What is a content audit and why it matters for SEO
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TL;DR: What is a content audit?
A content audit is like spring cleaning for your website.
It’s a systematic review of all your site’s content to ensure that each piece is contributing to your business goals and search engine optimization (SEO) performance.
By evaluating everything from blog posts to landing pages, a content audit helps you identify what’s working, what needs improvement, and what should be removed or repurposed.
Essentially, it’s about making sure your content pieces are as effective and SEO-optimized as possible, which can involve adjusting internal links, refining metadata, and ensuring CTAs (call to actions) are impactful.
For beginners: A quick overview of the content audit process
If you’re new to content audits, think of it as a health check-up for your website.
The process involves cataloging all your content pages, analyzing their performance, and making informed decisions about how to optimize them for better results.
Whether you’re looking to boost organic search traffic, improve user experience, or increase conversions, a content audit is a powerful tool to help you achieve these goals, often requiring attention to both on-page SEO and technical issues.
Types of content to audit
When conducting a website content audit, you'll want to review various types of content, including:
Blog posts: Evaluate SEO elements like focus keyword, metadata, and word count to enhance their relevance and readability.
Landing pages: Ensure they’re optimized for conversions, include effective CTAs, and align with keyword research for search engineoptimization.
Product pages: Focus on clarity, keyword targeting, and user engagement, especially in ecommerce settings.
Videos and infographics: Check for relevance, social shares, and SEO-friendly descriptions.
Social media content: Audit posts and profiles to align with your digital marketing strategy and support your overall content creation efforts.
Content audit vs. SEOcontent audit: What’s the difference?
While a general content audit focuses on overall content quality and alignment with business goals, an SEOcontent audit zooms in on elements that affect web pages and their search engine rankings.
This includes assessing page titles, HTML structure, internal links, and how well your content meets search intent.
An SEOcontent audit may also involve a deeper dive into technical issues like crawlers and site audit reports, ensuring that your site remains friendly for mobile devices and other platforms.
Why content audits matter for SEO
Website content audits are crucial for maintaining a strong online presence.
They help ensure that your content aligns with your SEO strategies, provides a user experience, and ultimately drives organic search traffic and conversions.
The role of content audits in SEO strategies
Content audits are a cornerstone of effective digital marketing and SEO strategies.
By regularly auditing your content, you can identify what’s driving traffic and what’s holding your site back.
This ongoing process helps you stay competitive in search engine rankings and adapt to changes in algorithms and user behavior.
Enhancing content quality and user experience
A content audit allows you to evaluate the quality and relevance of your content assets.
High-quality content that meets the needs of your target audience not only ranks better in search engines, but it also should provide an excellent user experience—one that sharply meets search intent and leads to higher engagement and conversion rates.
Identify content gaps and opportunities
During a content audit, you might discover gaps in your site’s content where you’re missing key topics or focus keywords.
These gaps represent opportunities to create new, targeted content that can attract more organic search traffic.
Additionally, you may find outdated content that can be refreshed, repurposed, or even deleted to boost SEO performance.
Improving search engine rankings and organic traffic
By addressing issues uncovered in a content audit—such as duplicate content, broken links, shallow content, or poor keyword optimization—you can significantly improve your site’s search engine rankings.
This makes your site more likely to appear in SERPs, driving more organic traffic.
How content audits work
Conducting a site audit may seem daunting, but breaking it down into steps makes the process manageable and effective.
How to do a content audit: A step-by-step overview
Gather and organize your website content (also called content inventory or content library)
Analyze content performance metrics
Evaluate basic SEO elements
Audit for technical SEO Issues
Assess your content quality and relevance
Gather your website content
Start by compiling a comprehensive inventory of all your website content.
This includes every blog post, landing page, product page, and multimedia asset.
Tools like Clearscope—or a simple content audit spreadsheet in Google Sheets—can help you organize this inventory.
Analyze content performance metrics
Next, analyze the performance of each piece of content using metrics like:
Engagement rate (or time on page)
Events
Bounce rate
Impressions
Organic traffic
Total page views
Conversion rates
Keyword rankings
Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and other SEO tool platforms are invaluable here, providing insights into which content pages resonate with your audience and which fall flat.
Evaluate basic SEO elements
Check each page for essential SEO elements such as meta descriptions, page titles, and headings.
Ensure that these elements are optimized with focus keywords and align with your overall SEO strategy.
Audit for technical SEO Issues
A technical SEO audit is also crucial.
Look for issues like broken links, missing XML sitemaps, indexation issues or page notices from Google Search Console, and slow page load times—all of which can negatively impact your search engine rankings.
Assess your content quality and relevance
Finally, assess the quality and relevance of your content. Here’s what you’ll want to do:
Review performance metrics for the content and determine if there’s content decay
Remove any outdated content or outdated information in your content
Improve readability or in-depth topic coverage where needed
Find keyword cannibalization issues and eliminate duplicate content
Ensure your content is meeting EEAT guidelines and considering the concept of information gain
This step can be time-consuming, but it’s essential for maintaining the health of your site.
Many SEO experts like to take a simple “keep,” “rework,” or “delete” approach and then take action accordingly.
Tools for conducting a content audit
Using the right tools can streamline your content audit process. Let’s take a look at a few of the most popular and trusted platforms below.
Google Analytics and Google Search Console: Google Analytics and Google Search Console are essential for tracking website content performance and identifying SEO issues. These tools provide data on traffic sources, keyword rankings, and technical errors. (And they’re free.)
Traditional SEO tools and keyword research platforms: SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Moz are powerful SEO tools for comprehensive audits. They can help you analyze backlinks, track keyword performance, and identify technical issues across your website.
Technical SEO tools: Softwares like Screaming Frog, PageSpeed Insights, and the SEOQuake Google Chrome Extension can help you quickly spot technical issues across your website.
Content-first SEO platforms: Clearscope’s software will help you monitor content decay, sharply meet search intent, and assist in properly refreshing outdated content. Our platform is particularly useful for streamlining your content monitoring efforts and ensuring that your content remains relevant and competitive over time.
Excel and Google Sheets for audit spreadsheets: For organizing your content audit data, Excel and Google Sheets are great options. You can create content audit spreadsheets to track changes, prioritize tasks, and ensure nothing falls through the cracks.
Best practices for content audits
To make the most of your content audits, follow these best practices:
Prioritize high-impact areas
Know when to delete, repurpose, or update
Re-optimize existing content correctly
Set up a content audit workflow and audit checklist
Use a content audittemplate for systematic reviews
Prioritize high-impact areas
Focus on high-impact areas first. This includes content with target keywords that drive significant traffic and high-quality content that aligns with your business goals.
Know when to delete, repurpose, or update content
Not all content is worth keeping. Deleting low-quality or outdated content, repurposing valuable but underperforming content, and updating older posts with fresh information and SEOoptimization can make a big difference.
And it’s what your content audit is all about, after all.
Re-optimize existing content correctly
Re-optimize existing content by incorporating updated keywords while focusing on improving your content writing with entity-rich copy, improving metadata, and enhancing readability.
This can give old content new life and boost its SEO performance.
Clearscope makes this really easy. See for yourself.
Set up a content audit workflow and audit checklist
Establish a workflow and checklist for your content audits.
This ensures consistency and efficiency, making it easier to conduct audits regularly.
Use a content audittemplate for systematic reviews
Using a content audittemplate can help you conduct systematic reviews of your content.
Templates ensure that you cover all necessary aspects of the audit, from performance metrics to SEO elements.
Check out LearnSEO.io’s library of free, high-quality SEO audit templates for ideas.
Additional considerations for content audits
Beyond the basics, there are additional factors to consider when conducting a website content audit.
Content Audits should fit into your overall content marketing strategy: They help ensure that your content aligns with your business goals, target audience needs, and SEO objectives.
Know the impact a healthy content inventory can have on SERPs: Content audits can significantly impact your rankings in SERPs by aligning your content with search intent. Understanding what users are searching for and ensuring your content meets those needs can boost your visibility.
Monitor and report your content audit results: Track the performance of your content over a date range and at regular intervals. This will help you gauge the effectiveness of your audit and make adjustments as needed.
Adjust your marketing efforts based on your findings: This could involve creating new content, refining your SEO strategy, or focusing on different keywords.
Future-proof your content with regular audits: This helps you stay ahead of changes in search engine algorithms and evolving user behavior, ensuring that your content remains effective for future content strategies.
Common questions about content audits
Q: How do you evaluate content length in an SEO audit?
Your content’s word count should be evaluated in the context of user intent and keyword competition.
While longer content can sometimes rank better, it’s more important to ensure that your content is entity-rich and addresses the search query effectively.
Q: How often should you do a content audit?
A comprehensive content audit should be conducted at least once a year.
However, smaller audits focused on specific areas—like technical SEO, content decay, or content quality—can be done more frequently.
Q: How much time does a comprehensive content audit take?
A comprehensive content audit can take anywhere from a few days to several weeks, depending on the size of your site and the depth of the audit.
Using content audit tools can speed up the process by automating parts of the audit as well as implementing a regular, templated process can help.
Additional resources
Page Indexing report from Google Search Console Help
Introduction to Google Analytics from Google Analytics
Bernard Huang
What is a content refresh and why it matters for SEO
