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By Blair Kelly Outreach

6 Step Guide to Conducting a Blog Audit for Financial Advisors

12 minute read
6 Step Guide to Conducting a Blog Audit for Financial Advisors Featured Image

You’re approaching the mid-year point, where you’ve already accomplished a lot, but still have a long way to go. While it has been a very eventful 2020 already, to say the least, we are all working in this together to try and emerge stronger. As we are “socially distancing”, people are turning to the internet and their digital marketing, even more, to connect with others. So, it’s important to boost your online presence and digital marketing content.

Creating strong blog content is even more important at the moment, as blogs can provide useful information to clients looking for an answer to boosting your website’s overall rankings, so it’s important to do an audit and make sure everything is performing as well as it should. Our six-step guide will be helpful in doing this.

1. Create a List

First things first, you will want to compile all of your blog posts into a spreadsheet and include all of the URLs. Depending on how long you have been blogging, you will have a lot of content to pore through, so a list is a must. In addition to the name and links, include a column to show the date and a bit of information about what you have changed up about the blog.

2. Look at your Analytics

There are two main metrics we recommend noting when you are performing your blog audit, and those are:

Sessions:

Use Google Analytics in order to determine how many sessions each blog post has had over the past six months or even longer. So, what is a session? It is simply a group of interactions that a user takes within a given time frame on your website. Something to keep in mind is that Google Analytics defaults that time frame to 30 minutes, so whatever a user does on your website, such as read a blog, watch a video, check out services or products, whatever it may be, that equals one session.  before they leave equals one session.

Google Analytics session

In this case, since it’s about conducting your blog audit, then you can check out the individual blog posts and see their session times with the average session duration, how many pages per session, etc.

Google analytics

Backlinks:

Additionally, check the backlinks that each of your posts has. Depending on the amount of content that you have on your site, this can take quite a lot of time, but the effort is well worth it. So, why should you track your backlinks? Well, if you have blog posts without any backlinks, then you aren’t going to be generating traffic to other parts of your website. you should be revising this and linking more, therefore boosting your website’s SEO.

3. Identify Blogs with “Thin Content”

What do we mean when we say to identify the blogs with thin content? It refers to content that offers little to no value to the reader. If your blog posts just don’t provide a lot or just are lacking in content, link to low-quality pages or don’t provide strong content that helps your readers, then that is considered thin content. We get it though, it can be hard to produce a lot of strong blog content when you are already extremely busy, however, that doesn’t mean you should be creating a lot of content without much variation, as that could be considered duplicate content, and that can lower your rankings.

Another thing to keep in mind is to avoid “keyword stuffing.” when you are creating your content. It may seem like a way to fill your blog with relevant keywords and that it can boost your rankings, but in reality, it can actually hurt your content.  So, when creating content, create blog posts that will answer the questions of your visitors, cater to your niche and remember that quality is better than quantity.

Trace Wealth Advisors

In the above image, in the light of the Coronavirus pandemic, Trace Wealth Advisors has included a blog entitled “Wash Your Hands,” where they briefly touch on that necessity then go on to include how to best go about navigating the current market situation. It’s a blog that many people will be interested in especially as this seems to be the only topic on the news as of late. So, provide relevant, useful and meaningful content to your blog and if you find ones on your site with “thin content,” then be sure to go in and add more information, backlinks and content to boost your rankings.

4. Update your Outdated Content

Make sure you are checking your blogs for grammatical errors, typos and just make sure that everything in your blog is accurate.  For example, if you are sharing data points, links to other resources, or anything like that, make sure that the information shared is still accurate and up-to-date and that all of the links work. If someone clicks on a link on your blog and it takes them to a 404 page, that doesn’t look very good at all and needs to be changed as quickly as possible. Additionally, make sure you are paying attention to what is happening in the world around you, and updating content to make it stay relevant. This is especially important in the midst of what is happening in the world currently.

5. Add 301 Redirects

As briefly touched on above, don’t forget to redirect posts removed from the site in order to avoid 404 errors. They are not only negative from a user-experience perspective,  but search bots like Google will penalize you for these types of website errors. They happen when a page is deleted from a site and the server, but links still exist to the page. One way to get started on fixing a 404 error is to implement 301 redirects on your page.

A 301 redirect signals that a page has been “moved permanently,” so when you are setting up these types of redirects, they are ideal for SEO. Setting these up are key to maintaining any domain authority your website has already achieved, which is a top-ranking factor for search engines like Google. Most of the time, setting up a 301 redirect is the best method for instituting redirects on a website.

Luckily, this can easily be done on the Twenty Over Ten platform, just follow the steps below.

Log into your Twenty Over Ten account.

Step 1:
Access your “site settings” from your sidebar(bottom).

Setting up 301 redirects

Step 2:
Open the “Advanced” panel.

Setting up a 301 redirect

Step 3:
Click the 301 Redirects button.

set up a 301 redirect

Step 4:
Begin entering your 301 Redirects into the overlay. In the From section, add the URL of the page that you want to be redirected. This may be the URL for a page that no longer exists, for example. In the To section, enter the destination that you would like the user to be redirected to. Click the “Add” button to add the redirect to your Redirects list below.

Note: Do not enter your full domain URL in the From or To sections. For example, if you want to redirect the page www.twentyoverten.com/oldURL to www.twentyoverten.com/newURL/subpage, your 301 Redirect would look like this:

301 redirect

If you want the user to be redirected straight to your domain’s home page, enter a / in the To section. For example:

6. Repeat

It’s important to remember that this isn’t a one-time thing. You should be performing these blog audits on a regular basis, either annually or bi-annually in order to keep your content relevant. As you create newer blog posts, check where you could link these posts to other blogs where it is relevant. Constantly check the news and pay attention to the market and what is trending, as this is another thing that you add to your blog posts. Just make sure you re repeating these steps and your content will be in great shape!

Wrapping It Up

We hope that this helps you to better perform audits on your blog pages regularly. You put a lot of time and effort into creating blog posts for your readers, so don’t you want to make sure that you can get the most out of your content and provide your readers with useful information that will help them out, as well? If you follow these six simple steps, then your blog posts are sure to be a big part of your advisor website and will really boost your SEO rankings.

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About the author

Blair Kelly

Blair is a digital marketing assistant at Twenty Over Ten and has a passion for uncovering what drives online traffic and the highest engagement. She follows more animals on Instagram than humans and her greatest achievement is her daughter, Grey.

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