Auditing the Digital Content of a Leading Pro-Life Organization
How does a pro-life organization navigate the online landscape in order to elevate awareness?
They ask their trusted communications partner to do a full digital audit.
The background
Abortion has continued to be a hot-button topic in the United States for decades. With varying abortion laws throughout the world, it is essential for pro-life brands to optimize their digital communications channels, including search, website and social to help cut through all the noise. Seeing this opportunity, Guardian was tapped by a leading pro-life organization, Save the Storks, to conduct an audit of their website, and recommend technical and content optimizations. These recommendations will serve to increase the brand’s accessibility via search and enhance each consumer interaction with the brand through populating relevant, tailored content throughout the digital communications journey.
The process
One of the key factors in organic search performance is overall site health, which is a score based on the number of errors and warnings, or lack thereof, found on a website. The higher the score (the fewer problems), the better your website is optimized for search engines and user experience.
Guardian began the audit and optimization process by analyzing this organization’s site health. With a current score of 64%, their website was below the industry average (90%), indicating that there was a great opportunity to improve the technical quality of the site, in addition to the search and content strategy.
We created a detailed report of five significant risk categories—toxic backlinks, duplicate title tags, duplicate meta descriptions, internal broken links and internal broken images. In addition to providing warnings and identifying errors affecting the website’s site health, the report included detailed instructions on how to address each. By correcting these errors promptly, the website’s search performance will be positively impacted, moving the site health score into the average or above average range.
auditing the digital landscape
Our next step for Save the Storks was to complete a digital content audit—an assessment of all digital content on the organization’s website with the purpose of powering a long-term search engine optimization (SEO) and digital content strategy. The audit helps articulate, through data, the story an organization is telling on their website. Are they using the right keywords and enabling search engines to see their website as a valuable resource on topics that matter to the brand? Is the organization focusing on content that aligns with its core mission and vision? Is the website optimized to provide the best possible user experience?
To complete the digital content audit for this organization, our team crawled 2,000-plus pages of the website and reviewed 770-plus pages of content, primarily from the blog and resource section. We assessed the content on each page, as well as the page’s performance in Google Analytics, organic search rankings, readability and social media engagement. We also categorized each page of content in one of 18 topical categories to gain a better understanding of the current content priorities, in addition to content gaps and opportunities to expand the brand’s footprint. Through this lens, our team recommended that the organization archive 506 pages and optimize 221 pages to create a more streamlined, purposeful content experience on the site.
In addition to optimizing existing content, we leveraged organic search analytics to identify opportunities for new content topics—strengthening all content through the lens of the four primary categories of user search intent: informational, navigational, transactional and investigational.
The results
Our work served to establish an important baseline, filled with measurable data and a roadmap that will inform a thoughtful digital content strategy and SEO plan moving forward. Armed with this information, Save the Storks can more effectively focus on key content areas with strategic search emphasis, increasing the likelihood of intercepting key audiences in moments of intent. Leveraging a solid digital content strategy will maximize the resources of the team and lead the brand to strengthen and extend their reach and awareness, ultimately helping more women and families.