Maeve Catherine

Think of your website as car being faced with road signs throughout your ride. Each road sign is a page on your website, each tell you different information that leads you to something related. Traffic moderators watch and analyze patterns on traffic cameras, just like content strategist do when they create a content analysis.

What is a Content Analysis?

A content analysis is the process of evaluating effectiveness of the qualitative and quantitative content on a platform. Qualitative aspects that are analyzed include the structure, format, and tone of content. Quantitative aspects include rankings, time users spend on pages, or sales.

There are different steps to creating a content analysis, which require content strategists to analyze each type of content. I, and many professionals, recommend starting with creating a content audit than conducting audience and competitive research.

Auditing for SEO

A content audit can be done simply with a search engine optimization (SEO) tools such as Screaming Frog SEO Spider and WAVE. Both of these tools with analyze your business’s website qualitative aspects. Screaming Frog software will help identify indexed URLs, metadata, and visual inputs. WAVE helps identify places to improve based on a website’s accessibility, specifically the length of image tags and contrast errors.

Learn more about Screaming Frog software:

Learn more about WAVE software:

Take a Look

To demonstrate, I conducted a content audit for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation website. The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation is a non-profit organization whose goal is to provide emotional, financial and physical support to those with Cystic Fibrosis. Cystic Fibrosis is a genetic disease that impacts the lungs, pancreas’ and other organs of close to 40,000 people in the U.S..

At first glance the website looks organized and easy to use but while using the Screaming Frog SEO analysis the components that make a website efficient can be improved.

Page Titles

• The site uses 145 page titles
  • The shortest and only page title under 30 characters on the website is currently labeled under title 1 as “Anxiety”.
    • This page title should be changed to match the layout of other page titles. The title should be “Anxiety | Cystic Fibrosis Foundation”.
  • The longest page title is 153 characters and is being automatically cut off as a google search.

Meta Descriptions

• The site has descriptions ranging from 0 to 575 characters.
  • 5.52% of the sites did not have a meta description.
  • 66.89% of sites descriptions are over 155 characters long.

Header Elements

• 71.72% of the sites web pages do not have main headers, known as H1.
• All 145 pages have duplicate H2 elements.

Accessibility

Efforts can be made to make the site more accessible for everyone. WAVE found reoccurring contrast issues between text and images against backgrounds.

Image Alternative Tags

• Majority of the images within the site are missing alternative text.
  • 15% of images were missing alt. text just on the first page.
• The Community Blog pages displays the best examples of alt. text.

Find my full content analysis report below: