pages (your existing blog posts).
• Plan Your Internal Linking: The final step is to plan the internal linking structure. Your pillar page should link out to all its cluster pages, and every cluster page should link back up to the pillar page.

Step 6: Implement the Changes

This is the execution phase.

• Create or update your pillar pages.
• Go through your cluster content and add the internal links.
• If you are changing any URLs, be sure to implement 301 redirects from the old URLs to the new ones to preserve your SEO value.

Conclusion

A content audit is not just about finding and deleting old content; it's a powerful strategic tool for improving the fundamental architecture of your website. By systematically taking inventory of your content and organizing it into logical topic clusters, you can create a more intuitive user experience and send powerful signals to search engines that your website is a true authority on your core topics.