How to Conduct a Content Audit [Step-by-Step Guide]

Content audit is a step-by-step evaluation of your website content where every single page is assessed in terms of its traffic, quality, and business value and receives a recommendation to do something with it: keep, update, merge or delete. According to Ahrefs, 96.55% of about 14 billion pages receive no Google traffic, which means that most websites have pages that require that kind of decision (Source).

At Content Whale, we conduct content audits as a regular part of client SEO services. Audits precede all our SEO activities. In the DianaHR case, for instance, we solved problems with indexation, canonical tag and schema in month one, and keyword ranking increased from around 200 to over 1,500.

This guide will cover the definition of content audit, steps in conducting an SEO content audit and the actions to take based on the results.

1. What Is a Content Audit and Why It Matters?

Content auditing involves an evaluation of all pages on a website to assess their performance, quality, and relevance. SEO content auditing incorporates additional information such as click through rates, impressions, rankings, and links back to the website from your site. 

This allows you to base your decisions to keep, update, merge, or delete based on facts.

Improve SEO Performance

Content audits surface duplicate pages, broken links, and pages that no one visits. Duplication is common: 29.2% of 150 million crawled pages were very similar to other pages, and 22.2% were virtually identical (Source). Merging or updating weak pages lets search engines focus on your strong ones.

• Duplicate pages split clicks and links between URLs.
• Broken links and redirect chains waste crawl effort and frustrate readers who land on dead ends.

Identify Content Gaps and Opportunities

With an audit, you’ll know the topics you’ve missed and which formats succeed. Check your inventory against the queries from the Google Search Console, and list all of the queries that earn impressions without a page dedicated to them.

Improve User Experience

Bounce rate, average time on page, and pages per session reveal what content engages and what content fails to engage. Improve the pages that drive users away in less than one second; these pages already earn clicks.

Optimize Content Library for Better Management

Content becomes outdated and redundant over time. The second biggest content challenge faced by B2B marketers according to a survey is the lack of resources (Source). This is why it will be more manageable for them to have a smaller content library.

Align Content With Marketing Goals

According to the survey mentioned above, 33% of B2B marketers struggle to track content effectiveness while 40% struggle to produce content that drives a certain action. With a content audit, you’ll align your content with marketing goals (Source).

2. Prepare Your SEO Content Audit

Essential Tools

• Google Analytics measures the sessions, engagement and conversions on every page, and this will let you know if the page that generates traffic is also generating leads or sales.
• Google Search Console provides data about clicks, impressions, average position, and crawl errors per URL and per search query triggering it.
• SEMrush does keyword and backlink analysis.
• Screaming Frog scans your website for URLs, HTTP statuses, titles, meta data and duplicates and allows you to export the findings to an excel file with one click.

Our list of free SEO tools for beginners covers low-cost options, and our comparison of Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools shows which reports to use first.

Build Your Content Inventory

A content inventory is a spreadsheet with one row per URL. A content audit SEO checklist starts here: add the columns below before you judge any page, and keep one shared version of the sheet so that every reviewer works from the same data.

Set Clear Goals

• SEO improvement: update weak pages, fix outdated facts, and close keyword gaps.
• Content quality: meet your brand and EEAT standards on every page, including a named author and cited sources.
• User engagement: make pages easier to read, scan, and act on.

Pick one primary goal per audit. A content marketing audit that covers every channel is a larger project, so start with your blog or one product category and expand once the process works and the team trusts the scores.

3. How to Perform a Content Audit in 7 Steps?

Here is how to perform an SEO content audit on any site. Follow the steps in order, because each one feeds the next.

Step 1: Collect All Content URLs

Crawl the site with Screaming Frog or SEMrush, then compare the crawl with your XML sitemap and your CMS export. Pages that appear in one list but not another are the first things to review. They are often orphaned, redirected, or left out by mistake.

Step 2: Pull Performance Data

Merge Google Search Console and Google Analytics data into the inventory, matching each row by URL. Use at least 12 months of data, so seasonal pages do not look dead in the off season, and note the date range in the sheet so that later audits use the same window.

Step 3: Evaluate Quality and Relevance

Open each priority page and answer five questions.

• Is every fact current and sourced?
• Does the page match the search intent of its main keyword, or does it answer a different question?
• Does it show experience, expertise, and a named author with a profile page?
• Is it easy to scan? Grammarly can check readability, and a read-aloud pass catches awkward phrasing.

Step 4: Identify Gaps and Redundancies

Search your inventory for pages that target the same query. Then list the topics your competitors cover and you do not, using SEMrush or the queries in Google Search Console. Overlapping pages split clicks, links, and signals. Read our guide to canonical URLs to see how to consolidate them.

Step 5: Score and Prioritize

Our scoring model gives each page 0 to 2 points on five signals: organic traffic, conversions, backlinks, quality, and freshness. Add the points to get a total from 0 to 10.

• 8 to 10 points: keep the page as it is, and review it again in 12 months.
• 5 to 7 points: update it.
• 3 to 4 points: merge it or redirect it.
• 0 to 2 points: delete it, unless it serves a legal or navigation purpose.

Wait six months after publishing or a major update before you score a page, because newer pages need time to rank.

Step 6: Assign One Action Per Page

Match the signals in your inventory to an action with the table below. Log the action in a new column.

Step 7: Build the Action Plan

Turn the actions into tasks with an owner and a deadline, and track them in Asana or Trello. Start with the pages that have the highest impressions, because small gains there move the most traffic. Review progress every two weeks.

4. Implement Your Content Audit Findings

Update Existing Content

Include the most up-to-date information, latest examples, and proper headings, and optimize the page to match the search intent. The page on Ahrefs’ backlink checker was improved to match the search intent, and monthly organic visits increased from 14K to nearly 200K (Source).

Unite or Delete Duplicate Pages

Combine similar pages into one full guide, and redirect all other pages to the new one using a 301 redirection, so that all signals from those pages would lead to one page. Remove pages only if there is no traffic, no backlinks, and no reason for their existence anymore.

Optimize Internal Linking

Create links from pages with high authority to those that have been recently optimized, and create links from optimized pages to the service pages, like “SEO content writing services”. 

Make a Content Plan Out of Gaps

List all content gaps and create a plan of creating pages for them with keywords, formats, owners, and deadlines, so that the gaps will become scheduled work. Check out our guides to content marketing strategies and blog writing services.

Monitor and Adjust

Track organic clicks, bounce rate, and conversion rate for each changed page, and compare the numbers against the baseline in your inventory. Log every change with a date.

5. Content Audit Best Practices

These content audit best practices come from our client work and keep an audit from turning into a mass deletion.

• Audit one topic cluster first, and then scale to the whole site.
• Protect pages that bring informational traffic. For KnowledgeHut, informational queries such as “CISSP certification” and “PMP boot camp” drove 65% of total traffic (KnowledgeHut case study).
• Add expert review to high-stakes pages. On KhataBook, BFSI subject matter experts verify each finance blog before it goes live (KhataBook case study).
• Never delete a page with backlinks without a redirect.
• Run content audits once a year, or every six months for high-volume publishers and fast-changing industries, and record the date of each audit in your inventory so that the next team knows which window the numbers cover.
• Keep a changelog.

Conclusion

A content audit turns a long list of URLs into a short list of decisions: keep, update, merge, redirect, or delete, each backed by traffic, quality, and business-value data from your own site. Build the inventory, score each page on five signals, assign one action, and measure the result against your baseline. Start with your ten highest-impression pages.

Contact Content Whale’s SEO team to get a content audit with a prioritized action plan for your site.

FAQs

What is a content audit?

The content audit is a page-by-page analysis of website content regarding its performance, quality, and relevancy. This analysis results in one action taken on every page – keep, update, merge, redirect, or remove.

How often do I need to conduct a content audit?

Conduct a content audit at least once a year. Conduct audits every six months if you post content frequently, operate in a fast-paced industry, or have a large website with multiple writers.

Which tools to use for a content audit?

Google Analytics, Google Search Console, SEMrush, Screaming Frog take care of traffic data, search metrics, backlink research, crawling. An excel table contains the inventory.

Does the content audit boost SEO?

Yes, because the content audit SEO process eliminates duplicate pages, optimizes for keywords, updates out-of-date pages, so that search engines identify your best content.

How do I conduct an SEO content audit?

In order to perform an SEO content audit, you need to gather all URLs, analyze 12 months of search and analytics data, assess the quality, look for gaps and duplicates, rate pages from 0 to 10, decide on one action for each page, and make an action plan. Section

What is the distinction between content audit and content marketing audit?

Content audit involves auditing the pages on your website. The content marketing audit, on the other hand, involves auditing not only the channels used but also the objectives behind them. Examples of channels include emails and social media.

What are the major difficulties encountered in conducting content audit?

The difficulties include the inability to collect all data, evaluate the quality, and use the results of the content audit. The bigger the website, the more difficult the task becomes, and you should audit your site in sections.