Content continues to be the cornerstone of successful content marketing strategies. The importance of high-quality, relevant site content will continue to soar in 2024, and that’s why you need a content audit to ensure your content is performing well.
In this guide, we’ll discuss what a website content audit is, how to manage your content inventory, and how to optimize the content creation process.
Let’s start by first understanding what a content audit is.
- What is a Content Audit?
- Why is a Content Audit Important for Your SEO Strategy?
- How to do a Content Audit: Step-by-Step Guide
- Key Takeaway
- FAQs
What is a Content Audit?
A content audit is a complete evaluation of your website’s online content. It evaluates the content’s quality, relevance, and effectiveness. This process helps you assess the effectiveness of your content and better align it with user expectations and business goals.
By conducting a content audit, you can:
- Assess the content quality of your web pages
- Strengthen your SEO efforts
- Identify broken links and other linking problems
- Improve your metadata and alt tags
- Maintain a competitive edge
- Increase user engagement
This involves collecting and analyzing quantitative and qualitative data on various content pieces, such as:
- Blog posts
- Product pages
- Social media posts
Why is a Content Audit Important for Your SEO Strategy?
The ultimate goal of a content audit is identifying which content to keep, update, consolidate, or delete.
Here’s how it helps:
1. Relevance and Accuracy
Over time, content may become irrelevant or outdated. A content audit ensures that all published content is accurate and pertinent to your audience’s demands and the market’s state.
2. Strategic Alignment
Content must align with your company’s strategic goals and keywords. A content audit assesses whether each piece of content supports these goals and aligns with keyword research.
3. Performance Analysis for Search Engine Optimization
By examining metrics such as page views, bounce rates, and conversion rates, a content audit can reveal which pieces are performing well and which are not. This data is invaluable for refining your content strategy.
Moreover, SEO best practices for content audits change frequently. A content audit helps SEO experts ensure your content is optimized for search engines.
4. User Engagement
Content audits can reveal what types of content resonate most with your audience, allowing you to tailor future content to meet user preferences and boost engagement.
Info Box: Use an SEO audit tool like SEOBoost to run a complete SEO content audit of your content.
How to do a Content Audit: Step-by-Step Guide
Here’s how to set up your content audit for success.
1. Define Your Audit Goal
First things first, you need to define your goal.
A clear goal from the start is crucial because it will determine how you measure content performance and evaluate whether your efforts were successful after implementing any changes.
Here are some general goals you can keep for your content audit:
Improve SEO results: Check how your existing content performs in organic search (unpaid search engine results) and identify opportunities to increase rankings and organic traffic.
Increase engagement: Understand the current level of user engagement with your content and find ways to enhance it.
Improve conversion rates: Evaluate how well your content guides users toward conversion goals lead generation, purchases, or other desired actions – and optimize it accordingly.
While these general goals can help you set a direction for improvement, I’d also advise keeping specific goals. Your goal could be achieving an average ranking position of 3 across all content pieces and increasing organic traffic to more than 20,000 monthly visits.
Once you’re clear about your goal, you can tailor your content audit process accordingly and determine which metrics to focus on when benchmarking your current performance.
2. Compile a List of Relevant Content Pages
Next, collect a list of your site’s important content pages, including blog posts, white papers, and landing pages.
This is important because you don’t want to overlook any pages during the auditing process accidentally. If key pages are left out, you won’t get a complete picture of how your content is performing, which can lead to missed opportunities for optimization and improvement.
Collecting all the links manually is easy and wouldn’t be time-consuming if you have a small website. However, if your website has a lot of content, you can run a complete site audit using AIOSEO to identify areas for improvement.
Once you have that, you can use SEOBoost’s content audit feature for each page to identify the content gaps.
Let’s discuss this in more detail in the next section.
3. Measure Your Current Content Performance
Once you have a list of your pages, it’s time to evaluate each page’s performance and the content sections’ overall performance.
SEOBoost’s content SEO audit feature assesses your current content and campaigns by employing AI to analyze critical ranking metrics. Our advanced algorithms categorize your content into specific metrics and evaluate its performance across 25 key criteria. Based on this analysis, we provide actionable recommendations to enhance your on-page SEO score and content quality.
This comprehensive report identifies successful elements and areas for improvement, empowering you to make strategic adjustments that ensure your content remains relevant and aligned with industry best practices. By focusing on the most impactful changes, you can maximize the value generated by your content.
Input your content’s focus keyword and URL; our tool will analyze it thoroughly, presenting a detailed report outlining necessary improvements.
This will help you see where you currently stand so you can work toward your goal. If your goal is to improve SEO performance, you should focus on the following information:
Organic Traffic
Organic traffic is the amount of unpaid traffic your pages have received from search engines like Google. It’s one of the most important metrics for measuring SEO success because a high amount of organic traffic often translates to more conversions, such as form submissions and purchases.
You can use Google Analytics to determine how much organic traffic your content pages get.
To do so, log in to Google Analytics and choose the site you’re auditing. Go to “Reports” > “Business objectives” > “Generates leads” > Traffic acquisition.”
You can also set the date range from here to the last full month. To filter for a particular page, add a “Page path and screen class” filter and paste it into the URL slug.
Keyword Ranking
Next, you must check where your content pages rank for their target keyword.
Are they ranking in the top three results? Top 10? Or further down on the search engine results pages (SERPs)?
Finding this information is important because it allows you to assess your pages’ current performance to identify which ones need optimization.
You can use Semrush’s Position Tracking tool to get ranking data.
To do that, open the tool, enter your domain name, and click “Set up tracking.” You’ll see a setup window. Adjust your tracking preferences in the “Targeting” section by choosing a search engine, device, location, and language.
Then, click “Continue To Keywords.” Here, input the primary keywords associated with your pages. Then, click “Add keywords to campaign” and “Start Tracking.”
On-Page SEO
Your content’s SEO performance also depends on its on-page optimization. This refers to the various elements within the page that influence its ranking in search engines.
Some key on-page factors are:
Title tag: The page title that appears on browser tabs and can appear in search results.
Meta description: A brief page description can appear under the title in search results.
Header tags (H1, H2, etc.): The hierarchical headings that structure the content.
Content quality: The depth and overall value of the page’s main content.
Keyword optimization: How well the target keywords are naturally incorporated into areas like the title, headers, body copy, etc.
URL slug: The last portion of the URL that identifies the page.
When auditing your content, you should confirm whether it’s optimized for on-page SEO. Use SEOBoost’s content audit feature to automate this process.
Backlinks
Backlinks are links that point from other websites to your own. They’re incredibly important from a ranking standpoint and off-page SEO factor.
So, you need to get backlink data for each content page. This data allows you to pinpoint content that may be underperforming due to a lack of quality backlinks.
You can use Semrush’s Backlink Analytics tool to get the backlink data. Open the tool, enter one of your content sections, and click “Analyze.”
Navigate to the “Indexed pages” report. Here, you’ll see a list of your content pieces and how many backlinks each has.
Technical Issues
Lastly, you must check the technical SEO health of your content pages and your entire website.
Why?
That’s because technical SEO can influence whether search engines can find, store, and display your content in search results. So, you should check that no technical issues are holding your content back.
These could be:
- Duplicate content: Having substantive blocks of identical or nearly identical content across multiple site pages can hurt rankings.
- Broken internal links: Including links to your own pages that are returning 404 errors, which means they couldn’t be found.
- Slow site speed: Having content that takes too long to load frustrates users and can hinder rankings.
- Lack of mobile-friendliness: Publishing content that doesn’t display properly on mobile devices hurts your performance.
- Lack of security: A properly configured secure sockets layer (SSL) certificate for hypertext transfer protocol secure (HTTPS) is unnecessary. It’s the more secure version of HTTP and is a confirmed ranking factor.
Info Box: Use AIOSEO to run a complete site audit and identify the technical issues with your content.
4. Implement Your New Content Plan
After completing your audit, review each page manually and decide on the best course of action.
If your objective is to improve SEO performance, you have the following four options to choose from:
Keep Content As-Is
If a page is already meeting or exceeding the performance goals you set initially, leaving it as-is will be the right move.
For example, let’s say your goal was to achieve an average ranking position of three for all your content pages. If the page currently ranks two, it’s met that goal. The page already brings in lots of organic traffic and contributes well to your traffic goal.
Update Website Content
You should update the page when:
- It’s not currently meeting the performance goals you established for the audit
- It’s meeting the goal but contains outdated or irrelevant information
If you have an SEO-focused goal, look at the page’s current ranking. If you improve its ranking, organic traffic will likely increase, helping you achieve your traffic goal.
When updating the page and optimizing content, try to improve its quality. Start by evaluating whether the page’s content satisfies search intent. Does it cover everything a user wants to know about the topic?
If not, rewrite the content with search intent in mind. Ensure the writing is clear, engaging, and formatted using subheadings, short sentences, and paragraphs to improve readability.
To make this process easier, use SEOBoost’s content optimization feature.
This tool enhances your content’s SEO performance by evaluating keyword density, readability, and relevance.
You can write, edit, save, and optimize your content within a single interface designed like an editor.
What I love the most about the content optimization feature is that you receive real-time suggestions for improvement as you work.
It identifies the most effective keywords to incorporate, ensuring your content aligns with current trends. By pinpointing topic gaps and optimizing key elements, this tool empowers you to boost your Google ranking effectively with AI and big data.
Repurpose Older Content
Instead of overlapping content across multiple pages, combine the best elements into one definitive piece and create topic clusters.
This approach has two key benefits: It prevents you from competing with yourself for the same keyword in search results and funnels all the link equity to a single canonical URL to boost its ability to rank.
Delete Content
Sometimes, the right move might be to delete the page. If your goal is centered on SEO, that’s often the case when:
- No organic traffic
- It has no backlinks
- It targets a keyword (or covers a topic) unimportant for your business.
Before deleting a page, always check Google Analytics to ensure it isn’t getting significant traffic from other sources or driving a high percentage of conversions. Deleting a page like this could negatively impact your business.
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5. Measure Your Results
After implementing the action plan, the next step is checking whether you’ve achieved your goal.
But how long should you wait before measuring results?
There’s no definitive time frame. However, if your goal is to improve your long-term SEO results, I recommend waiting at least two months before analyzing the performance. This allows enough time for search engines to process the updates and for any positive ranking impacts to materialize in organic traffic fully.
Key Takeaway
Conducting a comprehensive content audit is crucial for maintaining a strong online presence and achieving your marketing objectives. By systematically evaluating your existing content, you can identify areas for improvement, optimize search engines, and enhance user engagement.
Remember, a content audit is an ongoing process, not a one-time task. As your user preferences change, you must regularly assess your content’s relevance and effectiveness.
By using SEOBoost, you can make the process easier and simpler. Try it for a 14-day free trial and see the power of our AI-driven tool today!
FAQs
1. What does a content audit do?
A content audit involves a comprehensive analysis of all the existing content on a website or digital platform. It evaluates each piece of content’s performance, relevance, and alignment with the overall business goals and user expectations.
2. What are the 3 goals of a content audit?
The three primary goals of a content audit are:
- Improving SEO performance.
- Increasing user engagement.
- Improving conversion rates.
3. How to do a UX content audit?
To conduct a UX content audit (User Experience Content Audit), follow these steps:
- Define your goals
- Identify content gaps and overlaps
- Evaluate the content quality, structure, and layout
- Analyze user engagement
- Test across different devices and platforms
- Develop an action plan
- Implement and monitor
4. Why is a content audit useful?
A content audit helps improve SEO and organic traffic by enhancing the user experience and aligning your existing content with your business goals.
