What Is a Content Audit and Why Is It Required?

Publishing new content on the site is important to improve traffic and conversions or meet other business goals.

But…

If you’re not aware of how each page of your website is performing in terms of page traffic, organic rankings, and conversion, you’re not going to make a difference.

Without analyzing the existing content’s performance, businesses fail to identify:

• Underperforming pages and what went wrong.
• Which pages need improvement?
• What content types are driving the most business value?

This is why every business with existing content inventory needs content auditing periodically to improve overall website performance.

What is a Content Audit?

A content audit analyzes a website’s existing content inventory and finds underperforming pages that need improvement. The process also helps in shaping the content strategy around well-performing pages (high traffic, rankings, and conversion) of the site.

A content inventory includes a list of all website pages, such as blog articles, promotional pages (service or product pages), and landing pages.

What Insights Does Content Auditing Provide To A Business?

Some of the key insights that a content audit provides are listed below.

1. Pages that need improvement

Auditing starts with finding pages that don’t meet the business expectations in terms of conversion rate, page traffic, backlinks, and lead generation. This way, you will have a clear idea of what to do next to improve the efficiency of existing content.

2. Finding what improvements a page needs

A detailed auditing report not only shows you the page-level problem but also gives you actionable solutions. Let me show you an example of getting page improvement suggestions based on current performance:

As you can see, depending on the audit, you get an overview of what actions (including content updates, updating metadata, adding backlinks, etc.) each page needs to improve its performance.

3. Pages with the highest and lowest conversion rates

One of the key benefits of a content audit is that you get data on what type of content is working most and least. This way, you can focus on creating content that delivers maximum ROI.

4. Organized view of content inventory

What can be better than having an organized view of content inventory categorized by buyer persona and goal? Here’s an example of organizing content by buyers’ stage.

With that, let’s understand the key reasons why to do a content audit periodically to prevent traffic and conversion drops.

Why Is It Important To Audit Content?

A content audit is not a one-time event, you need a strategic auditing process that will track the performance of existing content and suggest the scope of improvements.

Here are some key reasons why it is important to do a content audit regularly:

1. Your competitors are outranking you in the SERP

Your content competitors are always trying to outrank you in the SERP by auditing the content and backlinks of your website.

To stay ahead of your competitors, you need to regularly perform a content audit of their websites.

This will help you find the pages where your competitors are already outranking you and find the low-competitive keywords of competitors to create better content and rank higher.

In simple words, a regular auditing process is a way to identify content gaps in your competitor’s content strategy and how to fill them with better and quality content.

2. Lack of understanding of buyers’ journey

One of the key challenges in SEO and content marketing is to create content that solves the target audience’s pain points and challenges.

But without understanding what the buyer’s journey looks like, creating relevant content for the audience is difficult.

For example, the buyer’s journey helps you know the different stages (awareness, consideration, and decision) of your customers so you can create content for every stage of the marketing funnel.

Therefore, a content audit report including the target market, needs, and pain points is essential for creating content that drives traffic and encourages conversion.

3. You have no idea about underperforming content

Imagine you have 100+ content pieces published on the website, and still, you’re publishing new content every week.

There’s nothing wrong with creating new content but not analyzing the organic performance of existing content makes your content strategy inefficient.

Here’s why:

Not every single piece of content will rank on the first page. So, identifying pages that are not driving any traffic or conversions will give you quick wins. Instead of spending 100% effort on creating new content, you can spend 30-50% of your effort on updating your old articles to get quick results.

A real example:

Healthline invests 50% of its efforts in updating old articles to continuously improve the quality and improve rankings.

So auditing existing content helps you find which pages need improvement. Hence a quick and reliable way to increase organic rankings and traffic.

4. You’re running out of content ideas that convert

Finding new content ideas that resonate with your audience becomes difficult over time.

If this is the case with your business, auditing content gaps and studying related search queries from GSC will give you an endless number of proven content topics.

For example, if you audit the Google Search Console data, you will see a list of search queries that your web pages are already ranking for.

Here’s an example:

Since the data is directly coming from Google, you can rely on the accuracy of the data and identify new content topics from it.

This is only one way of finding new blog topics. Other techniques, like studying site search, running content gap analysis, etc., will sharpen your content strategy.

5. Your content is outdated

No matter how high-quality content you’re publishing, if pages lack freshness and relevance for the target keyword, your organic ranking will suffer.

In fact, Google officially announces content freshness as a ranking factor.

That means you have to have a regular content auditing process to find outdated content pieces and update the content.

Otherwise, competitors will create fresh content with the latest information to take your position in the SERP.

When To Perform A Content Audit?

There is no strict rule on when to do content auditing.

However, from our experience of doing SEO content audits, we recommend businesses go through a detailed content auditing process when the website:

• has 50 or 100+ pages targeting important keywords
• is 6 months or older

This ensures that the auditing process will give you enough data on what pages to improve and how to improve the traffic, conversion, and revenue of your website.

Now that you know the importance of doing frequent content analysis, let’s understand the prerequisites of a successful content audit.

Things You Should Keep Ready Before Content Audit Process

Whether you have an in-house team or want to hire SEO content auditing experts, you need to keep the following elements accessible.

This will help the content audit team understand the current state of your website.

1. Business goals and KPIs

The first step of doing an audit is to understand the business goals and align key KPIs to track progress.

Business goal examples are:

• Traffic: Improving website traffic to X/month (quantified goal) by Y (deadline)
• Conversion: Increase product sign-up conversion rate by X% (quantified goal) in the next Y months (deadline)
• Retention: Reducing churn rate by X% (quantified goal) in the next Y months (deadline)

Ensure that you have an overview of what goals you want to achieve along with a deadline.

Why it is important: Business goals and KPIs help the content team align their auditing process and look for opportunities to support the end goal.

2. Buyer persona

A buyer persona gives you clear ideas about who your target audience is, their pain points, and their challenges. Once you have an accurate buyer persona, it gives the content auditing team clarity on what content format to focus on, what pages to prioritize, and how to tailor your content for maximum ROI.

Why it is important: The role of buyer personas in content audit is to analyze existing content and suggest improvements based on your target audience. That means every piece of content you’re producing will be useful to your audience.

Need help in creating a buyer persona? Contact our experts and get buyer personas based on your target market, business offerings, and audience profile.

3. List of products and services

One thing you want to prioritize is the performance of your important pages, such as product, service, or other landing pages.

Create a list of important product or service page URLs (if you already have a page) that you want to focus on. If the business offerings don’t have a dedicated page yet, document the offering details such as target audience, product positioning, key features, and challenges it solves.

Why it is important: Knowing which products and services are important will help the auditing team perform keyword research, create SEO-optimized pages, and rank them higher in the SERP.

Conclusion

A successful content audit will help your business meet its end goals (traffic, conversion, retention, etc.).

Make sure to get your auditing process done by experts, as the entire process has many technical aspects, such as dealing with website issues, content gap analysis, audience research, and more.

This is where Pazeviews helps businesses like yours get a result-oriented content auditing report that not only shows you the problems but also solutions.

If you need any assistance with content auditing, book a free consultation call with our SEO and content experts.