Travel Industry Case Study:

How a Content Audit Helped Travel Leaders Improve its Web Experience

Overview

As part of ongoing efforts to improve its user experience, a team at Travel Leaders wanted to find opportunities to improve the content of one of its core web properties. This property was attracting millions of visitors per year and was a critical source of leads and revenue for the business.

Marketade conducted a qualitative and quantitative content audit of the website. The audit consisted of 3 stages:

• Inventory: cataloging all relevant pages, their URLs, and selected metadata in a spreadsheet.
• Analytics: exporting key performance and traffic data for each page from Google Analytics and incorporating it into the spreadsheet for easy comparison.
• Assessment: evaluating core pages on a quality scale of 1 to 4, checking for 3rd party copy, and commenting on the current state of the content.

The Inventory

We audited over 70 pages. Our first deliverable was a content inventory spreadsheet that listed the above components for each of the 70+ pages.

Specifically, the inventory included the 14 attributes for each page, broken out as follows

Core Page Data

• ID
• Site Section
• URL
• Meta Title Tag
• H1

Google Analytics Data

• Unique Pageviews
• Entrances
• Bounce Rate
• Exit Rate
• Page Value
• Time on Page

Qualitative Assessment

• Content Uniqueness
• Content Quality Rating
• Notes

For the Quality Rating, we scored each page on a scale of 1 to 4, defined as follows:

• 4 = Effective; needs no more than a few minor rewrites or light reformatting
• 3 = Adequate; readability and/or usefulness would benefit from rewrites and/or editing
• 2 = Inadequate; requires significant rewrites to address issues of tone, readability, usefulness, or grammar
• 1 = Poor; requires heavy rewrites to fix multiple problems

The Report

Our second deliverable was a summary report. This report provided an overview of key findings from the audit, including a summary of the quality scoring:

• 3 pages received a score of 4 (effective).
• 10 pages received a score of 3 (adequate).
• 30 pages received a score of 2 (inadequate).
• 28 pages received a score of 1 (poor).

We shared the 6 highest-priority recommendations from the audit. These recommendations covered elements such as:

• Writing more detailed titles and headings
• Adding copy to present customer benefits
• Creating template copy that explains why certain products are featured
• Adding information to help users differentiate among products
• Reorganizing the content on pages

Finally, we shared findings and recommendations for the 10 most important pages that we reviewed. Each of these pages had between 4 and 8 findings.

We presented our top findings and recommendations to the Travel Leaders team; after this, we sent them the summary report and inventory spreadsheet.

In the months that followed, the content team used our audit as a guide and implemented most of our recommendations.

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