Create your very own Auto Publish News/Blog Site and Earn Passive Income in Just 4 Easy Steps
If your organization has been publishing content for many years, there's a good chance your website contains more content than you can keep track of. This makes managing a content strategy more difficult than it needs to be. If you don't know what content already exists – or the quality of that content – any efforts to create new content can actually have a negative impact on your overall search performance.
To counteract this, we recommend conducting an SEO content audit. This process will help you understand everything published on your website so you can make an informed decision about how to use it more strategically.
A step-by-step guide to SEO content audits
Step 1: Define your goals
Before you can begin an SEO content audit, you need to know what you want to achieve. Without clearly stated objectives, the analysis derived from the audit will likely lack focus and meaningful insights. Setting clear goals provides a framework for prioritizing tasks, evaluating the effectiveness of implemented changes, and demonstrating the impact of the SEO content audit on overall site performance.
When you define specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound (SMART) goals for your SEO content audit, you establish direction, purpose, and measurable results. Whether the goal is to improve keyword rankings, improve user experience, increase organic traffic, or a combination thereof, clearly defined goals are the key to a targeted and strategic approach.
Step 2: Create a content inventory
The first step in the content audit itself is to create a comprehensive list of all the content on your website, including blog posts, articles, product pages, and any other destinations where content is crawled. This inventory makes it clear exactly what content is on your site, where it is located, and its performance metrics. This lays the foundation for all future work.
Without this information, your audit could miss hidden opportunities or tackle irrelevant content, hindering your SEO efforts. But when you have a complete picture of your content ecosystem, you can confidently understand what you have, what you need, and what you can improve.
Step 3: Keyword analysis
Once you have created an inventory, check the keywords associated with each piece of content. This process shows whether your pages are targeting the right search terms, attracting the desired audience, and ranking where they should be.
Analyze the keywords your content targets and compare them to search trends, competition, and user intent. This allows you to identify missed opportunities, counteract keyword cannibalization, and guide your content optimization efforts.
Step 4: Evaluate the quality of the content
Evaluate the accuracy, readability, and consistency of each piece of content on your website Search intent. High-quality, helpful content is more likely to perform well in search engine rankings, especially according to Google's 2022 rankings helpful content update.
An abundance of content on your site that is deemed “low quality” by search engines can have a significant negative impact on overall search authority. An SEO content audit will help you identify your lowest quality content, which you can either remove or improve with a content update. In any case, editing this content will help you improve the overall search performance of your website.
Step 5: Internal linking
Another aspect of the content itself that should be examined is the way other pages are linked within your content. Internal links lead users to relevant content and search engines help understand the relationships between different sides.
But internal linking is about more than just adding a list of additional resources to the bottom of the page (although that has its place). These should be relevant, contextual links embedded within the content itself. By optimizing internal linking, you improve your website's overall SEO performance and contribute to a more seamless user experience.
Step 6: Check for duplicate content
Google's bots will hurt your search performance if they find two pieces of content that cover the exact same topic. Additionally, creating duplicate content is a waste of resources.
Duplicate analysis helps you identify cases of duplicate content on your website or external websites. This is not as easy as identifying duplicate keywords because sometimes different keywords target the same user intent. Expert guidance will help you filter out these cases.
Step 7: Content Gap Analysis
Now that you know what content you have, it's time to figure out what's missing. A content gap analysis helps you identify the missing pieces in your content ecosystem by comparing your existing content with the needs and interests of your audience.
By understanding what your audience is searching for and comparing it to what you've already published, you can create a list of new, relevant content to fill those gaps. This strategic approach ensures that your future content creation aligns with user intent while targeting a broader and more strategic selection of keywords.
Step 8: Create a plan for each piece of content
Once your audit is complete, it's time to analyze the data and create an action plan. A well-structured plan provides a roadmap for addressing specific issues identified during the content review and strategically implementing improvements.
Your plan should include tasks like updating content on low-quality pages, optimizing internal links, or completely removing duplicate content for every piece of content on your site. This ensures that all of your subsequent efforts are consistent with the broader content strategy and tailored to the unique needs of each piece of content.
An SEO content audit is one component of a broader SEO audit. To learn more about this broader approach, read our guide: Here's why you should do an SEO audit and what you can learn from it
About the author
Nick Nelson is our friendly neighborhood writer and man. As Associate Content Director at TopRank Marketing, his mission is to bring brand narratives to life with smart, entertaining and sharp wordplay. In his free time, Nick enjoys basking in the misery of the Minnesota sports fan base, making obnoxious puns, and pouring buffalo sauce on all kinds of foods.
Create your very own Auto Publish News/Blog Site and Earn Passive Income in Just 4 Easy Steps
