Learn to Conduct a Content Audit Like a Pro

When was the last time you performed a content audit?

A content audit is vital for maintaining a strong online presence and ensuring your website aligns with current search engine trends. In fact, relevant and unique content is an integral part of boosting search engine optimization (SEO) performance, and it’s one of Google's most important ranking criteria.

Businesses that take their marketing strategy seriously reap significant returns. According to Statista, global content marketing revenue is expected to be nearly $108 billion by 2026.

Image via Statista

A website content audit helps you assess the present condition of your website content and improve your overall content marketing strategy.

While conducting a content audit, you need to ask yourself:

Is your content getting decent views, likes, and shares?
Are readers actually taking the desired actions after reading your content?
Does your content help generate qualified leads and sales?
What is the ROI of your content marketing campaigns?
Is any of your old content outdated?
Which posts can you upgrade to make them relevant and useful for your audience?

Conducting a thorough content audit can help you find all these answers and figure out ways to improve your content strategy.

Let’s get started.

Disclaimer: This content contains some affiliate links for which we will earn a commission (at no additional cost to you). This is to ensure that we can keep creating free content for you.

What Is a Content Audit?

A content audit refers to the process of collecting and analyzing all of the content assets on your website, including landing pages and blog posts.

Conducting a content audit will help you assess the strengths and weaknesses of your content strategy and optimize your content plan to meet your current marketing goals.

Why Do You Need to Perform a Content Audit?

A content audit is a powerful tool to check the ongoing health of your content and optimize it to drive maximum traffic, leads, and conversions.

That’s why most companies conduct content audits at least once a year, and some conduct them more than three times yearly.

Some of the major benefits of a content audit are:

1. Optimize Your Website for SEO

A significant benefit of a content audit is that it helps you optimize your website for SEO. It can help you identify the underperforming pages and rectify the content gaps.

You can also eliminate duplicate content using free canonical tag checker tools, which might harm your SEO performance. A website content audit also helps improve internal linking, making landing pages more appealing to search engines.

2. Enhance Content Quality

The primary purpose of website content is to engage your visitors with valuable information. Conducting regular website content audits helps improve the quality of your content and aligns it better with the user’s search intent.

3. Improve User Experience

If you want the visitors to stay on your website for a longer time, your content needs to be more than just informative. Conducting a content audit allows you to experiment with different content structures and formats to improve dwell time.

This process can also reveal inconsistencies that may be impacting the overall user experience. A content audit can help you address these issues, enhancing the experience for your potential customers and search engines.

4. Track Content Performance

A successful content audit allows you to track the performance of your content strategy. By analyzing key metrics like traffic, engagement, dwell time, and conversion rates, you can determine how successful your content marketing strategy has been.

5. Facilitate Content Repurposing

You can repurpose high-performing content on your website to attract more organic traffic, and a content audit helps you identify such content. You can repurpose your popular blog posts or interviews into short-form videos, podcasts, social media posts, or even infographics.

6. Take More Informed Decisions

A content audit involves gathering and analyzing data to derive valuable insights. These findings will help you get a comprehensive view of the present state of your website content and help you make informed content marketing decisions.

Content audit data can provide insights into several SEO metrics and help develop a more precise roadmap to achieving bigger business goals.

When Should You Run a Content Audit?

How often should you conduct a content audit? Well, there is no fixed answer to this question. Experts suggest conducting content audits annually. However, the frequency may need to increase depending on the nature of your content and specific SEO needs.
Here are a few scenarios when you should consider running a content audit of priority.

You See a Decline in Your Organic Traffic: When the organic traffic inflow declines, it's time to conduct thorough content audits. You can use a free tool like Google Search Console or paid tools like Semrush or Ahrefs to track your website traffic regularly. Identifying the low-performing website pages and the causes of the decline would help you develop a strategic plan to boost traffic.

Your Content is Due for an Update: To keep your content up-to-date, identify redundant and low-performing content. A result-oriented content audit can help you find the gaps in your content.

You are Expanding Your Product Line or Services: When adding new product or service pages, ensuring they align with your website's structure is important. Auditing existing pages helps maintain consistency and provides a better user experience.

You are Reestablishing Your Brand Presence: Conduct a complete SEO content audit to establish your brand presence. Good content audit tools can comprehensively analyze multiple pages to help you revamp, restructure, and refresh content for better search engine visibility.

You are Launching a New SEO Strategy: Before launching a new SEO strategy, running an SEO content audit is critical. Understanding your website's content quality, relevance to search results, keyword rankings, and link optimization can help you develop an effective strategy to enhance your SEO performance.

How to Run A Content Audit Process?

Running a content audit may seem time-consuming, but it will help you save time and resources and generate better ROI from your content marketing efforts.

Here is the step-by-step process you should follow to conduct a content audit:

Define Your Goals

Just like other marketing initiatives, you should begin by defining your goals clearly.

Evaluate the challenges marketers face in executing successful content marketing campaigns. Prioritize quality content generation, lead generation, and improve SEO ranking.

Image via Semrush

What do you want to achieve with content marketing?

You might want to:

Improve your SEO results. You can use tools such as Semrush, Serpstat, SE Ranking, Traffic Travis, Ubersuggest, and Ahrefs to identify your top-ranking content and the posts that are lagging behind.

Track metrics such as organic traffic, search rankings, the number of backlinks, and dwell time.

Increase engagement rate. You should use Google Analytics and other web analytics tools to track performance metrics such as page views, average session duration, and bounce rate.

This will help you identify the topics and types of posts that are driving maximum engagement and the ones that are hurting your user experience.

Improve conversion rate. Track metrics like the number of downloads, leads, product inquiries, affiliate link clicks, and sales will help you calculate and improve your content’s conversion rate and ROI.

You’ll be able to define the most efficient content types and topics for every stage of your customers’ buying journey.

Create an Inventory of Your Content Assets

Compile a list of all of the content assets that you are going to audit. For this, you need to collect the URLs of the web pages and the metrics associated with them.

You can create and maintain a spreadsheet manually that includes details like:

URLs and titles
Date posted or last updated
Focus keywords
Content types (blog posts, landing pages, podcast episodes, product descriptions, ebooks)
Content format (text only, images includes, video included, CTAs included, affiliate links included)
Number of words
Meta descriptions
Author (writer’s name)
Buyer’s journey stage (awareness, consideration, decision)

You can also use online tools like Screaming Frog (free for up to 500 URLs) to automatically identify all URLs on your website, collect various other SEO data points, and download that data as a CSV file.

Another way to do this automatically is to opt for the WordPress Content Audit plugin.

Track Metrics and Analyze Data

Content analytics involves collecting valuable data from various sources and analyzing it thoroughly. You can use a good content audit template to collect data and consolidate it in a content audit spreadsheet to get it organized and easily analyzed.

Some of the core content marketing metrics you should include in your content audit template are:

Organic Search Traffic: How many users visit your website from organic search results? This metric helps measure the relevance and visibility of your content.

Traffic Sources: Identify the sources from where your website is getting traffic and which ones contribute the most. This helps you focus on the most profitable channels.

Keyword Rankings: Keyword optimization is an integral part of on-page SEO. Tracking your keyword rankings compared to your competitors will help you set goals for future campaigns.

Backlinks: A thorough backlink analysis is essential to establish authenticity. Achieving a higher search engine ranking is easier with high-quality backlinks.

Average Engagement Time: This metric helps assess how engaging and informative your web pages are for visitors. If a landing page has a higher bounce rate, refresh the content and CTA to make it more interesting.

Click-Through Rate: When potential customers read a blog post or watch a video, they are more likely to click the CTA button if they found the content useful. Tracking CTR is vital to measuring content performance.

Subscriber Gworth: A landing page aims to gain more subscribers. During your content audits, measure subscriber growth in a given period and identify the gaps.

You can use tools such as Google Analytics, Semrush, Linkody, Brand24, and Mention.com to analyze the collected data and compare them with business goals.

Identify the Actions Required

Using the collected data, you should assess each piece of content and segment them into the types of actions required.

Identify which content pieces you need to:

Keep as is. The content that performs well and remains relevant.
Update. Increase word count, replace statistics and outdated information, and add FAQs.
Rewrite or delete. Low-quality content and extremely short posts need to be revised completely to make them relevant and effective.
Optimize. The content that has the potential to rank higher after keyword optimization or link building.
Repurpose. Exceptionally high-performing content that can help you gain more traction if it is repurposed.

You can simply create a new column to update the “Action Required” in your content audit spreadsheet. Feel free to highlight them in specific colors to see an overview of the health of your website content.

At the same time, you can add new content ideas that can help fill out the content gaps on your website. Also, research your competitors’ content while doing so.

Optimize Your Content Plan

Once you know what you need to do with each of your content assets, it is time to prioritize which actions to take first.

You should optimize your content plan to generate better results in a quicker way.

But how?

You can prioritize content tasks that require minimal work and may bring great results. For example, adding affiliate links, optimizing metadata, updating CTAs, and implementing 301 redirects.

Create a content plan with proper tasks, responsible person, and deadlines for each piece of content. And use automated tools to simplify the process and track everything systematically.

Here are some actionable tips that can help you improve the ROI of your content assets:

Optimize the content and page title that has the potential to rank higher. You can use tools, such as LongTailPro, to identify the best long-tail keywords to include in your underperforming posts.

Alternatively, use the TF-IDF Tool to identify content gaps. Use it to find out if you overuse keywords, discover semantically related keywords, and compare your content to that of competitors.

Build high-quality backlinks to content that offers valuable information and great engagement potential but is not getting enough visitors. Tools such as Link-Assistant and Linkody can help.

Expand the content to be shorter to make it more insightful and valuable for your audience. Use tools like Grammarly, Hemingway Editor, and ProWritingAid to spot and fix errors while writing content.

Syndicate and repurpose evergreen and trending content to amplify its reach.

Structure your content to improve readability and make it easier for crawlers to understand its flow.

Add examples, statistics, and case studies to engage your audience better.

You should run content audits regularly to review and optimize your content marketing strategy for maximum results.

Monitor and Measure Results

All the content audits conclude with monitoring and measuring the performance of your renewed content marketing strategy. Use good content marketing analytics tools like Google Analytics, Buffer, Moz, SimilarWeb, and others.

These tools can track the performance of your latest content marketing strategy and compare it with your past performance to measure improvement. They can also run a competitor analysis to compare your results.

Monitoring content marketing metrics can help determine which strategies work best for you. It also lets you spot trends early, create a more precise road map, and invest wisely for better ROI.

Content Audit Checklist

Now, you are familiar with the content audit process. Let’s discuss the key elements to include in your content audit checklist for a comprehensive analysis.

Page Structure

A good site audit always starts with analyzing the page structure. You can use an audit tool to assess the content structure on a particular page. Some of the content elements you need to check include:

Title
Subheadings
Media (images, infographics or videos)
Popups
Paid ads

Each content element needs to be properly optimized to meet search intent and compete with the top-ranking pages on Google.

Thin and Duplicate Content

If there is one thing that can drive away traffic from your website, it is poor-quality content. Thin and duplicate content can harm SEO and thus must be removed immediately.

Content audit tools can help you identify pages with poor content based on various parameters. You can then formulate a content strategy to fill the gaps in your content and optimize it for better user engagement and search engine optimization.

Keyword Performance

Optimize your existing content for various keywords. But is your optimization strategy working? Run content audits to track the performance of your keywords.

A quick analysis of the existing content is necessary for on-page SEO. Ensure that your main keywords are evenly and strategically distributed on various pages to grab the readers' attention. Remember, keyword stuffing is bad for SEO, and you need to avoid it strictly.

Helpful Content (E-E-A-T)

If on-page SEO is one side of your content audits, assessing how helpful it is to Google searchers is another critical factor. After all, Google considers helpful content to be an important ranking factor when indexing pages.

Be it a landing page, product description, or blog post, the content has to fulfill the E-E-A-T criteria: experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness.

Image via Semrush

Thus, a good content audit tool can evaluate existing content and improve its relevance and credibility.

Readability and Inclusive Language

Your website should be readable and understandable even to a visitor. A successful content marketing strategy improve your SEO performance and attracts more organic traffic.

Your language, tone, and style should be inclusive to cater to people from all walks of life. When conducting content audits, check each page's readability score, identify the sections that are too complex, and create additional resources to explain the content better.

Content Optimization

Content audits focus not only on content quality but SEO performance as well. Content audit tools should be able to analyze your web pages for several technical SEO metrics, such as:

Broken internal links
Page speed
Site navigation
Schema markup
Security
URL structure
responsiveness

While some of these elements are not directly related to content quality, they will ultimately impact how you get indexed for organic search results. This auditing process will also help you understand how many pages rank well in the search engine results.

You can create your content audit template based on these elements or download our ready-to-use content audit template for your site audit.

FAQ

Q1. How do I do a content audit?

A. To do a content audit, you should:

Define your goals and key metrics.
Create an inventory of your content assets.
Collect and analyze data.
Identify the actions required.
Optimize your content plan.
Create, upgrade, and repurpose content.
Measure its performance regularly to optimize your content plan further.

Using tools can help you simplify the content audit process and save you time, money, and resources.

Q2. What does a content audit do?

A. A content audit is used to conduct a qualitative analysis of all of the content on a website. It helps you identify the strengths and weaknesses of your content strategy to optimize and improve your ROI.

Q3. Which tool is the best fit for doing a content audit?

A. Some of the tools you can use to do a content audit include:

SEO tools such as Semrush, Google Analytics, Serpstat, SE Ranking, Traffic Travis, LongTailPro, etc.
Content optimization tools such as LongTailPro, TF-IDF, etc.
Content writing editors and proofreading tools such as Grammarly, ProWritingAid, etc.

Q4. How do you do content inventory?

A. Content inventory includes creating a list of all of your content assets, such as landing pages, blog posts, case studies, and more. You can either do it manually or use tools such as Screaming Frog to export a CSV data file.

Q5. What is a content audit?

A. A content audit refers to the process of collecting all of your site content and analyzing its effectiveness in terms of traffic, leads, user experience, and conversion rates.

Q6. When you're running a content audit, what is the first thing you need to do?

A. The first thing you need to do is identify the purpose behind running a content audit. Identify what you want to achieve.

Do you want to improve SEO results, user engagement, or conversions? Or, are you just trying to increase your brand’s online visibility?

The process of conducting site content audits will depend on your content marketing goals.

Q7. How do you review content?

A. You should review content for:

Relevance to your audience and the current times
Grammatical and structure errors
Content flow issues
Ways to improve its ranking on search engines
Its performance against that of the content published by your competitors

You will need a team of content strategists, writers, editors, and SEO analysts for conducting a thorough content analysis. If you don’t have an in-house team of experts, feel free to hire us.

Q8. How much does a content audit cost?

A. A content audit may cost anywhere between $600-$14,000 depending on the amount of content already published on the site and your company goals.

Q9. What are the 3 goals of a content audit?

A. The 3 key goals of a content audit are:

Content Inventory: To take stock of your website content and measure how each element is performing.
Data Analysis: To analyze data from various sources to get a comprehensive overview of the current situation. Here you would also perform competitor analysis and identify the gaps.
Fix Content Gaps and Improve Performance: To chalk out a plan to fill the content gaps and generate more valuable content to boost SEO performance.

Q10. What is the difference between a content audit and an SEO audit?

A. A technical SEO audit is a comprehensive site, whereas a content audit is a part of it. An SEO audit checks website structure, security, crawlability, speed, schema markup, and many more elements to give you a vivid picture of your website performance in Google indexing.

The content audit process, on the other hand, checks content quality, readability, relevance, and accuracy to help you engage visitors better and generate leads.

Ready to Perform Content Audit?

Most content marketers are so busy creating and distributing new content that they seldom revisit old content to check if it performs well. You shouldn’t make that mistake if you want to make the most out of your content marketing efforts.

Many marketers agree that updating and repurposing existing content is an efficient content marketing tactic. You can also leverage this tactic by conducting a thorough content audit of your website and identifying old content pieces that have the potential to perform better after an upgrade.

Do you need help conducting a content audit or creating high-quality content for your business? Hire our experts for competitive content marketing and writing services.

Disclaimer: This content contains some affiliate links for which we will earn a commission (at no additional cost to you). This is to ensure that we can keep creating free content for you.