An SEO content audit consists of reviewing the entirety of your website’s content with the goal of identifying optimization opportunities and gaps to fill in your content strategy. This inventory is extremely useful for optimizing your content marketing strategy and achieving your business goals.

To implement a comprehensive content audit, you must conduct an on-page SEO audit to assess the quality of your internal content (content published on your website). In addition to an off-page SEO audit to identify the SEO optimizations desired to improve your site’s ranking along search engine results.
Find out more in the following section.   

Why should you conduct an SEO content audit?  

It’s a good idea to conduct a content SEO audit at least once a year to ensure that your content marketing strategy is always aligned with your marketing goals and meets your target audience’s expectations.

Regularly monitoring the performance of your content strategy (particularly every quarter or semester) allows you to make the necessary improvements at the right time while also ensuring its effectiveness and evolution over time. As a result, in general, SEO content audits cover the following areas:

• An “on-page” or “onSite” audit evaluates the quality of your site’s content and the various factors that influence its performance, such as the relevance of meta title and meta description, the structure Hn, key words, the quality of internal links, image optimization, and so on.
• An “off-page” or “offSite” audit to assess the popularity of your site based on the number of backlinks (incoming links) obtained. This analysis provides information on the quality of these links, their number, their depth (they point to the home page or deeper pages), etc

These investigations allow for a thorough examination of the factors that contribute to a good or bad performance.
They also allow you to make the best decisions for optimizing your SEO in the eyes of users and search engines.  

  How do you conduct an SEO content audit?  

• Identifying the audit’s goal
  The first step in performing an SEO content audit is defining your business goals and expected results. You must specify your goals in order to assess the relevance of your publications. This is particularly relevant to:
  Improving search engine ranking: (SERP : Search Engine Result Page). To that end, it is necessary to identify defective pages that contain uninteresting or poorly structured content, thereby increasing the bounce rate.

This goal also allows you to determine the best pages to improve your site’s SEO potential, as well as various optimizations to implement to boost your natural ranking.

• The growth of your visibility:The act of feeding your website with high-quality, value-added content allows you to attract qualified traffic and, as a result, increase your visibility on Google and other search engines.  

• The optimization of the engagement rate: To achieve this goal, you must have a solid understanding of your client’s needs and behaviors. This allows you to present them with content that is relevant to their search intent.  

• The improvement of the conversion rate:To get there, you must detect the sales pages that generate the most conversions and those that have a high cart abandonment rate. The goal is to identify the best strategies for improving user experience and successfully converting prospects into customers.  

Examine the entire content to be reviewed  

At this stage, you must list all of your website’s URLs in order to browse all associated content. As a result, it’s a good idea to use your sitemap, which maps out all of your URLs. Following that, you must categorize the content to be audited based on your preferences:

• Type of content: blog post, product sheet, web page content…  

• The name of the content author.

• The publication date.

• The format of the content: text-only or hybrid (text, images, and video).

The length of the content.

You can organize all of these details into a table for easier viewing. You must collect as much data as possible for each content in order to specify the performance metrics required to complete your content audit. This includes, for example, interactions on various social networks, bounce rates, organic traffic volume, etc..

Data collection is a time-consuming and tedious process because the information is heterogeneous in nature and comes from various sources. As a result, it is recommended that you use SEO content auditing tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console to get the most out of your time.  

Examine the key words   

This study allows you to see if you’ve chosen the right keywords to position your content. To that end, you should go through your keyword list and examine the changes in position of the contents that contain these expressions. For each keyword, you must evaluate:

• The level of competition, in order to determine whether your site can withstand competition from other sites that use competitive keywords to rank first.

• Compliance with the subject matter and the nature of the products/services in question.

• The ROI of key words in terms of traffic or conversion.

   

The audit of keywords also allows you to identify the most valuable type of keywords (long tail, brand keywords, informational keywords, etc.). These words will help you gain a better understanding of the needs of your target audience. After that, you can adjust your content to meet the requirements.  

Conduct a semantic audit  

The semantic audit aims to improve the performance of your natural search engine optimization and the quality of your content. It consists in meticulously studying all the indicators related to each expression or keyword in your semantic field, with the goal of:

• Optimizing the value of your copies and enhancing them.

• Determining the best keyword/content combinations in order to achieve higher rankings in the SERP.

• Creating more relevant content for the target audience’s search intent.
  

The semantic audit yields strategic recommendations to implement in order to create a richer semantic cocoon, resulting in more appealing browsing experience within your site and higher visitor engagement.  

Conduct a technical audit  

The technical audit identifies the various technical issues that are interfering with the performance of your website. It is necessary to explore the URLs of your pages in order to detect and list the errors that are hampering your SEO. Namely, this inventory assists in verifying:

• If your site is properly indexed. In fact, indexing errors can result in traffic and ranking position losses.

• If your sitemap is correctly set up, this will facilitate indexing robot exploration and provide a better user experience to visitors.

• If the site’s loading speed is fast.

• If your code is of high quality.

It is strongly advised to use specialized audit tools, such as Screaming Frog SEO Spider and Semrush, in order to perform a more effective technical audit.   

Create an actions plan  

Following the completion of your content analysis, you can plan the course of action to be taken in order to make the necessary improvements to your content. To accomplish this, it is best to prioritize planned actions based on your marketing and business objectives, as well as time and resource constraints.

Furthermore, it is recommended to create an action plan for each URL and each objective. This strategy may rely on the following optimizations:

• Rewriting some copies to bring them up to date and to enrich them with new information (new statistics, instructional videos, etc.).

• Extending certain articles in order to include more strategic keywords and increase traffic.

• Optimizing the structure of some copies through finer hierarchization with catchier h1…hn.

You can adjust your content policy based on the results of the action plan you created. You can use SEO tools, such as Rektic, to save time and effort on copy optimization.   

Rektic: a powerful SEO optimization solution  

Rektic is a SaaS SEO optimization solution powered by artificial intelligence. This solution provides SEO editors with a comprehensive set of tools to help them create more interesting and SEO-friendly web content. In this regard, Rektic provides the following features:

• AI assistance and generation of title, summary, and meta-description

• Automatic article correction for grammatical or orthographic errors

• A plagiarism detector to identify duplicate content and prevent search engine penalties.

• A keyword generator to create a lexical and semantically rich field that’s aligned with your writing topic.

• Some suggestions for improving the optimization of your content. This includes, for instance:

-The keywords’ density of that must be kept up in order to avoid redundant repetitions.

-The adjustments required to optimize the meta-title and meta-description tags.
-The appropriate length to use to create richer content.

• Sources of inspiration for refreshing your copy and filling it with unique and innovative ideas.

The task of SEO optimization becomes smoother and faster with Rektic. As a result, you will have more time to concentrate on other SEO writing tasks.   

3 Examples of practical SEO content auditing tools  

SEMRUSH: a comprehensive content auditing tool  

Semrush provides content auditing capabilities that allow you to:

• Analyze your position on specific keywords in order to carry out the optimizations desired to achieve higher rankings on these keywords.

• Follow user behavior to learn which copies pique their interest and which make them dissatisfied.

• Create a comprehensive auditing technique that allows you to determine the reasons for a good or bad SERP ranking.   

Google Search Console: the essential tool for a thorough content audit  

Google Search Console (GSC) is a powerful Google web-marketing tool that provides users with a friendly interface through which they can:

• Anticipate potential errors that could harm the quality of their websites;

• Get insight about the frequency of site exploration by indexing robots;

• Determine the most relevant keywords that generate the most traffic;

GSC also allows you to generate a final report on your site’s indexation and the various factors (impressions, clicks, errors, loading speed, and so on) that affect its performance.    

Google Analytics: the ideal tool for web site auditing  

Google Analytics is a powerful web analytics tool. It is very useful for identifying the most effective content that generates a good ROI in terms of visibility, traffic, engagement, conversion, and so on, and more broadly, in terms of your marketing objectives.

Notably, this tool includes a pre-configured board layout that allows you to:

• Analyze the traffic to your website and gain insight into the sources of your audience, the devices used to access your website, etc.

• Analyze the conversions made.

• Discover the SEO optimizations required to improve the performance of your website.

   

Google Analytics is available to all users in a free version. However, in order to fully utilize advanced features, you must purchase the Premium version.    

Final thought   

The SEO content audit is a powerful inventory that reveals the weaknesses in your content as well as its strengths, allowing you to make better decisions to optimize your content marketing strategy in the long haul.

In this case, you should begin by defining your audit objectives. In light of which, you will go through all relevant content to perform audits: key word, technical, and semantic. It is strongly advised to use auditing tools such as Semrush and Google Analytics to simplify these diagnostics.

To simplify the implementation of an action plan for content improvement, you can turn to an SEO optimization solution like Rektic, which is assisted by the AI. You can save money on operational costs and get a better return on investment from your SEO strategy by using this tool.