Keeping your website content in top shape is important for achieving your business goals. But are you confident that your content is delivering results? That’s where a content audit comes in.
A content audit is an integral part of content strategy that helps you look at your existing content to determine what's working, what needs improvement, and what’s simply not pulling its weight. Plus, it helps you keep track of your top-performing posts and gives you insights into what content needs to be rewritten or removed.
When done right, a website audit can help you get more traffic, improve user engagement, and create an inventory for future content creation that aligns with your business goals. And while it may seem tedious and time-consuming, it isn’t as difficult as you might think.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through how to do a comprehensive content audit process on your own. Keep reading or click the links above to jump to your desired section.
What is Content Audit?
A content audit is basically taking a close look at each piece of content on your website to see how well it is performing, how relevant it is, and well it aligns with your business goals.
The content audit process goes beyond counting page visits; it’s about understanding which content is driving results, which pieces could use some improvement, and what should be removed altogether. Plus, it informs your future content strategy.
You can keep it simple, focusing just on your highest and lowest-performing pages, or you can go for a comprehensive content audit of your entire site, including:
- Landing pages
- Service pages
- Product pages
- Case Studies
- Blog posts
The ultimate goal of content audit is to improve site content and spot opportunities for improvement across your website. Doing this regularly makes sure your content stays up-to-date, optimized for search engines, and valuable to your audience.
What Is The Purpose Of A Content Audit?
The main reason to do a content audit is to re-evaluate your website content and see how effective it is through analytics. It helps you understand how each piece is performing and contributing to your overall goals – whether that’s improving SEO, increasing brand awareness, or guiding potential customers through your sales funnel.
A content audit provides insight into which pages are performing well and which web pages need to be optimized. It can also help you:
- Create an inventory of all the content on your site.
- Find content gaps and new topics or formats to try that could better meet your audience's needs.
- Update and improve site content to make the reader experience better.
- Spot and fix content issues, like low readability, missing meta titles, duplicate content, and keyword cannibalization.
- Highlight your best-performing content to use in social media and marketing campaigns.
- Optimize your website accessibility so it meets current digital accessibility standards.
Most importantly, it helps you understand what content topics and formats resonate most with your audience. These insights will inform your future content strategy.
In short, regular website audits ensure that your content stays relevant, up-to-date, and in line with best SEO practices. This not only keeps users on your site longer but also boosts your SERP rankings and content ROI.
If you're looking to optimize your content, improve user experience and drive more traffic to your site, a comprehensive content audit might be just what you need.
Benefits of a Content Audit
Whether you’re revamping your content marketing strategy or simply updating your website's content, doing a comprehensive content audit to clear out content that is no longer useful is essential.
A content audit will help you optimize your content, improve your web page rankings, and make your site easier to navigate and free of errors. According to Semrush’s 2023 State of Content Marketing Report, 49% of marketers said that content audits and updates helped increase website traffic and improved their SERP rankings.
Here are some of the benefits content audits offer:
1-No More Guessing:
Content audits give you data-driven insights into which content is hitting the mark and which isn’t doing so great at driving traffic or generating leads.
You’ll know what types of content, topics, and formats your audience loves so you can create more of it.
Website audits also help avoid wasting time creating content around keywords that don’t bring results. It takes out the guesswork and helps you make informed decisions to get the most out of your content.
2-Enhance User Experience:
A content audit helps you make sure your content is easy to navigate, relevant, and valuable to your audience.
When you optimize your content, fix broken links, improve technical SEO metrics like page speed and mobile-friendliness, you make your website more user-friendly. This leads to more engagement and keeps your visitors from bouncing away.
3-Improve Your Site’s SEO Performance
One of the biggest perks of a content audit is how it impacts SEO. Content audit helps you identify and improve underperforming site content. This includes updating outdated information, refining keyword usage, and improving on-page SEO elements like meta titles, metadata and headers. This all helps boost your website's search engine rankings.
If you are looking for technical SEO experts to improve site content and overall SEO Performance, Legiit is a great place to find them!
4-Check Your Internal Links:
Internal linking is key to helping visitors (and search engines) find their way around your site. A content audit helps you review your internal linking structure to make sure it’s optimized for both search engines and users.
This step of the content audit process can show you where you can improve link equity and make your site easier to navigate.
5-Optimize Your Content Distribution
Your website content doesn’t just live on your site—it’s often shared across social media platforms. A content audit can help you understand how well your content performs on social media and identify ways to make sure it reaches the right audience.
6-Maintain Your Brand and Authority
Every piece of content sends a message. Do you want that message to suggest you're outdated, careless, or inefficient? Of course not.
Website audits help you keep your design and tone consistent, maintain information accuracy, and deliver updated, high-quality content. This not only boosts your credibility but also establishes you as an authority in your field and builds trust with your audience.
How To Do A Comprehensive Content Audit? Website Audit Steps
Now that you understand the importance of audit let’s go through the content audit process to do one effectively.
Define Your Goals & Objectives
Before you start, be clear about what you want to achieve with your content audit. This will help you plan and execute it better.
Decide what you’re trying to measure and which metrics you want to analyze. For example, you might want to identify your top-performing pages, which pages need to be optimized for SERPs or find out why you're not getting conversions or leads you want.
This will guide the entire process and help you identify where you're doing well and where you can improve site content.
Here are some common goals people have when they decide to do a website audit:
1. Improving SEO Results:
The most common goal for content audits is to improve SEO results. This means you might want to focus on identifying and fixing seo issues, both technical and content-related.
By thoroughly examining your content, you can
- Check for outdated, duplicate content, keyword cannibalization, missed keyword opportunities, etc.
- Optimize your content for relevant, targeted keywords that align with user search intent.
- Organize your website content so SERP bots can easily crawl and index it.
- Analyze internal and external links, remove broken links, and identify new linking opportunities.
This increases the chance of appearing in organic search results, leading to more traffic and better online visibility.
When SEO is your primary focus, pay attention to metrics like average keyword ranking, organic traffic and the backlink profile, etc.
Or you can hire the best professionals to conduct a website audit and improve your site's SEO Performance on Legiit.
2. Increase Your Audience Engagement:
Beyond driving traffic, it’s crucial to see how visitors interact with your website. A content audit helps you:
- Identify which type of content resonate most with your audience
- Evaluate how content is presented on your website (text, bullets/lists, graphics, etc.)
- What pages generate engagement (clicks, likes, comments) and find ways to increase it.
If engagement is your priority, focus on metrics like page views, average time on page, clicks, and bounce rate.
3. Improve Conversion Rates:
Your ultimate goal is to improve your site content to drive conversions.
Even if your website gets decent traffic, it doesn’t mean much if that traffic isn’t turning into sales or leads.
An audit will help you evaluate your content in relation to your sales funnel and make sure it’s optimized to convert at each stage. Keep an eye on metrics like conversion rates and click-through rates (CTR).
Create an Inventory and Organize Content
Once you’ve set your content audit goals, it is time to collect all the published content on your site. This includes everything—blog posts, landing pages, product pages, multimedia, and more. The goal is to see what you’ve got so you can start evaluating each piece.
Create a catalog or inventory of all existing content in an organized spreadsheet. This will help you keep track of changes and performance along the way.
Start with collecting URLs of each page and organize your content into categories, such as;
- Page Type
- Page Titles
- Content Type and Format
- Target Audience
- Linked CTAs
- Word Count and Author
- Date Last Modified
This may take some time, but organizing your content like this will help you evaluate its performance more effectively.
Trying to track every metric for each piece of content can feel overwhelming. Use your goals to decide which categories to focus on during the website audit.
A content audit template (CoSchedule Content Audit Template) can make it easier to gather your content inventory (manually) and kickstart your content audit process. You can also use online tools like Screaming Frog SEO Spider (or any other tool) to collect this data automatically.
Analyze Your Data
Now that your content is organized, it’s time to analyze your data closely and see how well it’s actually performing. This part of the website audit is where you’ll assess each piece of content for quality, consistency, and overall effectiveness.
For simplicity, let’s divide the content audit process into two broad categories: qualitative and quantitative.
Qualitative Website Audit Steps:
This step is all about digging into the on-page SEO elements of each piece of content to make sure everything is fine-tuned for optimal performance. Here’s what to check:
- URL: Is it clean, descriptive, and SEO-friendly?
- Page Type: What kind of page is it? (e.g., blog post, landing page)
- Page Title: Does the title accurately reflect the content’s purpose and include relevant keywords?
- Content-Type: What type of content is it? A blog post? How-to guide? Review article?
- Content Format: Is it a text-only post? Does it contain any images or videos?
- Word Count: Is the length appropriate for the topic and audience?
- Focus Keyword: Is there a clear focus keyword, and is it used effectively?
- Meta Descriptions: Do they accurately describe the page’s content and include keywords?
- Headlines: Are the headlines compelling and aligned with SEO best practices?
- Images and Alt Tags: Are images relevant and optimized with descriptive alt tags?
- Last Updated: When was the content last updated? Is it due for a refresh?
- Average Rank: How has the content been ranking on search engines over time?
- Author: Who wrote the content? Does their expertise enhance credibility?
You might also want to analyze your content for:
- Content Quality (EAT): Does the content demonstrate expertise, authority, and trustworthiness?
- Accuracy and Freshness: Is the information current and accurate?
- Spelling and Grammar: Are there any mistakes that need fixing?
- Readability: Is the content easy to read? Does it flow well?
- Duplicate Content: Does your website have duplicate content on different pages?
Quantitative Content Audit Process
Now that you have a clear overview of your site's structure and goals, let’s collect some quantitative data to identify areas of weakness and opportunities for improvement. For website audit purposes, you might want to analyze metrics like:
Organic Traffic
Organic traffic refers to the number of visitors your pages attract without paid promotions, primarily from search engines like Google. This metric is vital for assessing your SEO effectiveness, as a higher volume of organic traffic typically leads to more conversions.
To track how much organic traffic your pages are receiving, you can use tools like Google Analytics.
Keyword Ranking
The next step is to check where your content pages are currently ranking for their primary target keywords.
Are they appearing in the top three results? The top 10 or 20? Or are they further down on the search engine results pages (SERPs)?
This info is crucial for evaluating your page’s performance and figuring out which ones need optimization. To get this ranking data, use tools like Semrush’s Position Tracking tool.
Backlink Analysis
Backlinks, links from other websites to yours, are one of the key ranking factors. So, it is important to gather backlink data for each web page and see the total number of backlinks for your main content sections.
This data will help you identify content that might be underperforming due to a lack of quality backlinks. To get this data, use tools like Semrush’s Backlink Analytics tool.
Technical SEO
Lastly, don't forget to check the technical SEO health of your content pages and your entire website.
Technical SEO covers behind-the-scenes elements that influence how well search engines can crawl, index, and rank your content. Even the best content won’t perform well if technical issues are holding your site back.
So, you need to ensure there are no technical issues hurting the performance of your content. These issues could include:
- Pages that take too long to load
- Content that doesn’t display properly on mobile devices.
- Not having a correctly configured SSL certificate for HTTPS.
- Having large sections of duplicate content across multiple pages on your site.
- Links within your site that return 404 errors, meaning the pages can’t be found.
- Accidentally using noindex meta tags that prevent important pages from being indexed and appearing in search results.
To identify whether your site is affected by any of these issues, use tools like Semrush’s Site Audit tool. Take note of any technical issues affecting the rest of your site, prioritize fixing them, and then proceed to the next step.
Alternatively, you can hire technical seo professionals at Legiit to run a thorough website audit and optimize your site's SEO.
Develop an Action Plan
Once your website audit spreadsheet is fully updated with data, the final step is to determine the appropriate action for each page based on its performance and relevance. Here’s how to decide whether to keep, update, merge, or delete content:
To Keep Content As Is
If a page is already meeting or exceeding your SEO and engagement goals, it’s a strong candidate to keep as-is. Likewise, if the page generates substantial organic traffic and aligns well with your traffic goals, it might not need any changes.
However, you’d still check that the content remains accurate and relevant. Regularly check and improve site content for outdated information so it aligns with current industry trends and user expectations.
Update or Optimize Your Content
If the page isn’t meeting your set performance goals, or maybe it contains outdated content, it’s time for an update.
Fresh, accurate content that satisfies user search intent is key to maintaining user engagement and SEO effectiveness.
Mark the checklist if it is comprehensive, clear, and formatted for readability with subheadings, short sentences, and bullet points where appropriate.
Also, update on-page SEO elements, such as meta tags, headers, and keywords. Evaluate the page’s backlink profile and address any technical SEO issues that may affect performance.
Consolidate and Redirect Pages
If you have multiple pages covering similar topics or keywords, consider merging them into a single, authoritative page. This prevents internal competition for the same keywords and strengthens your site’s SEO.
Combining content also helps concentrate link equity to one canonical page, improving its ability to rank higher.
Delete the Page
If a page has minimal to no organic traffic, lacks backlinks, and doesn’t target a crucial keyword or topic for your business, deletion might be warranted.
On a similar note, if the content no longer aligns with your business objectives or provides no value to users, removing it could be beneficial.
But before you delete, make sure the page isn’t driving significant traffic or conversions from other sources. If necessary, redirect any remaining traffic to relevant, high-performing pages on your site.
As you assess each page, assign the appropriate action—keep, update, consolidate, or delete—to each URL in your website audit spreadsheet. Prioritize tasks based on their potential impact on your SEO and user engagement goals.
By systematically applying these actions, you’ll ensure that your content remains relevant, optimized, and aligned with your business objectives, leading to better performance and a more effective website.
Conclusion
Conducting a comprehensive content audit might seem like a big task, but it’s one that pays off in the long run. By regularly reviewing and optimizing your website’s content, you’ll ensure that everything you publish is relevant, engaging, and aligned with your business goals. This process not only improves your site’s SEO performance but also enhances user experience, helping you attract and retain more visitors. Whether you’re looking to boost traffic, increase conversions, or simply keep your content fresh, a well-executed content audit is a powerful tool that can drive significant results for your business. So, take the time to audit your content—your website (and your audience) will thank you for it.
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