If you’re running a website (or several), you know how important it is to keep your content fresh, relevant, and performing at its best.
A content audit is the perfect way to figure out what’s working, what needs a little love, and what should be deleted to keep your site in top shape. 🔎
This guide is packed with step-by-step instructions to help you conduct a thorough content audit, even if you’ve never done one before. It will also show you how to use tools like the On-Page Auditor to bring your website back to life.
What Is a Content Audit?
A content audit is a process where we take a close look at all the content on your website to see how well it’s doing and if it’s helping you reach your business objectives. 🎯
If you find that some of your content is really hitting the mark and generating great results, that’s fantastic! You’ll probably want to create more content along those lines.
On the other hand, if you notice that a significant portion of your content isn’t quite meeting your expectations, it might be time to make some changes. This could involve using updating the content, combining similar pieces, or even removing some altogether.
When Should You Run a Content Audit?
Now, let’s talk about content audits and why they’re crucial for your strategy, especially when you’re running an agency.
The timing of these audits depends on your client’s needs and industry. Here’s when you should prioritize them:
- Lots of Content (Quarterly): Clients like blogs, news sites, or big e-commerce stores may need quarterly audits. This keeps their content optimized, relevant, and ranking well, and lets you react to trends.
- Regular Content (6-12 Months): Most businesses are fine with audits every six months or annually. It maintains SEO health and helps find improvement opportunities.
- Before a Website Redesign: Always audit before a redesign. It helps decide what content to keep, improve, or remove, making the process smoother.
- After a Google Algorithm Update: After a big Google update, audit to see how content is affected and adjust your strategy.
- Traffic Drops (Immediately): If traffic drops suddenly, an audit helps diagnose if content is the problem.
- Competitive Analysis (As Needed): To beat competitors, audit their content and your clients’ to find gaps and improve.
- Onboarding New Clients: Start with a content audit for new clients. It sets benchmarks, prioritizes fixes, and helps build a long-term strategy. It’s a good starting point.
The Content Audit Process: Step-By-Step
Doing a content audit means taking a good, hard look at all the stuff you’ve got on your website and figuring out how to make it better. Basically, you make a list of everything, see how it’s doing, find ways to improve it, and then make a plan.
We’ll help you make sure it all goes smoothly.
1. Define Your Goal to Be More Efficient
Before diving into a content audit, figure out what you want to achieve. This goal will shape how you check your content’s performance and, later, see if your changes actually helped.
Here’s what most people aim for with a content audit:
- Better SEO: See how your content is doing in Google searches (without paying for ads) and find ways to rank higher and get more visitors.
- More Engagement: Find out how much people are interacting with your content and how to make it more interesting. There are also strategies to increase your blog engagement.
- More Conversions (Sales, Leads, etc.): Check if your content is leading people to do what you want (like buying something or signing up) and how to make it more effective.
2. Gather All Your Content for a Clear View
This step involves creating a master list (usually a spreadsheet) of every piece of content on your website. You’ll want to include details like the URL, content title, type, author, publish and update dates, word count, meta description, target keywords, and CTA.
To gather this information, smaller sites can manually go through each page, although it tends to get tedious. The alternative is to use tools like the Site Auditor, or another crawler, and get the info in minutes.
In Search Atlas, you can create a project in Site Auditor and perform a comprehensive crawl of your website, identifying all accessible URLs.
After you enter the URL of your website, click on the Site Audit button and the tool will scan your website. You’ll get a list of all URLs along with associated data such as page titles, meta descriptions, and status codes.
After that, you can export all the info into a single file.
There’s also a Pro feature for larger agencies that lets you analyze URLs in bulk, so you get more of your projects crawled at once.
3. Evaluate Your Content’s On-Page Performance
Okay, so you’ve got your big list of content. Now it’s time to see how well everything’s doing. This is where you figure out if your content is hitting the mark. You have to analyze:
- Organic traffic
- Backlinks
- Keyword ranking
- Technical SEO
- On-Page SEO
After you have the info on keyword positions, traffic, and the number of backlinks, you’ll need to put it in your sheet or database next to each piece of content, so you have data for analysis later.
With so much work, these situations call for automated tools.
On-Page Audit
The first is the On-Page Audit Tool, which covers several aspects at once:
- Content Scoring: See how your page scores for readability, word count, topical terms, page structure, and multiple keywords at once. You can also compare scores to your competitors.
- Links: You get to see the number of referring domains and internal and external links.
- Technical Scoring: Optimize meta tags, rich media, schema, and other page performance factors to identify issues that impact crawling and indexing.
- Competitor Analysis: Quickly evaluate your competitors’ website authority and content quality.
- Recommended Actions: Get suggestions for adding missing keywords, internal links, structural elements, and tags to enhance your content score and ranking potential.
- 1-Click Optimization: Send your page to the SEO Content Assistant for instant improvements in content quality and SEO performance.
OTTO SEO
You can also rely on AI and speed the process up with our AI assistant manager OTTO.
This tool lets you see issues in real-time and fix them directly in the dashboard. This goes for countless mini-tasks, including title tag updates, alt texts, meta descriptions, broken link repairs, canonical tag adjustments, and much more.
Backlink Analysis
The on-page audit gives you a basic backlink count, but it’s worth investigating further if you see any pages with unusually high or low numbers of backlinks. A closer look at your website’s backlink profile, using a dedicated backlink analysis tool, can reveal important off-site factors that influence your search rankings.
This deeper dive allows you to understand why certain pages are performing the way they are.
During this analysis, pay close attention to several key elements: the number of referring domains (unique websites linking to you), the anchor text used in those links, and the location of the links on the referring pages.
Keyword Rank Tracking
Another aspect you need to see and write down is keyword rank tracking positions. Here’s how to do it effectively:
- Identify Focus Keywords: For each page you’re analyzing, determine the primary keyword or phrase you want it to rank for.
- Add to Rank Tracker: Input each page, along with its corresponding focus keyword, into your rank tracking tool.
- Record Baseline Rankings: Note the page’s current ranking and average position for that keyword. This establishes a baseline for measuring future progress.
- Identify Underperformers: Pages with low rankings or poor average positions indicate a need for optimization efforts.
4. Assess Your Content to Satisfy Your Readers
Checking your content’s relevance and quality during an audit is key for a few reasons:
- User Experience (UX): Use UX metrics to find when your content hits the mark, visitors stay longer, and bounce rates drop, boosting your site’s performance.
- Search Engine Rankings: Google loves relevant, high-quality content. Improving yours can help you climb the search rankings, making it easier for people to find you.
- Content Gaps: Audits reveal what’s missing. Spotting these gaps lets you cover topics your audience is searching for but isn’t finding on your site.
- Consistency and Alignment: Good content that stays on message supports your business goals and builds trust with your audience.
- Conversion Rates: Quality content encourages action, whether that’s signing up, making a purchase, or filling out a form.
You can first start checking crucial pages, either those that are underperforming or those that are bringing in the most traffic.
However, with Search Atlas, there is another, faster way to check your content’s quality. While some previous ones also show content info, these tools are content specialists.
Scholar
Imagine being able to see inside Google’s brain and know exactly how it evaluates what you’ve written. Scholar makes that possible by looking at your content through several key lenses:
- Content Clarity: It checks that your content is clear, readable, and straight to the point.
- Factuality: It ensures your facts are accurate and relevant to the query.
- Human Effort: It measures how much human creativity goes into your content compared to automated tools.
- Information Gain: It helps uncover unique insights that aren’t already covered in search results.
- Content Freshness: It tracks the latest updates and timestamps to highlight how current your content is.
- User Intent Alignment: It ensures your content aligns with what the user expects from their search.
- Entities: It pulls in relevant topics from Google’s Knowledge Graph to optimize content.
- Contextual Flow: It checks that your headings and topics follow a logical flow.
It gives you an easier way to evaluate content relevance and quality and compare it to your competitors’ content immediately. In the end, you get several new metrics to enter into your sheet and to understand your performance.
Content Velocity
You can get an even deeper insight into your content and compare it to your results.
Content Velocity is a tool that helps you stay on top of your content game. It tracks how often you publish new content, your publishing peaks, as well as gaps.
It also lets you peek at your competitors’ strategies.
Page Pruning Tool
Marketers need to decide which content to enhance and which to eliminate. The focus should be on content that drives traffic, aligns with current SEO trends, and adds value to the user experience.
Content that can be updated to become more relevant should be prioritized for improvement. Conversely, content that no longer fits the company’s goals or values should be considered for removal.
The tool lets you recognize issues like low-quality pages, thin content, pages with low impressions, low clicks, and other issues. If you need a quick refresh, you can just see the worst-performing pages and cut them out.
5. Identify Content Gaps to Find Opportunities
While this is optional, it’s a useful step in seeing your (potential) content from a bird’s eye view. Consider spending several minutes to see how an AI Content Planner would generate a content calendar from a seed keyword.
This can give you new ideas or clarity about some pieces of content.
- Find topics you haven’t covered yet
- Discover keyword opportunities to expand your reach
- Plan fresh content that aligns with your audience’s needs
6. Create a Game Plan
Alright, so you’ve analyzed your content; now it’s time to put that knowledge to work! This is where we create our action plan, deciding what to do with each piece of content.
We’ll be sorting everything into four main categories:
- Keep: These are your star players! Content that’s performing well and aligns with your goals. No changes are needed here, just keep it shining.
- Update: This content has good bones but needs a little TLC. Maybe it’s outdated, needs some SEO tweaking, or could use a fresh perspective.
- Consolidate: Sometimes, you have multiple pieces covering similar ground. We can combine these into one stronger, more comprehensive resource. This avoids diluting your message and improves user experience.
- Delete: This is for content that’s no longer relevant, is outdated, or doesn’t align with your brand. It’s okay to let things go. A clean, focused website is a happy website!
7. Track Results
Don’t just audit and forget, though. Track your results! Keep an eye on things like traffic, how long people stick around, and whether they’re taking the actions you want them to (like signing up or buying something).
Using this data is crucial. It lets you see what’s working and what’s not, so you can make smart, informed decisions about your content.
Audit Faster and With Deeper Insights With Search Atlas’ AI Tools
So, to wrap things up, make content audits a regular part of your routine. They’re key to keeping your website fresh, relevant, and working hard for you. Think of it as a regular check-up for your online presence.
The Search Atlas platform offers a cutting-edge way to carry out content audits and keep track of your content in real-time, all powered by AI. Plus, you can apply fixes automatically.Why not give it a go? Try these tools for yourself with a 7-day FREE trial and a full tour of the platform.
