How to perform an SEO content audit of your website

November 14, 2022
Ellie Watts
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Eager to improve the accessibility and quality of your content for your audience? Why not consider performing an SEO content audit to uncover any areas of weakness as well as content gaps that you could fill with your valuable insider knowledge?

Luckily, the SEO professionals at Aqueous Digital are on hand to help you discover what’s involved in an SEO content audit alongside the various benefits of performing this type of audit. Below, we also show you how you can conduct an SEO content audit on your very own website.

What is a content audit?

A digital or SEO content audit involves collecting and analysing content on a website, such as the website’s landing pages, blog posts and product pages. It can also be used to examine a wide range of resources including infographics, social content assets, cast studies and even e-books.

It’s designed to evaluate all the online content assets of a website to ensure they are providing the best support and information for their users. A fantastic tool for any business that publishes content, a content audit can be used to identify both the strengths and weaknesses of a website’s content with a view to improving their overall content strategy.

What is the goal of a content audit?

The aim of a content audit is to improve the quality of the content on a particular website by assessing how well each piece of content is performing. Often, content audits are implemented to assess whether a company’s content marketing strategy is effective. If areas of weakness have been identified in the audit, the content marketing strategy may need to be adjusted accordingly.

How to do a content audit

The most effective way to conduct an SEO content audit is to use an SEO tool like SEMrush which has a dedicated content audit feature. This content audit feature is informed by a host of data that’s gathered from SEMrush itself as well as real-time statistics provided by Google Analytics and Google Search Console.

Once you’ve selected the folders of your website that you want the content audit to analyse (most often the blog and landing pages), it will gradually collect the relevant data from these pages. It’s worth noting that websites with more content to analyse will naturally take longer to process than smaller sites – SEMrush’s content audit tool can analyse up to 20,000 pages.

Upon collecting this information, the content audit feature sets out a selection of data for each page of analysed content. For each piece of content, it can highlight the number of shares, backlinks, and sessions alongside providing a bounce rate statistic and average session duration. It will then group the articles into one of four categories: rewrite or remove, need to update, quick review, and poor content.

Benefits of content audits

Identifies weaknesses in current content

From a technical point of view, there are many issues that can arise in content. This might include performance issues such as poor loading speeds that can be highlighted by a high bounce rate, but a content audit can also identify broken links that could be affecting the site’s search value as well as the user’s experience.

Assesses the quality of your content

While a content audit can help you to create new content that fills gaps in knowledge, it can also assess the quality of your current content. From here, you can decide (using the accumulated data from the content audit) whether it’s best to completely remove or rewrite the article, add some key improvements or simply give it a quick review.

Identifies content gaps

A content audit creates an inventory of the content on your website. This comprehensive list of content helps you to identify areas of information that are lacking. By identifying these content gaps, you can create a new strategy that covers these topics to help boost your domain authority, add value to your site and create content that your target audience is actively looking for.

Enhances the structure of content

Even if you have already created a bank of fantastic and useful content with plenty of backlinks, it’s of no use to your target audience if they can’t find it. With this in mind, a content audit can also help you to improve the overall structure of your content using analytics and keyword data. As a result, you’ll be able to make this great content more accessible for both online users and search engines alike.

Highlights keyword cannibalisation

One benefit of analysing your current content is that any instances of self-competition (where you are competing with yourself for the same search terms) will be highlighted. This refers to pieces of content that rank for the same keywords, resulting in keyword cannibalisation. By taking away this competition and cannibalisation, the website conducting the content audit is likely to see more success and engagement with the remaining piece of content.

Why you should be performing content audits on your website

Due the many benefits of content audits explored above, it simply makes sense to conduct regular content audits on your website. By digging into the audit data, you can discover which pieces of content are the most effective and which could be improved to achieve better results for your business. This allows you to constantly adapt your content strategy to ensure it is as effective as possible as your business continues to grow and evolve.

Content audits at Aqueous Digital

As an award-winning digital marketing agency, the team at Aqueous Digital have invaluable experience conducting SEO and content audits for our clients. We use a combination of SEO specialists, content audits and expert content writers to implement effective content strategies that can boost your online presence, increase your domain authority and lead to more conversions and enquiries.

To get in touch with a member of our Liverpool or Cheshire team, please don’t hesitate to give us a call on 0800 285 1424. Alternatively, you can also contact us by emailing us at agency@aqueous-digital.co.uk or filling out our handy online contact form. Upon receiving your enquiry, we’ll be in touch to provide a free website health check and no-obligation consultation.