You’re producing content. You know it’s high quality, but is it the correct content for your audience? Is it what your readers want to see? Unfortunately, as humans, we’re not perfect. Our content isn’t going to be perfect all the time. That’s why performing an SEO content audit every so often is so important.

When you perform an audit, you look at key performance indicators such as performance, missing keywords, and quality. Taking a second look helps you work towards a successful future. After you’re done, you’ll be able to answer these questions about your content:

  • Which content is performing the best?
  • Which topics are connecting with the audience?
  • Do any posts need a refresher or need to be removed?

Not only will you get a better understanding of your content (and understand what to do better in the future), you’ll also understand changes that will improve your marketing strategy. Not sure how to begin your audit? Follow this complete guide to auditing your SEO content.

Know What You Want

What are you trying to attain by doing this audit? Don’t just audit because you feel you need to—have a purpose behind your work. What are your goals and what are you trying to achieve? Here are some of the goals you may have for your audit:

  • You’re trying to improve your organic search
  • You’re looking for gaps in your content
  • You’re looking for pages that may need to be grouped together due to overlapped content
  • You need ideas for future content
  • You need to remove content that is no longer reflective of yours or your client’s business

Once you have a good idea of your goals, you’ll be able to put the audit into action.

Inventory Check

Before you start your audit, you need to know exactly what you’re working with. Start by taking inventory of your content. Since you’re auditing your content as opposed to your technical SEO, you need to crawl for indexable content.

You start with indexing all the indexable URLs. There are a few tools that you need to use for this step, including Screaming Frog and Google Analytics, and of course XML Sitemaps. Remove any URLs that contain:

  • Robots meta
  • Noindex tags
  • URLs with error codes
  • URLs blocked by robots.txt files

Remember that you’re not doing a technical audit—there’s no need to crawl every URL on your site!

Find Metrics

Once you’ve crawled all your URLs, you’ll get a report showing all your metrics. For example, you should get information regarding titles, descriptions, meta tags, links, traffic, and tons of others. In order to get this information, use a resource such as URL Profiler. Once you’ve done a scan with Screaming Frog, export “Internal All”—you use this in URL Profiler.

Here are the metrics you should be pulling from each URL:

  • Indexed pages: If a URL is non-indexed it may be poor in quality or uncrawled.
  • Unique content
  • Organic search traffic
  • Conversions
  • Internal links: Make sure the important pages have high-quality links.
  • External links
  • Mobile-friendliness and page speed

These can vary depending on your goals. You’ll also notice Screaming Frog will gather these SEO points for you:

  • Page Title
  • Target Keyword
  • Page Bounce Rate
  • Images Present
  • Broken Links

You may want to collect the following information (again, depending on your audit goals):

  • Word count
  • Assigned tags
  • Call to action

Before you’re able to access anything, make sure you’re only working with the data you need. You need to remove the following tabs from your spreadsheet from URL Profiler:

  • Screaming Frog and URL Profiler tabs
  • Content type
  • Status Code and Status: For this, you only need one of these.
  • Meta Keywords

Of course, any blank or duplicate tabs and columns can also be removed. This will help when you take the next step.

Analyze Data

After gathering all your data, you’re ready to get into the meat and potatoes of your audit—the analysis. To analyze your data, you need to set up a dashboard. Create one easily by adding two columns to your spreadsheet. One column should be labeled “Action” and the other “Details.” Use the “action” column to filter the action you’re taking, whether that be leave it, remove it, or improve it. The details column allows you to add any additional information to help you complete that action.

While you’re working through your audit, look out for any content-related issues that would result in a Google penalty. These would include:

  • Low-quality content: This means content with poor grammar, keyword stuffing, inaccurate, and simply not helpful information.
  • “Thin” Content: For example, this would be a blog post that only skimmed over discussion of a topic. Any 100% image-based content would be considered “thin” content.
  • Duplicate content: This could be duplicate content on other pages of your website or externally duplicated content like plagiarized content.

Those are some of the highlights, but there are tons of ways your website can be penalized based on your content. Learn more here.

The Takeaway

An audit shouldn’t be something you do on a whim or randomly—it should be done consistently and with purpose behind it. When you step back and take a look at the content of your website, you’re better able to make informed decisions about your marketing strategy. In the long run, you’ll save time and money, and you’ll improve your ROI.

While this is a great starting point, this isn’t going to work the same for everyone. You’ll adjust metrics and your spreadsheet based on your specific goals. Just by starting the audit, you’re on your way to improving your website and your business.

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