How To Run a Content Audit (Step-By-Step Guide)

Your ability to conduct audits is mission-critical to your online business. That’s why I’m sharing the most in-depth website content audit process to guide you through it.

It doesn’t matter if you’re new to or experienced with auditing website content—I’ve got you covered.

In this post, I’ll walk you through the entire content audit process step-by-step. By the end, you’ll know everything you need to know to increase your site’s organic traffic and convert more visitors to customers.

Let’s get into it.

Identify your goals

Knowing why you’re conducting a content audit will be key to the entire process. This will allow you to focus on specific issues you must find and resolve in your website content.

There are three goals you can choose from:

Improve traffic

Suppose your site has plateaued or isn’t growing in traffic despite being around for a long time and publishing content regularly.

You want to know why this is the case.

Maybe your content is no longer of the same quality as your competitors, or your content promotion strategy needs revamping.

There are other reasons why your website traffic isn’t growing, and you can only learn more about them by analyzing your existing content.

Fix traffic drops

This is arguably the most common reason to launch a content audit initiative.

Websites dependent on a single traffic source, primarily Google, live and die by it.

So, whenever Google makes major algorithm changes, it keeps website owners on their toes.

The problem is that despite observing SEO best practices, there’s always a chance that their site will lose traffic. Once that happens, we have to figure out what caused the drop in traffic.

In most cases, the drop is related to content. So, launching an SEO content audit is essential.

Improve conversion rates

There are times when the traffic isn’t the problem. It’s what your site does with the traffic you receive.

For landing pages, you need to convince visitors to perform your desired action, such as buying from your site or signing up for your mailing list.

To do this, you need to create call-to-actions (CTAs) in the form of buttons or sign-up forms.

More importantly, you need to track the performance of your CTAs.

You must monitor the number of visitors clicking on your buttons and filling out the forms. This determines the potential revenue your online business is getting.

Now, if people aren’t performing your desired action despite having a reasonable amount of traffic, you have a problem.

Auditing these pages will help you identify the root cause and make necessary changes to the affected pages.

Gather website content pages to analyze

Once you have a clear idea of what to expect from your content audit, it’s time to collect data from your site.

From Google Search Console

Log in to your Google Search Console (GSC) account, choose the site you want to audit from the drop-down box and go to Performance > Search Results.

On the next page, click on the Date drop-down box and click on the Compare tab. Choose between “Compare last 3 months…” or “Compare last 6 months…” 

Then, click apply.

from google search console compare

Next, you will see the Export button on the top-right portion. Click on it and download the data in your preferred format.

from google search console export

Open the exported sheet and go to the Pages tab, where you’ll see all of the pages that Google has indexed on your site.

Even better, you can compare clicks and impressions from the current months to the previous months.

from google search console pages

This lets you know which web pages lost traffic (clicks) and dropped position on search rankings (impressions), which will be helpful if you’re monitoring your site’s organic search performance.

From Google Analytics

Next, you want to cross-reference data from GSC with Google Analytics (GA).

Log in to your Google Analytics account and go to your website. Then, click the Reports icon and go to Business Objectives > Traffic > Pages and screens.

from google analytics pages and screens

This report shows you the top website pages based on views. It also shows engagement metrics like average time spent on the page, as well as event count and key events, both of which are related to total revenue generated.

from google analytics report

To export this data, click the “Export this report to analysis” icon.

from google analytics export this report

On the next page, you can edit the report to add more metrics to analyze. Once done, click on the download icon to export the data.

from google analytics download

Another good thing about Google Analytics is that it shows you traffic generated from sources besides Google.

Go to Lifecycle > Acquisition > Traffic Acquisition on the left sidebar to see other referral sources your site is getting visitors from.

from google analytics traffic acquisition

This can help you better understand what channels are driving you the most traffic and how to further improve your content’s reach and performance.

From Google

If you don’t have access to either of these tools, you can still extract pages indexed by Google.

Go to Google search and type in site:example.com. Replace “example.com” with your website URL.

The search engine results pages (SERPs) should show you pages that Google is currently showing to users.

from google google

To show you how many pages Google has indexed from your site, click on the Tools tab to show you the exact count.

from google tools

Next, you want to export the pages by downloading the Google SERP Extractor Tool Chrome extension.

After downloading, the extension will ask you to enter a free API key so you can start using it.

from google google serps extractor tool

After verifying, click on the extension’s icon from your browser to initiate the export.

from google export

The extension can only export 100 pages max per operation (set your Google search to show 100 pages on SERPs). So you may have to do this multiple times, depending on how many pages Google has indexed.

On the downside, this approach only extracts the pages without the metrics available in GSC and GA.

Regardless, it is useful since you can cross-reference the pages you’ve published on your site and the ones that Google has in its database.

If you have important pages that Google failed to index, consider looking into them to know why they aren’t appearing on SERPs.

From SEO tools

You can use premium tools like SE Ranking to find which pages are ranking and which keywords are showing up on search engines. This is a good alternative if you can’t access Google Search Console, although it’s not ideal as the data is estimated using clickstream data.

Sign up for an account and enter your website URL using the Competitive Research feature.

The next page shows you vital SEO information about your site. But scroll down the page to see the top pages in the organic search section. Click on “View Detailed Report.”

from seo tools view detailed report

The report shows pages with the highest traffic share % and total traffic on your website. Another great metric from the report is the total keywords, which shows you search terms the page is ranking for.

from seo tools highest traffic share

Click the Export button to download the data in sheet format.

You can also click on a page from the results to see which keywords it gained or decreased positions in SERPs, as well as new and lost terms.

from seo tools keywords

You can use the information here to compare the search queries you lost traffic from in GSC (if you can access it).

Note: This data is estimated so it cannot completely replace data from GSC or your analytics. While this type of data can be useful, I’d highly recommend having GSC + proper analytics in place before running a content audit. 

Cross-reference content with competitor

Using SE Ranking, you can compare your competitor’s SEO performance and pit it against yours.

In particular, you can use its Keyword Gap feature to identify pages on your site and their targeting the same search query and analyze what makes your site better or worse.

After entering your site URL in the Competitive Research text bar, click on Competitor Comparison.

cross reference content with competitor competitor comparison

Then, enter the URLs of your top two competitors on SERPs max.

cross reference content with competitor top two competitors

On the next page, scroll down and ensure your site is chosen on the drop-down box on the right before clicking on “Common.”

cross reference content with competitor common

The tool shows you the list of keywords you and your competitors are ranking and each of the pages’ SERP positions.

This view lets you analyze your competitor’s pages for the same keyword and determine what makes them higher on SERPs than yours. Determine content quality and other on-page SEO factors that could have played a role in its high rankings.

From here, you can also view keywords your top organic competitors are ranking for, but yours isn’t and vice versa.

To do this, click on the “Missing” tab.

cross reference content with competitor missing tab

The tool will then show search terms that the competitors you listed are ranking for, but your site isn’t.

Use the search bar and enter a word you want the search queries to keyword. Ideally, start with the 4 W (what, why, when, where) and 1 H (how) to identify question and long-tail keywords to optimize your site.

cross reference content with competitor search bar

Keep in mind that you can only do this one word at a time.

Once done, you can download the keyword list by clicking on the Export button.

This is important because you may want to add more content to your site to help improve its traffic.

Understand current performance of each page

At this point, you should have compiled all the gathered data above into a content audit spreadsheet to help you analyze the pages properly.

Having a handy sheet lets you perform a content audit much easier since you don’t have to jump from platform to platform to generate the data.

When auditing your pages, ask yourself the following questions:

Are your important pages drawing traffic?

Search for pages on your sheet that aren’t generating enough traffic from any channel. Scroll the sheet to view them.

However, you must understand that not all pages are created equally.

You should be fine with some pages not getting any traffic at all because they don’t really impact your site’s bottom line.

For example, a blog post optimized for a low search volume keyword is not expected to generate tons of traffic. So, if they’re getting zero traffic from Google and other referral sources, that should be fine, at least for now.

What you want to focus on, however, are pages you spend a lot of time crafting and creating because of the value they can make for your business. You want to get your ROI from them in the form of traffic.

Identify what these pages are (particularly pillar pages and in-depth guides and how-to content) and see how much traffic the referral sources are generating for it.

Are the pages generating engagement?

You want people to take action on your page based on its CTA. You don’t just want them to browse your site and leave, never to visit your website again.

Regardless of which stage visitors are in your content funnel, you want them to do something while they’re there.

Google Analytics can provide data on how visitors interact with your page, such as how soon they leave the page and any events that take place as they browse it.

Also, it’s best to use a heat mapping tool like Hotjar to monitor how visitors interact with the different elements on your site pages.

understand current performance of each page hotjar

The tool shows visitors’ mouse cursors, the areas they click on the page, and which part of the page they ended up on before leaving.

From here, you can see the conversion rate of your CTAs and whether you’re getting your money’s worth from these pages.

Do you have pages that are performing well?

Now, let’s talk about something positive: pages generating tons of traffic and conversions on your site.

Just because they’re doing well for your site doesn’t mean you shouldn’t look into them.

For instance, you have a page you didn’t strategically plan for but is performing much better than the ones you have carefully created.

Analyze the page and think of how you generated the content. Is there something different in how you wrote it? Or maybe something different in your keyword research process enabled you to find unique search terms specifically for this page?

Asking more questions about these successful pages lets you fall into a rabbit hole of more questions that could help you unlock the door to potentially improving your content marketing strategy and producing better traffic and conversions for your site.

Determine an action plan for each page

From the questions above, you should have delved deeper into the pages in question, which would have provided you with insights on the next steps of your content audit.

Below are four of the most common actionable items for your content.

Leave as is

You probably won’t change anything for the majority of the pages regardless of their performance, whether SEO-wise or conversion-wise.

For starters, we want to follow the Pareto Principle or the 80/20 rule – you want to focus only on the 20% of your site pages that have the potential to generate 80% of the results.

This means not focusing on pages that:

  • are boilerplate (About Us, Contact, Terms of Services, etc.)
  • are not optimized for keywords with high search volume (as mentioned above)
  • are part of a topical map; their sole purpose is to help your site achieve greater topical authority, not necessarily to rank (although getting them to show up on SERPs is a plus)
  • are set to “noindex”

To be clear, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t address them at some point. But you want to fix immediate concerns before digging deeper into these low-risk, low-reward pages.

Reoptimize page

For underperforming pages, you want to fix their content and edit their page elements to improve their traffic and conversions.

Below are rules of thumb to determine that you need to reoptimize your important pages:

  • The content is actually useful, but it unfortunately didn’t rank for some reason.
  • They have authoritative and valuable backlinks you don’t want to risk losing.
  • They contribute to your siteFocusScore, a metric identified in Google’s leaked document early this year that measures how relevant the content is to the site’s overarching theme.

When optimizing the pages for SEO, use Frase to include natural language processing (NLP) keywords not currently included in the content.

Create a new document, toggle on “Import content from URL” and enter the URL and target keyword (refer to the search queries in GSC or top keywords your page currently ranks for on SE Ranking).

reoptimize page new document

After importing the content, click “Start” to initiate the research phase.

reoptimize page start

Next, click on the Optimize tab and change the Status to Topic Gap. Doing so will show you phrases you need to include in the site content to make it more topically relevant and increase its optimization.

reoptimize page optimization

Remove and redirect

You may have optimized multiple pages for the same or similar keyword without knowing it.

What happens here is that Google will rank these pages for the same search query. This becomes a problem because Google will dedicate its resources by ranking your pages on SERPs. This means it’ll be harder for your site to rank on top of search results.

To fix this issue, first identify the one page you want to appear on Google search for that keyword.

Then, redirect the other pages to that page. This way, whenever people visit these pages, they’ll be brought to the page you want to rank instead.

If you use WordPress, the easiest way to do this is by using the WP 301 Redirect plugin.

remove and redirect add new redirect rule

Before redirecting, however, consider moving some of the information found on the redirected pages that isn’t on the page you want to keep. This allows you to make the page much more informative and useful to your audience, allowing it to increase its search engine visibility.

There may be other situations where you may want to do this. Here are some examples:

  • You’ve optimized the page time and again, given it a chance to rank on Google or convert visitors, and still nothing happened.
  • Having too many reviews (Google is tagging sites in this situation as review sites and demoting them in search, according to Google’s May 2024 algo leak).

In these situations, you’ll need to carefully weigh the pros and cons of removing the content.

For example, some pages or posts may have backlinks pointing to them that your site is benefiting from. You could lose those if you remove the content.

In other cases, informative content could be stopping your site from being tagged as a review site. You don’t want Google to tag your site as a review site. It’ll get demoted if that does happen.

And there will be situations where the content is helping search engines like Google to understand the topical relevance of your site. In those cases, pages that perform badly are still useful.

So, use caution here. And always redirect to the next most relevant page if there is one.

Note: Save any content you remove or delete. More often than not, just unpublishing the content and assigning a new post status within your CMS will be your best option. 

Delete

The last-ditch solution is to delete the pages causing your website grief.

There are rare instances when removing the page from your site is, unfortunately, the best solution.

The main reason you may want to completely delete a page without implementing any redirects would be if that page’s topic has nothing to do with your site.

There may be other reasons but every website is different. 

Regardless, I’d recommend backing up every page you delete. Just as you would when removing and redirecting content, just unpublishing it in your CMS.

Other content audit suggestions to consider

Below are other action steps you may need to take based on your content audit findings.

Create new content

A possible reason why your site is losing traffic is that you’re not creating enough content.

In particular, you’re not optimizing for highly targeted keywords relevant to your site topic.

Use data from SE Ranking’s Competitor Comparison feature as shown above to cover topics you don’t have pages yet in your topical map.

Analyze backlinks

Sometimes, the content issue takes place off-page. Some of your pages may simply not have enough backlinks.

It’s unlikely that bad backlinks would cause an issue. Google’s handling of bad links has improved a lot since the carnage caused by the Penguin update.

There are a bunch of tools you can use to analyze backlinks. Semrush is a popular option.

But I’d highly recommend SE Ranking if you’re on a budget.

Review site architecture

Some of your pages are not getting love from Google because they don’t have internal links pointing to them.

These orphaned pages, no matter how good their content is, won’t rank on SERPs because Google is having a hard time finding them on your site.

So, you need to identify orphaned pages and ensure that there is a healthy amount of interlinking going on in your site.

Link Whisper helps you do both.

From the link audit report, you will see orphaned pages, broken links, and 404 pages.

review site architecture link whisper

Its Visual Sitemap feature gives you a bird’s eye view of your current internal linking strategy and makes changes moving forward.

review site architecture visual sitemap

Improve conversion rates

For pages that didn’t generate clicks or sign-ups based on content audit data provided by your heat mapping tool, try doing the following:

  • Play around with your CTAs. Change the button color, copy, and size. To maximize visibility, try moving them around the page, particularly the section before 50% of visitors leave.
  • Improve your WordPress site’s loading speed by using a caching plugin (NitroPack works well here), compressing images (ShortPixel), or using lightweight themes (Astra, Kadence, or GeneratePress ought to do the trick here).
  • Redesign the page for better UX. Limit the number of elements that appear on the page.

Monitor content performance over time

Once you’ve implemented your action plan, the battle’s just getting started!

Give the changes you’ve made time before reviewing them again. Use GSC and GA to check if traffic improved, stayed the same, or decreased. Then, repeat the process outlined above to help you identify the changes you need to make on your site.

This self-fulfilling cycle means you’ll have to run content audits regularly, which is a necessity if you want your website to succeed.

FAQs

What is a content audit?

This refers to the systemic review and analysis of content on a website to assess its performance in organic search and conversions in accordance with your business goals. An effective content audit helps you identify areas of improvement and issues that prevent your site from performing.

Which content types are included in a content audit?

Content types include blog posts, landing pages, and even media and static files (images, videos, PDFs, etc.) hosted on your site. Or any other type of content search engines could crawl and/or index.

How often should you audit your website content?

Website content audits are conducted at least once a year (every 3-6 months for best results) to ensure that the content is updated, contains the latest information, and generates the traffic and conversions needed for your business.

What’s the difference between a content audit and an SEO audit?

A content audit focuses on quality, engagement, and relevance to your site’s topic, while an SEO audit analyzes your organic search visibility. For this guide, however, I’ve combined both to help you get a comprehensive view of your site performance.

What other content audit tools can I use?

In addition to the tools mentioned above, you can use Ahrefs Webmaster Tools and Screaming Frog SEO Spider to perform a thorough content audit that analyzes only your site’s technical SEO makeup.

Conclusion

Now that you have the steps required to complete a successful content audit, you decide how to proceed next.

The effectiveness of a content audit hinges on your ability to extract insights from all of the data you have access to. You then need to decide on the best action to take for your content.

While the steps above should make things much easier for you, your knowledge about your site and what’s best for it plays a much more pivotal role in how you can fix the problems in your content marketing efforts.

Good luck!

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