.svg)
.svg)
Content marketing can help you achieve multiple business goals, from generating high-quality leads to enhancing your relationship with existing clients. As SEO best practices and audience preferences change, it’s important to understand how your content is performing.
Performing a thorough content audit will help you identify what’s working and what you can improve. Learn which content improves your search engine ranking to maximize discoverability. Flag content your most engaging content by analyzing time spent on page and click-through rates, and track which pieces are directly driving conversions. As you audit your site, make a list of pieces to keep, update, consolidate, and remove.
What is a Content Audit?
A content audit involves documenting all your content and analyzing how it contributes to your business goals. Doing regular content audits highlights your strengths and content gaps and informs your content strategy. Checking in on your website statistics regularly also helps you improve the user experience, as it shows you which topics and content formats resonate with your audience.
Full content audits can take time. A small business with 100 pages might take a month to review, while a large website could take up to four months. But when you've completed an audit, you'll walk away with a deeper appreciation for customer needs and a roadmap to creating more successful online content.
Why a Content Audit Matters for SEO
An SEO content audit keeps your site relevant by helping you understand which pages attract and engage customers and which you could optimize to perform better.
Tracking website metrics also helps you understand which keywords people are using to find you online. As you compare analytics results to your content, you can identify where you are accurately targeting users by their intent and where you need to refresh your content to meet customer needs. Researching trending keywords might even give you some new blog post ideas.
A website content audit also allows you to assess the overall user experience. Since you’re focused on the details, note where you’re missing page titles and other important elements. Slow page loading times and other technical issues can also impact your search engine rankings. UX fixes and improved website responsiveness can go a long way toward boosting your ranking in the SERPs.
1. Prepare the Audit: Set Your Goals and Gather Inventory
The start of a content audit can feel like staring at a messy house and not knowing where to begin. The sheer volume of content can be overwhelming. Start by setting clear, specific objectives. What do you want to achieve?
You may want to optimize your content to increase conversions on your website. Or you might be interested in becoming known as an authoritative subject matter expert in your field. Decide on goals that align with your overall marketing strategy and stay focused on tasks that help you meet them.
Next, create a website inventory. Sort your content into categories, such as blog, page, landing page, or case study. Enter the information into a database that includes:
- URLs
- Titles
- Type
- Publish and Update dates
Use a crawling tool to list all the URLs on your site. Then, you can export data from your content management system, Google Analytics, or Google Search Console for more detail.
2. Collect and Categorize Data
Once you’ve inventoried all your content, start collecting performance data. Use analytics tools to analyze each URL in your spreadsheet for:
- Traffic and Engagement: Unique organic visitors, bounce rates, time on site, scroll depth.
- SEO: Number of impressions, number of clicks, click-through-rate, average position, keywords, backlinks, cannibalization (multiple pages on your website competing for the same term), and index status.
- User Experience/Technical Issues: Core web vitals (loading speed, visual stability, interactivity), page speed, mobile readiness, errors, and internal link depth.
If you can find data on how a piece of content helped you complete a business goal, note it. Look for pieces that assisted with conversions and generated revenue. These common tools will give you valuable insights:
- Google Analytics: Displays audience engagement statistics, traffic sources, conversion rates, and other user behaviors.
- Google Search Console: Measures search traffic and performance and identifies technical issues that may be impacting your SEO.
- Screaming Frog or Sitebulb: Crawls your website to analyze on-page SEO, including meta data, duplicate content, word count, and readability.
- Ahrefs/SEMrush: Offers in-depth keyword analysis and backlink profiles.
- Page Speed Insights: Assesses how fast your pages load and identifies technical issues impacting performance.
- Hotjar or Clarity: Shows you how people interact with your website, including scroll maps, click maps, and other insights.
3. Analyze Performance
Cluster your content by topic or intent and funnel stage so you can easily compare content within categories. Comparing a blog post’s performance to a product page isn’t going to give you any useful insights.
Use Ahrehfs, SEMrush, or Screaming Frog to analyze the top search results for each keyword and compare your results to the SERP leaders. For each topic or intent and funnel stage, flag:
- Top Performers: Most successful, high-quality content.
- Quick Wins: Underperforming content you can easily improve with simple fixes, such as adding metadata or removing outdated statistics.
- Decaying Pages: Pages with steadily declining metrics.
- Thin/Duplicate Content: Content you could flesh out more or that already exists elsewhere on your site.
- Intent Mismatch: Content that ranks for different keywords than intended. Can signal that you need to update user personas.
Look through each cluster and compare it to your competitor analysis to identify content gaps. Note keywords and topics your competition is covering and identify any questions your customers are asking. Take note of any instances of particularly effective copywriting or other tools that are bumping up their ranking.
4. Create an Action Plan: Update, Consolidate, Redirect/Remove, or Scale
Performance data will help you decide what to do with your content. For pages that rank between 5 and 20, decaying content, misaligned intent, and gaps in E-E-A-T statistics, update your content.
If you have overlapping pages competing with one another, consolidate them into a single canonical pillar with redirects. Add canonical tags so Google and other search engines know which page to put in search results.
If a page is not getting traffic and backlinks or if it is obsolete, redirect or remove it. Use a 301-redirect code to reroute the URL to the most relevant piece of content. Use a 410 code to tell search engines that a page has been permanently removed. This code is best for irrelevant topics and pages that are beyond repair.
For any topic that is clearly performing well, expand sections, add an FAQ page, and add multimedia and links to scale the page for better SEO.
Once you’ve changed a page, check it through Google Search Console to make sure it still works correctly.
5. Execute the Action Plan
Make a scoring model to prioritize your action plan. Assess each page for impact, confidence, and effort.
Impact measures how you can expect the project to contribute to your goals. Confidence indicates how certain you are that making a change will have the desired impact. Ease indicates how easy it is to complete. Fix your quick wins first.
Create a page-level brief outlining target intent, keywords and entities, a content outline, internal links, schema, and calls to action. Include tasks for each page, including publishing blog posts or improving the metadata. For each project, assign an owner and create a service level agreement outlining expectations, deadlines, responsibilities, and performance metrics. Set a sprint schedule for each phase.
Templates, Tools, and Best Practices
Take advantage of templates, automation tools, and other resources to speed up your content audit. You can find plenty of audit templates, inventory sheets, URL decision matrix templates, content briefs, redirect maps, and KPI dashboards online to help support your content audit. These tools are especially important if this is your first content audit, as they'll help you understand what data to collect and how to analyze it for best results.
Automate parts of the auditing process to save time. Regularly schedule site crawls and set up alerts for decaying traffic. Create an annotation log for major updates and set reminders.
Then, make content updates part of your routine. Every month, do a light refresh check and make quick updates, and plan quarterly mini-audits to save time down the road. Schedule an annual full audit with a topic map review to keep your content fresh and your website relevant.
Unlock More Traffic and Engagement
A content audit is like a car tune-up: it gives you the chance to assess weaknesses and find potential issues before they start impacting your search engine results. And just like a car, your content needs regular maintenance to function at its best.
Yes, content audits are time-consuming, but they are a critical source of valuable insights about your customers and your business as a whole. By tracking how customer interests and behaviors are shifting over time, you can develop relevant, insightful content while planing future marketing efforts around high-performing topics. You also increase your authority by removing outdated and inaccurate information, which helps foster trust with your customers.
Need help writing or refreshing your content? Hire professional writers. Compose.ly can connect you with a network of professional writers with experience in your industry. Take advantage of our team and get high-quality, SEO optimized content that fills in your content gaps.
