A content audit is a dreaded (yet crucial!) part of SEO.
I get it: You’d prefer to avoid this at all cost. Content audits consume so much time, after all. Not to mention that analyzing content performance often feels like trying to make sense out of seemingly disconnected information.
The thing is, a content audit is a real life-saver for any content marketing strategy. Even a quick glance at Google Analytics data will reveal enough insights to fuel the strategy for months … that is, if you know what to look for!
I want to show you how to do a content audit that can identify the biggest opportunities to boost the content's performance.
Here's what we'll cover:
Recommended Reading: The Best SEO Audit Checklist to Boost Search Visibility and Rankings
A content audit is the process of evaluating your existing content for its strengths and weaknesses, and identifying how overall performance is affected.
An SEO content audit will also help you spot opportunities to strengthen the content even further.
Note that a content audit is a qualitative process. Your goal isn’t to list every piece of content on your site or organize them into categories (although a thorough content inventory is part of the process). Your goal is to uncover insights about performance to date and determine what actions to take to improve rankings and conversion rates.
So, as a quick overview, a solid content audit will reveal:
If you're an SEO or digital marketer, you may be wondering "why do the content audit in the first place?" — what’s the key benefit of spending so much time analyzing the content’s performance?
Well, there are three main advantages:
What specific outcomes can you expect from a content audit?
I typically tell clients about these five goals of the content audit:
With those questions answered, let's talk about how to do a content audit.
Here is a simple, 7-step content audit process you can follow easily.
You can read the steps in order, or use the list below to jump to a certain section:
An SEO content audit isn’t a simple taking of inventory. However, before you can dive into the data, you must identify all the assets your organization has published.
So, as the first step, create a spreadsheet template with all your content assets.
You have a number of ways to do it:
However, if you’re using an SEO platform like seoClarity, you have a number of other ways to do it.
First, you can do this by going to the Managed Pages section of the Page Clarity report. It lists all content assets you’ve added to your site. Since you can also organize all those pages with tags, you can find and analyze them more easily.
The only challenge with the above method is that it includes pages you have added to the platform yourself.
If you want to discover every page on the site, however, not just the ones you manage, you need to use two other methods:
seoClarity helps with each method through our analytics reports.
You can also filter by Content Type to hone in on pages that fall into specific classifications: blogs, product pages, categories, etc.
The purpose of the audit is to evaluate your content and the best way to do it is with data, of course.
So, as a next step, gather additional data about each page to help you audit and evaluate your assets.
The SEO points I recommend you collect for each page are:
Aside from the above, I would also recommend including the following data points:
Much of the performance data above you can get from Google Analytics and Google Search Console. On-page SEO data, on the other hand, you may have to import into the spreadsheet manually.
If you use the seoClarity platform, you can extract all the GSC data for my URLs. But unlike the search engine’s platform, I can also filter and correlate it with other insights to gain a deeper understanding of each page’s performance.
(The Search Analytics report.)
Information like meta tags, the publication and last update date, and performance metrics (bounce rate, time on page, etc.) will help you establish:
Once again, you can go through the process manually. However, I’d imagine it would take too long to complete.
Alternatively, you can export all that data from the SEO platform. The Page Clarity report in seoClarity includes all those data points and lets you export the information to process further.
Depending on how deep a content audit you perform, you might need to collect some advanced metrics — content’s length or content types.
Each will help with evaluating a different aspect of your strategy.
Reviewing the content’s length will help compare it with the top-ranking content. This will help assess whether you deliver the full breadth of information Google wants to see there.
Breaking the content by type will confirm whether you match the right user intent.
You’ve collected all the necessary information. As the next step, you should also audit the content on the whole.
This will help you identify site-wide issues with pages, as well as individual content assets that may have missed the mark regarding on-page SEO.
Crawl the site using your crawler tool of choice. Most crawlers will include at least the basic on-page SEO checks. They will find pages with titles that are too long, duplicate content, or pages where you’ve included more than a single instance of the same tag.
If you are an seoClarity user, you can use the Page Clarity capability that provides all sorts of on-page data to help you evaluate each asset thoroughly.
You go even deeper, though. For example, you can analyze content for specific terms you’ve mentioned. These could be references to a product the company no longer offers, or pages mentioning specific categories, phrases, or any other information, at that.
Why, because, for various reasons, you may have to remove or update them.
seoClarity’s site crawler allows you to perform such searches at a scale.
(Clarity Audits projects setup.)
At this stage, you have all the data you need to conduct the audit. What's next, is to put all that information to use.
Here's how I recommend you do it:
First, decide on the type of next actions you want to take on the content. Most commonly, you'll be looking at updating, removing, consolidating the content, or leaving it as is.
Note: If you remove content, consider adding a URL redirect so users aren't taken to a 404 page.
Next, add a column in the spreadsheet, ideally to the right of the URL so you can spot it easily.
Then, go through each URL, and evaluate the content in turn. Look at the performance metrics to assess whether these are satisfactory or you feel the content could be performing better. Then, go deeper, and evaluate how well optimized the piece of content is, and whether it matches the user intent for its target keyword.
Add the desired next action beside each URL. Mark pages that you've identified to need updates, content you feel isn't necessary anymore, and assets you may consolidate with other pages, potentially.
Don't worry if this feels like a lot of work — it is!
It's not uncommon for such audits to take weeks, depending on the site size. However, as you've learned above, the benefits of completing the process far outweigh the time you must invest into it.
The last three steps of the process relate to updating the content and finding new ways to improve its performance.
We wrote about the idea of the user intent and micro-moments already but to reiterate:
Google describes the concept of micro-moments as:
… intent-driven moments of decision-making and preference-shaping that occur throughout the entire consumer journey.
These are the situations when you intentionally use smartphones and mobile devices to research information that helps you:
Google refers to them as the four main user intents: do, go, know, and buy, and as they point further …
They are intent-rich moments when decisions are made and preferences shaped. In these moments, consumers' expectations are higher than ever.
What’s also important is that the search engine serves different search results based on that keyword's intent. Just take a look at these search results for a mobile query that might indicate an intent to GO somewhere.
Now compare that with the first thing you’d see if you use a query that might suggest a transactional intent:
See what I mean?
For queries that indicate the intent to obtain information, the search engine displays various rank types — a knowledge graph, a list of recent news, the Answer Box, and many others. If you’ve searched for local information, a local business recommendation, for example, it would show you the local pack. To satisfy a buying intent, the search engine serves ads and product recommendations.
So, as the next step in your audit, map your content to keywords to buyers' intent. I recommend you do this by splitting your target keywords into two groups:
We've previously shared about how to leverage keyword intent to optimize your site to convert users at all stages of the buying cycle. Those opportunities include:
Doing this can help convert users at every stage of the buying cycle and is a very important step to every content audit and analysis.
As I've shared above, it’s crucial to your content's success that every page helps your users satisfy multiple intents — to learn, discover, and buy.
Similarly, to increase a page’s chances of appearing for various unique queries searchers might use, you need to enhance it with semantic keywords. The easiest way to do this is by offering information and content relevant to both — intents and semantic terms.
Here are some of the ideas I’ve discovered working particularly well for various content types:
The idea behind a category page is simple — they aim to attract users who look for a particular type of products. And then, give them easy access to all relevant items offered.
However, depending on the number of products within a category, customers might find that making the final choice is difficult. Including star ratings or number of reviews on category pages simplifies choice for users, and helps steer them towards a product to buy.
Customers often select products on emotion. But then, they justify their choice with logic. And for the most part, elements like meta-tags focus on targeting the buyers' emotions.
But once they’re on a product page, you need to provide them with all the information to convince them that a particular item is for them.
That’s where product information comes into play. However, instead of just listing product specification, highlight benefits and show how a product can help improve a person’s life, overcome certain challenges, or have any other positive effect on them.
It’s hard to believe, but product images can affect conversion rates in so many ways. Then again, we rarely buy anything without seeing it first. And so, it only makes sense that we’re more likely to purchase items on pages that feature engaging images, product videos, and have a clean layout that makes absorbing all the information much easier.
Here’s an example of a product page from Made.com boasting high quality, engaging visuals.
Today, for a page to rank well, it must be relevant to the most current audience’s needs.
Unfortunately, making it so sounds only simple in practice.
For one, the audience’s requirements change. And what goes with it, Google often updates what pages it deems the most relevant in SERPs.
So, how do you keep up? By analyzing the top 10 results for a keyword continuously to identify the most up-to-date trends and semantic keywords that engage the audience.
That’s exactly what Content Fusion helps you achieve. This AI-powered content optimizer analyzes countless data sources about the keyword and content ranking for it to deliver insights to help improve your page.
One of its capabilities is the ability to identify terms and phrases Google emphasizes for the keyword. Here, we see the must-use topics for the keywords "things to do in Chicago".
(Content Fusion must-use topics.)
Include these must-use topics on your page to increase its relevance and topic authority for your target keyword.
But a couple of weeks or months after you’ve done that, go back and re-test your copy with Content Fusion again.
I cannot emphasize this step enough.
You see, SERPs are constantly changing. As the Google’s algorithm evolves, the search engine becomes better and better at analyzing context and identifying the most relevant content to the query.
And what goes with it, the search engine’s expectations for content change as well.
Re-testing your pages with Content Fusion gives you the opportunity to update them for what’s relevant for the query right now. As a result, you ensure the highest possible rankings for your content.
Recommended Reading: 7 Content Fusion Success Stories of Increased Search Visibility
Finally, it’s always a good idea to take a peek at other websites ranking for your terms, paying particular attention to the ways they enrich the user experience.
This electronics retailer, for example, uses a variety of unusual elements on their product pages:
Notice a tool tip that explains how buyers could learn more about delivery options and a dedicated T&Cs tab. It’s worth identifying, and then, implementing similar initiatives your competitors might be doing on their pages.
I’m sure this goes without saying: the only way to ensure that any changes you’ve made to the site have delivered the desired result is by monitoring their performance.
As part of the content audit, I always recommend updating the set of KPIs you’ve been using to track and monitor.
Often, the original metrics might seem inadequate to capture the full breadth of your new strategy. Or they might be failing to reveal the insights you seek, simply.
With all content updated, amend your reporting dashboards to track all the information you seek.
The data of your content marketing dashboards might include traffic to pages that share certain common characteristics:
Here’s an example of such a dashboard, created with our platform, seoClarity.
(A customized dashboard on the seoClarity platform.)
Similarly, you could measure content performance in additional channels, social media (e.g. social shares), for example, to broaden the insight you receive about it.
Recommended Reading: 17 SEO Metrics to Monitor for the End User Experience
Fact: a single content audit can empower your strategy for a long time into the future.
But analyzing its performance on a regular basis will help you gain an unmatched insight into how your content works throughout the year or your market’s seasonality.
When asked about the ideal content audit frequency, I always recommend conducting them at least once a year. Twice is even better.
This way, you can react to any changes or capitalize on new trends much quicker.
An SEO content audit is the most effective way to identify problems with the content’s performance and work toward content optimization and quality content.
A high quality, specific audit will uncover even the smallest issues that prevent pages from ranking well on Google, driving ideal traffic and conversions.
And from this guide, you already know how to do it well. You’ve learned the importance of conducting the audit, its key elements and how to utilize a platform to speed up the process.
All that’s left to do is to actually conduct the audit so you can push your content strategy forward.
Editor's Note: This post was originally published in August 2018 and has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.