How to Properly Conduct a Content Audit?

Every website owner whose goal is to draw in visitors who are really interested in the offer should know how to conduct a content audit. It helps figure out which parts of the website are grabbing attention and which ones are falling flat. This insight lets you focus on improving popular content and working on the less engaging parts.

High-quality content is more likely to get shared and helps establish your website as a reliable source. And you wouldn’t know if your web content is actually trustworthy and detailed enough for your target audience unless you keep conducting a content audit on a regular basis.

When you add this task to your quarterly to-do list, you will get a chance to see if your content is well-optimized for search engines. For example, you will be sure that you hit the jackpot with the right keywords.

Moreover, conducting a content audit regularly highlights content gaps – topics you haven’t covered but should. Addressing these can attract new visitors.

Lastly, understanding why people leave certain pages quickly can help you make necessary changes to keep them around longer. And you will find out the cause of bouncing back by – yes again – knowing how to properly conduct a content audit.

At the same time, you need to remember we left behind the times when SEO content was all about keywords several years ago. What matters now are:

• EEAT – Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust.
• Uniqueness – The Internet is overflooded with new content every day, so yours needs to stand out.
• Relevance – Both in terms of being relevant to your target audience and relevant with your services.
• Conversions – We’re in recession, so your content needs to lead to conversions and help you fulfill your business goals.
• Coherence – Sticking to your brand tone and values.

The findings a content audit reveals can inspire you to introduce the necessary and unnecessary changes, resulting in better website performance and more engaged visitors – as proven by research done by Semrush:

source: Semrush

If you’re still not sure whether spending time on doing a content audit can really bring you benefits, let’s break it down even further.

Running a content audit is a way to improve your website’s performance in the SERP and being found by more people who are interested in what you offer. Here’s why doing an effective content audit is worth your time:

Conducting a content audit might seem like a techy thing to do, but really, it’s just about checking up on how your web content is doing. Taking a little time to do this can really pay off, helping your website rank better and keeping your visitors more engaged.

There are a few situations when conducting an SEO content audit is simply a must. What circumstances should prompt you to revise and analyze all your content?

• Website redesign – If you plan to redesign or reorganize your website, it’s good to perform an SEO content audit. This way, you will be able to identify which content pieces are worth keeping, updating or deleting.
• Business strategy change – You should also conduct an SEO content audit when the direction of your company shifts. Why? To check whether the existing content matches your business’ new goals and values.
• Content effectiveness drop – Your content is underperforming? You don’t get enough clicks, impressions, engagement, or conversions? You need to discover why this happens, and an SEO content audit will help you with that.
• New SEO strategy – Similarly to a new business strategy, you should conduct an audit if you plan to put a new SEO strategy in place.
• Long time since last content updates – If you haven’t updated your content for quite a long time, it’s best to conduct an audit. After all, you probably have a lot of pieces on your websites, so you need to know which ones to choose first for content repurposing.
• New products/services – It’s also good to carry out an SEO content audit when you introduce new products and/or services to your website. This way, you can make sure that the existing content is well-integrated with your new offerings.
• Domain migration – Migration is an excellent time to delete outdated or duplicated content. An audit will help you locate pieces that are worthy of migrating to your new domain, those that should be removed, and those that need an update.

The right frequency for conducting a content audit depends on your website’s size and activity:

• Large websites – Quarterly audits are ideal if you often update or have lots of content.
• Medium-sized websites – Consider auditing twice a year to keep content strategies fresh.
• Small websites or blogs –  An annual audit should suffice unless you’re planning major changes or notice a drop in traffic.

In short, starting a content audit means setting clear goals first. You’ll need to figure out what content you have and what you want to improve. Before, however, decide what aspects of your content you’re going to focus on and what you’ll measure to track changes.

This means that you need to know your target audience and how they behave on your website, since they will be the reference point to all your evaluations. A good SEO content audit is based on data, so if you do not who you create content for, extract the information from Google Analytics 4. What if you haven’t set up yet? Do it ASAP! Don’t know how? We can help you with GA4 implementation at Delante!

As you work through your content audit, keep your goals in mind to make sure you’re on track. So, how to do a website content audit the right way? Take a look below.

Step #1: Create an Inventory of the Content

First, gather all your web content in one place. This usually means listing every web page that holds content on a spreadsheet. Before you start, make sure your spreadsheet is set up to track everything you need. Common details to include are:

• the URL of the web page,
• the type of content it has, and
• the publication date.

For small blogs that don’t update often, listing all your URLs can be pretty simple and quick. But if you’re dealing with a larger website, like an online store or a major content platform, this task can be much more demanding.

For bigger websites, a tool like Screaming Frog can be a lifesaver. This desktop program lets you scan up to 500 web pages for free. Just enter your homepage address, and it will crawl your website, pulling up a list of URLs. It also flags issues like duplicate content, missing metadata, and duplicate H1 headers, which can be crucial for SEO.

Screaming Frog not only finds all the URLs but also allows you to filter them by various parameters. This makes it easier to identify which pages to focus on first.

source: Screaming Frog

Note: If your website is really large – with more than 500 web pages – you might consider upgrading to the premium version of Screaming Frog.

Once you have all your URLs listed in the spreadsheet, you can start to sort and prioritize which pages need updates or changes first. This setup gives you a clear view of your website’s content situation, making it much easier to manage and optimize.

Step #2: Analyze Traffic, Impressions, Bounce Rate, and Average Duration of Web Sessions

Now go through all the crucial performance metrics. You can use Google Analytics as it’s a great tool for this part of the audit. It gives you plenty of details into how each web page performs + offers insights into pieces that might need some updating.

Using Google Analytics helps you figure out which pages grab attention and which ones might need a little boost to keep visitors around longer. For instance, if a page gets a lot of views but people leave quickly, it probably needs more engaging or relevant content to really capture their interest.

Step #3: Check Metadata

When you’re doing a content audit, it’s also a good idea to run a quick metadata check. Why? To reduce bounce rate that is one of the factors affecting your website ranking.

• Title tags tell search engines what each page is about. To help your target audience find what they’re looking for when they click on your website from search results. This helps improve your search engine rankings and makes sure that people clicking on your links are more likely to find what they expect, reducing bounce rates.
• Meta descriptions appear below your page title in search results and help attract clicks. It’s important to keep these descriptions truthful and clear to match what’s actually on the page. If they’re misleading, people might leave your website quickly, which could increase your bounce rate.

? TIP: To check your meta tags quickly, you can use tools like the Open SEO Stats plugin or Screaming Frog. Another quick way to check these tags is to use Google’s search function with the “site:yourwebpagelink” command, which shows how your pages are being displayed in search results.

Step #4: Check Your Links

Examining your external and backlinks is yet another thing you should consider doing while conducting your content audit – they also contribute to improving your website’s search performance.

Using SEO tools such as Ahrefs provides you with a detailed look at both your external links and backlinks. With Ahrefs, for example, you can track the origin of your backlinks, assess the quality of the referring domains, and identify potentially harmful links that could negatively impact your SEO. Check our Backlink Audit Guide for easy-to-follow step-by-step instructions.

Step #5: Make Sure Your Heading Structure Is On Point

Making your web content easy to read and understand goes beyond just using the right words and examples. It also needs to be divided into digestible chunks, each clearly marked with headings.

Checking whether your heading structure is organized clearly helps you keep the readers longer on your website. How’s that? Simply because when users can glance at your headers (like H1, H2, H3, etc.) and get a sense of what each section covers, they’re more likely to stick around and read more.

? TIP: Well-planned headers that include keywords help search engines figure out what your page is about. This can make your site show up higher in search results because it’s clearer to search engines what you’re focusing on.

Step #6 Verify Whether Your Content Meets the EEAT Guidelines

Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust (EEAT) guidelines are crucial if you want to rank up with your content. Therefore, you need to verify them during the SEO content audit. What does it mean in practice? Here’s some info in a nutshell:

• The content needs to be informative, substantive and unique.
• The content needs to be created for the users (provide value), not for search engines.
• The content needs to be free of factual errors, and preferably revised by an expert.
• The content needs to evoke trust in the readers.

You can find the full guidelines in Google’s EEAT guide. We recommend that you read and remember them before performing your SEO content audit. Some of the best practices regarding the EEAT that should make it to your content include:

• Adding authors to each blog post (with a short bio of the author that underlines their expertise in the field).
• Using credible sources, such as statistics, scholarly articles, etc.
• Building a positive brand PR.
• Leveraging user-generated content, e.g., reviews and opinions, comments under blog articles.

Step #7: Check for Duplicate Content

A content audit wouldn’t be effective without checking how much of your content is duplicate – and this refers both to the internal and external duplication.

The good news is that finding and fixing duplicate content isn’t difficult. The entire process is well-explained in our guide How to Deal with Duplicate Content so be sure to check it while doing your content audit.

Step #8: Evaluate Your Content Distribution

Ever been to a restaurant? How would you feel if you’d get your dessert before the main course? This would be awkward and uncomfortable, likely prompting you to never visit that particular venue again, wouldn’t it? The same goes for your content.

Your content distribution impacts the way it is consumed by the users. If you, for instance, force the user to scroll the category subpage to get to the content, they will likely be confused or even won’t see the content. Thus, as a part of your SEO content audit, you need to evaluate whether the content on your homepage, landing pages, category descriptions, product pages and blogs is organized into a structure that does not mislead the users.

Step #9: Check for Missing Alt Texts

Images and other multimedia elements not only make your content more engaging, but also help break up text, making it easier to read.

? TIP: Make sure all images on your website include alt texts – alternative descriptions that help search engine robots understand what the graphics depict.

You can use Screaming Frog, a tool mentioned before, to scan your website and identify images that are missing alt texts.

STEP 1: Open Screaming Frog and enter your website’s URL in the top bar where it says. Click Start to begin crawling your website.
STEP 2: While not strictly necessary for checking alt texts, you can configure the crawler to focus more on images. Go to Configuration > Spider and in the Basic tab. Click if Check Images is ticked.
STEP 3: Once the crawl is complete, go to the Images tab on the lower panel, and then click on Missing Alt Text on the filter bar. This will display all images on your website that are missing alt texts.

Conducting a content audit regularly gives you tons of insights that help you maintain and improve the overall performance of your website. This way you stay positive your content remains relevant, engaging, and optimized for search engines.

For your convenience, here’s a website content audit checklist:

One more thing, conducting a content audit isn’t a one-off job – it’s an essential part of keeping your website fresh and engaging. Let us take the hassle out of figuring it all out for you. Get in touch today to see how we can help improve your website’s performance through quality content. With our content audit service, we will find out what is working and what is nor, helping you understand exactly where your content could use a tune-up.