Most businesses now do some form of content marketing.
But many have no idea how content is performing.
A content audit can help you understand how each piece of content performs, as well as guide you to make improvements or change strategy when content is consistently underperforming.
It can also help you prevent issues around content duplication by keeping all your content in one place.
In this blog, you’ll learn, step-by-step, how to conduct a thorough content audit.
What is a content audit?
A content audit is an in-depth review of all the content on your website, including how each piece of content is performing (currently and over time).
This isn’t just about putting all your content into one place like an inventory.
It’s about clearly analysing content performance down to each individual piece to inform your long-term content strategy for creating new content, as well as updating and improving historical content.
Why are content audits important?
Without a content audit, you might never know which content is performing well and which isn’t, or needs to be updated, merged or removed.
Without this vital information, any decisions you make about your content strategy are based on guesswork.
You could make changes to a well-performing service page that reduces its search visibility.
You could make changes to blogs that impact how well they rank or convert. You could delete content that’s performing well because you don’t think it’s relevant.
You could delete pages with valuable backlinks, wrecking the search performance of your entire site.
Or you could end up duplicating content topics, again damaging your search performance.
With an in-depth content audit, you have the data you need to make informed decisions that will improve your content performance over time without worrying that you’re making bad decisions.
How to do a content audit (step by step)
Define a goal for the audit
As with anything to do with content, the first thing to do is define what the goal of your content audit is (as this will determine what you measure as “content success”).
For example, are looking to:
- Improve search visibility
If you are, most of your audit will be based on judging SEO performance of content (rankings, traffic, etc).
2. Get better engagement
This means you’ll be looking at metrics like time on page, scroll depth, clicks and interactions (watched video, etc).
3. Earn higher conversion rates
In this case, you’ll be looking for how many people take a given action on your website (sign up for a newsletter, request a demo, make a purchase, etc).
List every content page on your website
For a content audit, you’re mostly going to be focused on some key pages that form part of your content strategy. These usually include:
- Website pages
- Landing pages
- Pillar pages
- Blogs
- Case studies
- Interactive content (calculators, etc).
You can include other pages, like your “About Us” page, if you want to.
But these aren’t likely to be impacted by the results of your audit, so we tend not to include them.
You can find the URLs on your website using Google Search Console.
Just go to Indexing → Pages → indexed pages
You can then export all the URLs of the pages currently indexed by Google on your website into a CSV file:
To put everything in one place, create a content audit sheet using Google Sheets, or Excel (or you can borrow ours) with the following columns:
URL
Copy and paste the URL of the page as it appears in the search bar of Google or Bing (you can copy and paste all your indexed URLs from Google Search Console as shown earlier to save time)
Heading
The heading/ title of the content
Topic
The overall topic or theme of the content. For example: SEO/house buying/self-assessment returns
Content type
What type of content does this fall into? For example, is it a blog? A service or product?
Funnel stage
What stage of the buyer journey does the content fit into? Top, middle or bottom? This can be useful when looking at where the gaps are in your content marketing funnel.
Total traffic
How much traffic does your content generate from all sources? Organic, social, direct, etc
Organic traffic
How much traffic does your content get just from organic sources (i.e. search engines like Google or Bing)
Current ranking (for top keyword)
What search position does the content hold for its primary keyword only (the main keyword you’re targeting)? If it doesn’t have a primary keyword, this is a good example of how an audit can help identify improvements for your content
Backlinks
How many links are pointing to your website from other websites?
On-page SEO
Are there any on-page SEO fixes that need to be made?
Technical SEO
Are there any technical SEO fixes that need to be made to the page?
Date created
What date was the content created originally?
Date last edited
When was the last time the piece of content was edited?
Action
What action (if any) needs to be taken on the piece of content.
When you’ve compiled this, your table will look like this:
We recommend including recently created content in this list so you have everything in one place. But be sure to mark the “date created” column with the relevant date, as this could impact any decision you make on a piece of content.
For example, for SEO or lead generation, something that you’ve only recently created may not have had the time it needs to get traction with search engines or users, so it wouldn’t make sense to make changes too early, even if it’s not performing well straight away.
Analyse page performance
Overall traffic
How much traffic does your content generate from all sources? Organic, social, direct, etc
Organic traffic
How much traffic does your content get just from organic sources (i.e. search engines like Google or Bing)
How much traffic does your content get just from organic sources (i.e. search engines like Google or Bing)
Primary keyword
What’s the main keyword your content is targeting? If it doesn’t have one, this is a good example of how an SEO content audit can instantly find improvements you can make to your content.
Keyword ranking (primary keyword)
Your content may rank for multiple keywords, but you want to focus on the visibility for your main keyword (if you have one)
Number of backlinks
Backlinks are the number of other websites with a link pointing to your page. This will help you see if a page is underperforming because it doesn’t have enough backlinks. Or if you have backlinks, it might be that you don’t want to delete the page, but see how else you can improve it.
On-page SEO
On-page SEO is the technical side of your page that can impact how easy it is for search engines to understand what your page is about, crawl it, and rank it properly. Elements of on-page SEO can include:
Title tags
Meta descriptions
Headers (H1, H2)
Content quality
Keywords
URL
You’ll want to check that each element of the page’s on-page SEO is optimised (as this could impact SEO rankings)
If the page needs work, mark this as “NO” in the audit sheet to indicate there’s room for improvement
Technical SEO
Assessing technical SEO, you’re looking for duplicated content and broken links (those that go to a 404 redirect, or haven’t been redirected properly.
Slow site speed
Large file sizes or ignoring settings like lazy loading can slow your website down and hurt your core web vitals.
Slow site speed can impact the user experience and potentially damage search rankings.
Not mobile-friendly
Your site doesn’t display properly on mobile (tables or images are distorted, etc).
Security
Does the page have HTTPS and an SSL certificate?
Can it be indexed
Has Google indexed your page, and if not, why not? It could be that you’ve accidentally added a noindex tag.
If the page hasn’t been optimised properly for technical SEO, mark it as NO:
Date created
New content may not have been live long enough to be picked up in search engines, so it makes no sense to start making changes
Date last edited
If you’ve only just made improvements to a page, it might be that the changes haven’t had a chance to take effect yet, so it makes no sense to make more updates yet
Set out the next steps for each page
No action
Page is already seeing good results and has no further updates to add.
Update
You’ve identified pages that aren’t performing well, have on-page or technical SEO elements that need to be updated, or other issues that need to be resolved (like low-quality content). They don’t cross over any other topics or pages you have (duplicate content)
Merge/redirect
Content is a potential duplicate of another blog or page that could be cannibalising results. In this instance, choose the page that is performing the best (ranks higher, has more backlinks), incorporate elements of duplicate pages and then redirect other pages to this one as a new piece of content
Remove/redirect
Content might just not be working, has no traffic, no backlinks, or is covering a topic that is irrelevant to your business (important now with Google’s EEAT signals, meaning all content should be relevant to the main theme of the website).
Monitor for improvements
Once you’ve completed all the actions in your audit, continue to monitor results monthly to gauge what improvements (if any) have come from your work and continue to look at updates to underperforming pages.
Use Google Analytics, Search Console or a paid-for SEO tool like SEO Gets, Ahrefs, or Wincher to monitor keyword position, traffic, backlinks and conversions of content and benchmark the performance against your audit.
How regularly should you do a content audit?
This depends on how much content your website has, or how often you publish new content
For smaller websites or those that rarely publish new content, like blogs, then biannually or even annually can be enough just to spring clean pages and make improvements
If you have a larger website or publish new content regularly (especially if you publish new content every day), then quarterly content audits may be needed to keep your site performing well
What can you use to do a content audit?
Google Analytics
Use Google Analytics to assess traffic to your website, including where that traffic is coming from.
You can also use Google Analytics to review what people do when they get to your website, like converting or making a purchase.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console provides valuable information on the keywords your website ranks for, and is getting impressions and clicks on.
This can help guide decisions on page improvements, which keywords are improving and where future changes are needed.
It can also identify issues around page indexing and flag technical problems (including manual penalties).
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog helps to identify issues around duplicate content, index issues and low-quality content pages.
Ahrefs/SEMrush/Wincher/SErankings/SEOgets
There are lots of paid SEO tools that can help with your content audit.
These can help you track keyword performance, uncover content gaps you can target and identify current links and opportunities for future links.
Get help with a professional content audit
If you’re not seeing the results from your content marketing, it could be time for a professional content audit.
Our content marketing agency is experienced in conducting audits and creating content strategies based on data that improve your site’s visibility and increase sales and leads.
