Content Audit: Best Practices and Tools Shared by Experts

Content was, is and will be the king of the SEO world, as long as people rely on search engines to find information.

Having said that, creating content for the sake of it, can only take you so far. You need to have high-quality content that is engaging, and SEO-friendly to impress your audience and search engines.

In order to ensure that the content on your website and any other branded content off-site is meeting these criteria, you will need to run periodic checks.

How you can go about it, and what things you should consider is what we will be covering in this guide, with a lot of help and input from experts.

What is a Content Audit?

It is no news that content plays an important role in your website. It highlights the most crucial pieces of information that you offer on your website through your blogs, landing pages, and more.

With so much importance assigned to content, it should come as no surprise that periodic audit of content is unavoidable. What exactly does it entail, you ask?

Let’s start with the definition — a content audit is a detailed analysis of all the content assets on your website, with the aim of identifying the strengths and weaknesses of your current content strategy. More importantly, content audits will empower you to assess how your content is performing and the improvements necessary for it to rank well.

That said, website content audits have to be carried out in the right manner in order to ensure that you are able to leverage the insights generated from them effectively. Remember, the outcomes of your content audits and SEO audits will alter and empower the actions and tasks in your SEO strategy and content marketing strategy.

But why is there so much ado about content audits? What is its importance for your brand? 

Great questions! Let’s seek answers to them in the following section.

Importance of Conducting Content Audits

If you are trying to gauge why you need to conduct audits and why you need to know so much about them, there are three questions that you are primarily seeking answers to:

• Which content pieces are performing very well?
• Which topics does your audience engage with most and which ones are you not addressing?
• Which content pieces should you bid adieu to?

With these questions in mind, here are some of the primary benefits of a content audit that you should be targeting —

Identify Content Gaps

If you post content regularly, you may have a large repository of content covering various topics related to your products or services. You may feel pleased about it until you discover that your competitor is doing better. They are covering more topics and types of content than you ever thought of, and are generating better results from them.

So, what went wrong?

You did not audit your content — that’s what went wrong. With periodic SEO content audits, you will be able to recognise which keywords your competitors are ranking for and have the opportunity of adding them to your strategy.

“After grouping content in different pillars, you can identify from your support and sales team what topics you are missing, but you didn’t identify them with SEO tools. By talking with customer facing roles, you can get unique insights for content gaps which can help convert new paying customers.”

Evaldas Mockus, VP of Growth at Omnisend

Say, your SaaS business has a repository of content related to your product and industry. However, you discover from your customer service team that your customers would find how-to articles on some of your complicated features useful. This is a content gap that you should definitely address to market your SaaS business right.

What’s more, content gaps are not just about the topics that you are not covering, but also the different types of search intents that you are missing out on covering as well. Your content strategy can not holistically perform unless you profile your audience, and understand their requirements.

With the help of a detailed content gap analysis, you will be able to identify and address any content gaps that exist in your overall content strategy and empower it to perform even better than it currently does.

Optimise Content to Perform Better

If you know anything about the process of producing high-quality content, you may know the wonders that proofreading can do for it. The same logic applies to content audits as well.

See, when you revisit your content after a while, and analyse it based on objective and subjective parameters, you will want to address several points and optimise your content better.

Not to forget, keywords are a fickle domain in SEO. The keywords for which your content is performing very well right now, may not necessarily be as useful a few months or years down the line. Here, you may want to integrate keyword research into the process. In such cases, auditing your content for the right keywords, and other SEO aspects help you optimise and position it for better success on the SERPs.

Remove Thin or Outdated Content

You would be surprised at the number of websites and brands that hold on to any kind of content they have ever posted for dear life — be it thin or completely outdated and irrelevant.

Having such content on your website, or worse, having such content rank can hurt your website’s credibility. Eventually, such content will prove counterproductive to your SEO goals and performance.

Conducting a periodic content audit, helps you maintain a record of such content pieces. Even if you do not decide to remove a piece of content right away, labelling it as something to be removed will help you prioritise it when the time comes.

Remember, doing so will ensure that your readers never come across any piece of content from your Magento or WordPress website that is anything short of high quality.

How Do You Conduct a Successful Content Audit?

With us so far?

Great! Then you know what content audits are and why they are so important. Now for the actionable part! Make no mistake — content audit is a difficult and time-consuming process but following the right process for it will ensure that you do not waste too much time or resources.

So, how do you go about conducting an effective content audit? Let’s find out! 

Step 1: Set Goals and Objectives

The key to any successful strategy is its ability to stay true to its purpose. So, the process of conducting a content audit too will begin with setting goals and objectives. Doing so will ensure that you have set benchmarks to guide your content audit and overall content marketing strategy.

Not only this but with clear and defined objectives guiding your content audit, you are more likely to have it go the way you plan.

The key to setting the right goals and objectives for your content audit is to reflect on the key performance indicators for your strategy. What business goals are you trying to achieve with your content? What are the metrics you want to measure and how well do you want to perform on it?

“First and foremost, you'll need to have a solid understanding of your website's goals and objectives, as well as your target audience. This will help you identify which types of content are most valuable to your business, and which areas of your site are most in need of improvement.”

Robert Katai, Marketing & Communication Manager at Creatopy

Say, your goal is to make your content on the SERPs. In this case, your content audit should primarily focus on identifying web pages that have the potential to rank higher. You may also want to identify the pages and content that are weighing down your website. Your content audit should also be able to check whether you have enough and the right internal links.

Step 2: Categorise Content

Once your goals and objectives are ready, your next step is to take inventory of all your pages. Depending on the nature of your website, you may have an array of different kinds of pages such as landing pages, blogs, comparison pages, product pages and more.

At this point, it is important to acknowledge that analysing the performance of your landing pages and blogs cannot follow the same process. With defined categories, you will be able to define specific metrics to analyse the performance of different kinds of web pages.

“Additionally, you'll need to have a comprehensive inventory of all of your website's content, including blog posts, product pages, landing pages, and any other pages that are part of your site. This can be a time-consuming process, but it's absolutely essential for conducting a thorough content audit.”

Robert Katai

Having your sitemap handy will help you in this process. Moreover, having a content audit tool to aid your efforts also bodes well. Most content audit tools will help you categorise content and audit specific categories of content individually to generate the best results.

Depending on what you want to achieve with your content, you can also catalogue your content into different kinds of categories such as —

• Content Format
• Topic Clusters
• Author
• Number of Words (short-form or long-form)

Search intent 

When asked about the factors that help in strategically assessing the pieces to perform a content audit on, Forest Zubaly, Content Marketing Manager at Intel Corporation replies, “Popularity and relevancy”.

Forest Zubaly

Indeed, these two factors should be considered even when you are categorising content to be audited.

Step 3: Track Key Metrics to Analyse Data

Once you have categorised your content and are ready to start auditing it, you need to ensure that you have a list of key metrics ready to aid your efforts. To be more specific, you will need to assign key metrics to every category of content so that you can analyse their performance effectively.

For instance, when you are analysing the performance of landing pages, you will want to analyse metrics such as the conversion rate, bounce rate, engagement, and the like.

Whereas, when you are analysing the performance of your blogs, you will want to analyse metrics such as time spent on the page, SERP ranking, number of keywords it is indexed for, and the like.

Of course, some metrics may remain common, but you will be unable to generate highly detailed and useful insights if you do not have the right metrics associated with specific content categories.

Step 4: Make Tweaks to Your Content Strategy

You have successfully generated some helpful insights regarding your content and its performance. While several of them indicate the successful implementation of your content strategy, some things may not be working as you planned.

The time has come for you to make the necessary changes to your content strategy. A content audit is nothing but a way for you to empower your overall marketing strategy. Equipped with insights about your data and content, you can successfully tweak your strategy, and change the way you try to appeal to your audiences.

“When we deal with anything content marketing for our clients, we start with a content audit. It gives us a better idea of where they stand currently, and what needs to be done. The weaknesses exposed in the content audit are usually the first things we address for a client in any campaign.”

Hardy, Founder at Supple Digital

You need to be open to tweaking your strategy, take note of whatever works for your website, implement those aspects, and get rid of aspects that might be proving counterproductive. What’s more, you will need to repeat this process periodically and ensure that you are carrying out activities that will help you meet your company’s goals.

Measuring Efficacy of Different Kinds of Content

We have discussed quite a bit about the importance of measuring the effectiveness of different kinds of content, but exactly how do you go about it?

Well, that’s what we are going to discuss in this section.

Core Content Pages

Not all pages on your website are made equal. Your core content pages are the ones that contain the most important information about your company. These include pages that contain your NAP information, necessary details for a prospective customer to get to know your company, and more.

More than their ability to rank, you are looking for accurate and easily understandable information in your core content pages. For some companies that use their website simply as a front desk and a way to communicate important information to customers, having the right information to attract the target audience is key.

“We keep a close eye on the mix of leads, new users, and customers, as well as page views and pages per session generated by our key content pages through organic search. Though some prospects do convert into paying customers right away, others, despite being qualified, may not immediately take the next steps — and enter a nurturing pipeline (because they’ll potentially convert down the road).”

Jon Davis, Content Marketing Manager at OnPay

If you sell your product or service online or even communicate with your target audience through your website, these pages need not be at the very top of your priority list when conducting a content audit.

Product/Service Pages

Your product and service pages are the most significant parts of your website — regardless of the industry you operate in. These pages not only need to contain content that helps you customers make buying decisions, but also be optimised so that they rank on the SERPs. 

After all, if your customers never discover these key landing pages, how will you leverage them to land conversions?

“To properly evaluate how effective and successful a service page is, you need to know what its goals are. Are you looking to generate enquiries, encourage people to start trials, or to buy a product? Once you've got that, you can track KPIs like conversion rates. That will lead you to better understand the cost of customer acquisition, too.”

James Tennant, Founder at Converge

Apart from this, you should also ensure that all the elements and aspects of your website content are poised to perform the way you intend them to. Check whether they will help you get the kind of conversions that you are looking for.

Lisa Loeffler,  suggests paying attention to the following when auditing content for service pages:

• “User experience: Ensure a clean layout and design that is easy to read and navigate.
• Service listings and descriptions: Use clear, accessible language that avoids industry jargon and is understandable by a diverse audience.
• Compelling visuals: Include product images, graphs, or diagrams to help users better visualise your offerings.
• Explainer video: Incorporate a video that highlights your products and services or demonstrates the experience of working with your company.
• Clear call-to-action (CTA): Guide users to take the next step, whether it's contacting you or making a purchase.”

Lisa Loeffler, Principal & Founder at Genuine Media.

Apart from this, you will also need to keep in mind the key metrics that you should be monitoring. Some of the top metrics that companies consider while running a content audit on their product/service pages include page views, bounce rate, click-through rate, and conversion rate.

Website Blogs

Now for the content repository of your website — your blog section. It is crucial to audit content for this section specifically because it is likely to contain the biggest chunk of content on your website, and it will keep growing. Over time, you will have a lot of content pieces that are either outdated, no longer relevant, or useful. You need a blog content audit to weed such pieces out.

When asked about measuring the efficacy of website blog posts with the help of a content audit,

”To evaluate the effectiveness of a website blog post, several metrics should be considered. These metrics include:

• Is the page live and accessible to users?
• Organic page views to measure the traffic and visibility of the post.
• Bounce rate to indicate the percentage of visitors who leave the page without engaging with it.
• Average time on page to assess the level of user engagement with the content.
• Total clicks to see how many users have clicked on the post.
• Impressions to measure how many times the post has been seen by users.
• Top 3 organic keywords to understand the relevance of the post to the target audience.
• Revenue generated from the post, if applicable.”

Yagmur Simsek, Co-Founder of Global Cyber Security Network

Conducting periodic content audits will enable you to get rid of such content, and help you optimise the ones that you decide to retain on your website. Website blogs offer companies the opportunity to educate their customers and guide their journey forward.

Video Content

Contrary to popular belief, content audits are not limited to just your textual content — they definitely extend to your other media-heavy content. Today, brands have to leverage videos to expand their reach to their audience across various platforms, and rightly so.

For video content, assessing whether they are loading as intended, and are optimised for the ideal user experience and SEO performance is crucial. 

Another aspect that you may want to incorporate in your video content audit is whether your videos are accessible to audiences of different spectrums — this means taking into account accessibility, ease of understanding, engagement, and conciseness.

Let’s not forget that by adding videos to your web pages, you can seamlessly increase the amount of time a user will spend on your website. 

“More importantly, video content can have a gigantic impact on a page’s search rankings. I’ve personally noticed content pages jumping up a couple of positions on Google shortly after the addition of video, and those pages also begin showing up in Google’s “Videos” tab, increasing their visibility even further. Higher search rankings naturally mean more traffic to those pages”

Ben Goldstein, Chief Content Strategist at Lovable Marketing

Content Audit: Best Practices & Tips

Now that you understand the basics of content audit, and the aspects to consider when running a content audit for different types of web pages on your site, you are ready to learn more about the practices and hacks that you should be taking into consideration.

Get Your Prerequisites Sorted

If you have been paying attention to everything in this guide so far, this may seem a tad repetitive, but the importance of having the prerequisites in place before you conduct a content audit cannot be overstated.

This includes having clear SMART objectives and goals for not only your content audits but also your website. You should also have a clear picture of who your target audience is, and their preferences in content before you go ahead and undertake any major changes.

Finally, it is important to have the tools that you want to use tested and ready before you initiate your content audits.

Address the Quick Wins First

Take any complicated situation or strategy into account, and one thing is undeniable — take up the simplest aspects that are in your control, and get them out of the way first. With the same thought, you should also actively target quick wins and low-hanging fruits in case of content audits.

“Quick wins in content marketing audits that deliver significant impact often involve technical adjustments: addressing broken links, optimising metadata, and enhancing content formatting all contribute to a more enjoyable user experience. It's crucial to assess both high-performing and outdated content: keep your website information current, consider incorporating new videos or statistics, and promote the updated content through your marketing channels to boost its visibility.”

Lisa Loeffler, Principal & Founder at Genuine Media.

Once you have run checks on all the technical requirements, and taken inventory of the different kinds of content on your website, you will also need to check whether all the crucial pages on your website have appropriate CTAs.

Determine Frequency of Audits

Once you have conducted a content audit successfully and have been able to leverage all the benefits it offers, you are going to want to do it again. After all, the key to running a successful content marketing strategy is measuring its performance periodically and monitoring the results.

“In terms of frequency, we recommend conducting a content audit at least once per year, or whenever there are significant changes to your website or business strategy. This will help ensure that your content remains relevant, engaging, and effective at driving business results.”

Robert Katai

Since content can get quickly outdated, or your content strategy might require significant changes, it is important to run periodic content audits. Not to forget, it is recommended that you run content audits before you make any amendments to your current content strategy.

Prioritise Content to be Audited

The next major aspect to be taken into account when you are running a content audit is prioritising the right content to be audited. If your website has been around for a while, but you have only just started posting blogs for the past few months, they do not need to be audited. You will be wasting a lot of time and resources if you do so.

Instead, prioritise the content that has been around for a while and needs revisiting. Revisit your high-performing pages to check what you did right, and the lowest-performing pages to check what you got wrong.

“First and foremost, you should prioritise content that is most closely aligned with your business goals and objectives. This may include content that drives the most traffic, generates the most leads, or has the highest conversion rates. You should also prioritise content that is most in need of improvement. This may include content that is outdated, poorly written, or doesn't align with your current brand messaging.”

Robert Katai

When you audit the right content for your website and implement insights from it, you will be able to harness its true potential and start generating results right away.

Consider Keyword Optimisation

Keywords, as we mentioned earlier, adhere to changing trends. A keyword that is performing great for your business may not be as valuable a few months down the road. This is the reason why optimising your content for the right keywords regularly is important.

The time when you make tweaks in your content after conducting a content audit is the right time to address such issues.

“Keyword optimization is crucial for ensuring that your content ranks well in search engine results pages (SERPs) for relevant search queries. This involves strategically using target keywords throughout your content, including in the page title, meta description, headings, and body text, without overusing or spamming them.”

Yagmur Simsek, Co-Founder of Global Cyber Security Network

Keyword optimisation can be the additional aspect that ensures that when you refresh your content, you are also positioning it right to perform well on the SERPs.

Pay Heed to Content Length and Quality

When we talk about enhancing the overall quality of a content piece or revamping it altogether, you will need to consider parameters such as its length and quality. While auditing your content, it is important to ask yourself if the length of the content justifies the topic at hand.

This goes both ways — if you end up having a long piece of content that rambles on and on about a narrowed-down topic, you risk it not being engaging anymore. On the flip side, if you have a very short content piece on a broad topic, it is a wasted opportunity and will not perform as well.

“Content length should be appropriate for your target keyword and audience, providing valuable information without being too lengthy or bloated. At this step, you may want to check what is the content length in the competing pages so that you can have a benchmark while analysing. Internal and external linking helps to improve the user experience and enhance the credibility and authority of your content. This includes internal links to other relevant pages on your website and high-quality external links to authoritative sources.”

Yagmur Simsek

Plus, a content audit is a good time to analyse whether a content piece is delivering its promised value and whether it is useful to your target audience. 

“High-quality content should be informative, engaging, and easy to read, with a clear hierarchy of information, well-structured and organised with headings, subheadings, and bullet points.”, adds Yagmur Simsek.

Additionally, ensure that your content addresses the search intent of the topic, and helps your target users in making decisions. That is the end goal after all, right?

Best Tools for Content Audits

Now, you already know that a competitive content audit is important, and makes a huge difference in the process of creating the perfect content strategy for your organisation. But you may have also realised that the process of running an actionable content audit is anything but easy.

There is good news here though — there are many tools out there that will basically automate most of the content audit process, saving you a lot of time and resources. We will be looking at three such website content audit tools that experts recommend, and that you can leverage for your content audits.

Screaming Frog

When you conduct a content audit, you will have multiple parameters to consider — SEO and otherwise. Screaming Frog SEO Spider is the best tool for content audits for this very reason. With a wide range of features that will empower you to find out all your SEO-related answers easily, Screaming Frog can automate the process and offer some powerful insights.

Right from auditing whether all your JavaScript-powered content is being crawled and rendered properly, to assessing if your content stands the test of Core Web Vitals and Page Speed, Screaming Frog can do it all.

Being a website crawler at its very core, Screaming Frog will evaluate each and every aspect of your website, including all its content and produce insights on what can be improved.

BuzzSumo

It is important to reiterate that content audit is not limited to just the content pieces on your website. It also includes all the social media and off-site content that you have in place. BuzzSumo is the right tool for the job when you want to run an audit on such content pieces.

BuzzSumo has the perfect features for you to audit all the content that you have socially shared. The tool will also enable you to find what kind of content pieces are performing for your competitors so that you can reverse engineer your content strategy for better results.

Ahrefs

When we discuss powerful SEO tools, it is no surprise that the mention of Ahrefs comes up. It is, after all, a powerhouse of a tool with features that are right for analysing a wide array of SEO functions. But the reason we are mentioning it in the context of content audits is simple — it offers several tools and features that help you get a holistic view of how your content is performing SEO-wise.

For instance, if you are seeking to identify and amend content gaps through your content audit, the Content Gap feature of Ahrefs will help you do just that. The tool lets you see which keywords your competitors are already ranking for, but are not.

“When auditing content, I stick with tools such as Ahrefs and SEMRush because they make it simple to export (and concentrate efforts on) content that’s within striking distance of the first page of Google. These platforms are a difference-maker for ongoing efforts to refresh content and help us zero in on pages that should be at the top of our to-do list during the audit process.”

Jon Davis

Plus, right from the get-go, you will be able to get a detailed picture of your top pages and content pieces, and what they are missing. To sum it up, Ahrefs is a great tool for running content audits, as well as assessing and monitoring your content and SEO performance over time.

Handle Content Audits Like a Pro

By now, we are sure you have a better understanding of what content audits are, all they entail and the process you should follow to generate the best insights and results from it. Ensure to go through the best practices and tools recommended by experts to make the entire process of auditing content more effective and easier.

However, if you find yourself needing help with your content audit and want some professional help, get in touch with us and let’s discuss your requirements in detail.