Conducting a content audit can be a challenging and arduous process. However, identifying the problems with your website’s existing content can help you improve future content creation and help you identify new growth opportunities.
You’ll find in this article a comprehensive checklist for conducting a search engine optimization (SEO) content audit so that you can go through this task efficiently and effectively.
What Is an SEO Content Audit?
An SEO content audit is a process that helps identify and evaluate the quality of the existing content and then makes the necessary changes to improve the website’s SEO ranking. An SEO content audit is an exercise designed to identify and correct any issues in your website’s content that could be causing it to rank poorly in search engine results.
It usually involves evaluating the quality of your site’s content and comparing it to the quality of your competitors’ sites. The goal is to find out how you can improve your site’s ranking by optimizing your content.
Nevertheless, the goal of an SEO content audit isn’t only to find out what’s wrong with your current website content. It also aims to know how well it fulfills users’ needs and what you can do about it.
Why Do You Need a Content Audit?
By conducting a content audit, you can learn about the strengths and weaknesses of your site’s current content and make improvements where necessary. The audit’s goal is to identify any problems or issues with your site’s content that could be preventing it from performing well in search results.
If you’re not getting the results you want from organic search, then it’s likely that there are problems with your site’s structure or content that need to be fixed before you can start seeing improvements.
Meanwhile, when you do a content audit, you’ll see what kind of content you have on your site and how much content there is. This means that you can evaluate whether the amount of each type of content is appropriate for the website’s purpose and its audience.
You can also identify gaps in the types of content available on your site. This will help you decide what kind of new content should be created to fill those gaps.
On the other hand, there are two main reasons why content audits are so important:
- They help you identify how users interact with your site so that you can make changes based on their behavior and preferences (for example, if users tend to bounce off certain pages or don’t click on links within those pages).
- They help identify opportunities for improvement so that you can focus on those areas during future development efforts.
Checklist for Conducting a Content Audit
Now that you know what a content audit is and its importance in your SEO content strategy, here is your comprehensive checklist for conducting a content audit.
1. Define The Purpose Of The Content Audit
As soon as you know what you want to get out of a content audit, you can start doing one. First, it’s essential to understand what exactly a content audit is. A content audit is an in-depth analysis of all of your online and offline content, including:
- Your website (including blog posts)
- Social media channels
- Any other online platforms where you share information about your brand or business
The goal of this process is for you to determine how much information exists within each category. It’s also important to identify what types of information are there so that it can be organized according to priority.
2. Define the Intent Behind Your Content
Before you finish a piece of content, it’s essential to define its purpose. What’s the goal of this piece? Who will it be for? What does it want to achieve? You need to answer these questions before making any other considerations about your content.
For example, suppose you’re writing an article about how to make the perfect cup of coffee. Also, you intend to educate people on how they can save time in their morning routine while teaching them to prepare an excellent beverage that they enjoy drinking every day.
This definition of intent will guide you as you write and edit the article. Essentially, it should give directions to readers who have never made coffee before. It should also include step-by-step instructions on how they can easily make it. Nevertheless, you can see from this example how important it is to take your audience and the intent of your content into account.
3. Keep Track of All the URLs You Need To Audit
If you’re using a tool to crawl and audit your links, it’s best to use it for tracking. It’ll save you the trouble of keeping track of URLs manually. However, if your audit is conducted on a large scale, then track all the URLs in a spreadsheet so they can be accessed quickly and sorted by priority.
For example, if there are 10 websites on which you’re doing content audits, and each website has 100 pages, you should create a spreadsheet with 200 rows representing one URL. Next, you can put all the URLs into this spreadsheet. This makes it easier for you to keep track of all the URLs.
4. Look at Traffic, Search Rankings, Social Shares and Backlinks
Look at the amount of traffic each piece of content is getting. If you’ve got a large audience, this may not be as important to look at. However, if you’re trying to grow your audience, find out what content your users like. You can use that information as a starting point for creating new content.
Significantly, by using SEO research tools, you can find out what keywords people search for when they arrive on your website. This will help determine which topics you should focus on to drive more users back to your website.
Furthermore, take note of how many shares each piece of content gets on social media channels. You want this number to be as high as possible so that more people can find out about your business through their friends’ recommendations.
5. Audit All Pages on the Site
Once you’ve completed your audit, you must go through each page on your site and verify that it’s configured as desired. While some pages may not need much work, others may require a few tweaks. If there are any issues with these pages during the audit process, ensure you address them. After that, you can move on to the next section of this checklist, which is content creation.
6. Focus on Analytics
A comprehensive content strategy is only as good as the data on which it’s based. Without analytics and reporting, you won’t be able to measure how efficient your efforts are or be able to adjust accordingly.
Essentially, analytics will help you identify trends in the performance of your content so that you can better understand what works and what doesn’t. Also, your analytics will help guide your future decisions about where to invest resources with the most significant impact.
7. Gauge Your SEO Health
It’s a great idea to do a health check on your site. Therefore, these are some of the most important things to look at:
- Broken links
- Duplicate content
- Metadata (title tags and meta descriptions)
- Internal linking (links between pages)
- Broken HTML or CSS mobile-friendliness
8. Identify Opportunities for Merging Old Posts
Identify opportunities for merging, consolidating, retiring and deleting old pages or posts. You can also look at the number of pages on your site and consider whether they can be merged into one page. This will help reduce clutter on your site, making it easier for users to find what they need and improving the overall user experience.
Additionally, you should also consider consolidating duplicate pages and categories, and tags with similar content. Also, look at old blog posts or articles that haven’t been updated in a long time or haven’t received any comments recently. This will help you assess if these posts or articles are still relevant.
Then, you can evaluate if they could be updated with current information by rewriting them. You may also want to consider whether the information deserves its own category instead of being buried within an existing post or page on your website. Having multiple pages about an issue isn’t necessarily better than just one page covering aspects of the subject in detail.
Conclusion
Content audits aren’t fun, but they’re inescapable. If you want to see your content succeed, you need to be willing to put the required work into it.
Make sure you have a plan and a system before you start so that you stay on track and don’t get overwhelmed by the amount of work ahead of you. The process can take some time, but it’ll pay off in the long run when your content is more effective than ever.