Succeeding in SEO means undergoing the proper checks and balances to ensure your content remains relevant and effective. What better way to do that than by running an SEO content audit?
In a world where search engine algorithms evolve daily, and new information flows constantly, conducting a site content audit can help your website surpass its competitors — and at TrioSEO, you can achieve that and so much more.
For more than 10 years, our team has refined our SEO processes to align with the latest trends and practices so you can thrive in the competitive digital space.
We offer a free SEO audit to help you start your journey of generating targeted leads and traffic. If that’s something you’re keen on, explore our SEO content writing services to see how we can optimize your online presence!
What is a Content Audit?
A content audit involves thoroughly inspecting your website’s content—blogs, articles, videos—to determine its effectiveness and alignment with your business strategies.
With content audits, you analyze metrics like traffic, engagement, and other relevant data points to help identify what strategies are working, what needs improvement, and what can be removed or updated.
Content Audit Goals
You might ask, what are the goals of a website content audit? An SEO content audit aims to accomplish the following:
- Improve SEO performance: If your website isn’t ranking well in search engines, you might lack a particular ingredient to succeed in SEO. An audit can trace this back to specific SEO issues, poor content quality, and other factors.
- Optimize keywords: An audit helps determine if you’re targeting the right keywords that your audience is searching for. You can then integrate these keywords into your site’s content.
- Ensure content quality: Are you writing for search engines or your audience? Ensuring top-notch content quality involves balancing optimizing content for search engines and creating valuable content for your readers.
- Update and refresh content: What was previously may not be true today. A content audit checks whether your content is updated and relevant, factors that both search engines and readers highly value.
- Identify content gaps: An underperforming website likely has content gaps. When a content audit identifies topics or areas that are inadequately covered, you can create content that fills these gaps, thereby expanding your reach.
- Improve conversion rates: Whether a product purchase or a discovery call, one of your business’s end goals is to improve conversion rates. An audit helps optimize your calls to action (CTAs) to maximize conversion opportunities.
Why is a Content Audit Useful?
All businesses with an online presence must undergo regular content audits. A significant part of SEO is ensuring you optimize your website’s content to meet the changing demands of search engine algorithms and user preferences. In short, it’s how you can stay on top.
However, not all have the time to tackle these tasks on their own. That’s where our e-commerce content writing steps in. Our team will handle the entire blogging process for you—from creating content briefs to analyzing performance—allowing you to focus on your core business.
SEO Content Audit Checklist
While there is no defined list for an SEO content audit, a lot goes into the actual audit process.
The analysis will involve a review of the following:
Keywords
Are you using the right keywords that your audience is searching for? Are they integrated naturally into your content? How do they perform in terms of ranking and traffic? Are you using a mix of primary, secondary, and long-tail keywords?
Running an SEO content audit will answer all these questions. If it wasn’t obvious enough, keywords play a critical role in SEO and content strategy. Investing your resources in selecting the right ones can help improve search rankings and attract relevant traffic.
Tone
The tone of your content says a lot about your brand. If you’re marketing your product toward a youthful audience, a more casual tone may be appropriate — the same cannot be said for professional or corporate readers.
An audit evaluates whether the desired tone is consistent across all content forms.
Language
Just like the tone of your content, the language must be appropriate. Avoid heavy jargon if your product is targeted to a less tech-savvy audience.
An in-depth content audit catches this, and as a result, the content becomes more accessible and user-friendly.
Meta Elements
These are the titles on your browser tabs and the descriptions below the page title in search engines. Conducting an SEO audit ensures that the meta elements are unique and contain primary keywords.
They should be interesting enough to garner clicks.
Multimedia Elements
Pictures and videos may enhance your website’s visual appeal and user engagement. However, in SEO, there is more to the visual aspect of these elements.
Alt texts and file names also create an impact, so they must also contain relevant keywords. Videos must also be engaging enough to enhance the content rather than to distract from it.
Links
Your website must contain both internal and external links. The former leads readers to other relevant pages on your site, while the latter adds credibility to your content. Audits check whether these links are relevant to your content and not broken.
Time on Page
Content auditors also consider metrics when running content audits, such as the time spent on a page. The ideal ‘time on page’ will vary depending on your industry and the services you offer. For instance, a good standard for ‘time on page’ is 82 seconds for B2B organizations.
Bounce Rates
Another metric reviewed in content audits is your bounce rate — the percentage of users who leave your website after visiting a single page.
Generally, the lower the bounce rate, the better. The benchmark bounce rates also vary by industry. Retail and e-commerce websites, for example, must strive for a bounce rate between 45-46%. You can identify and address content issues contributing to higher bounce rates by undergoing an SEO audit.
Note that this isn’t an exhaustive content audit checklist. Some audits may evaluate more factors, while others might review less.
How to Perform an SEO Content Audit – Our Process
Performing a content audit requires expertise and a strategic approach —that’s precisely what we offer at TrioSEO. It’s all thanks to our 10+ years of experience refining our processes following the best practices.
That way, you can generate more leads, scale the search engine ranks, and drive meaningful conversions.
Here’s a short run-through of our process:
Company Overview
First, we learn more about your company. Who is your target audience? What is your customer profile? By learning more about this information, our writers can craft articles that suit your company’s voice. Plus, we can identify any weak links or opportunities to optimize your content for better engagement and conversions.
Using Ahrefs, we gather data on your online presence, such as your domain rating, traffic levels, and already-ranking keywords.
Competitors
Next, we learn more about your competitors. Perhaps they’re outperforming your website, or your keyword rankings drop — that’s where competitor analysis comes into play.
Together, we’ll learn more about their keyword strategies and evaluate their content quality. From here, we’ll help you seize opportunities by identifying any content gaps your website can fill.
Already-Ranking Keywords
If you’ve been creating content for some time, we’ll help you analyze the performance of your already-ranking keywords. With the help of Ahrefs, we can identify keywords for which your content is already ranking. The tools provide insight into important data, including keyword positions and search volumes.
Then, we evaluate the performance of these keywords based on engagement metrics. We’ll also monitor how your keyword rankings have changed with time. Whether they have improved or declined in position, we’ll analyze the potential reasons for these changes.
Keyword Opportunities
To help expand your keyword coverage, we’ll identify related keywords with high volume and low competition, considering their potential impact on traffic and conversions.
We’ll also examine keyword volume and difficulty and find the right balance to help you stay competitive.
Our 4-step process at TrioSEO is an effort of our 10+ years of perfecting our SEO strategies so that you can yield the best possible results — an optimized website with better rankings and increased organic traffic.
Learn more about our keyword research services to start maximizing your digital potential. We’ll begin with a free SEO audit to get the ball rolling and set you on the path to success.
Content Audit Tools for SEO
You can’t run a successful audit without having some SEO tools in your toolbelt.
These are the most popular tools used in audits:
Semrush
Semrush is a full-featured SEO tool that comes in handy during content audits. It has it all: competitor analysis, keyword research, rank tracking, and more. On top of that, it offers a site audit tool that scans your website for both content and technical issues.
Ahrefs
Another excellent SEO audit tool, Ahrefs delivers many useful features. Its offerings are similar to those of Semrush, so it’s got you covered on all SEO fronts, whether that be content planning or report generation.
Google Analytics (GA4)/Google Search Console (GSC)
Google Analytics and Google Search Console are powerful yet free tools that simplify the audit process. GA4 allows you to visualize data to improve conversion rates, while GSC provides an overview of your website’s ranking for targeted keywords.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Below, we’ve rounded out the most common queries we receive on SEO content audits:
How Often Should You Do a Content Audit?
As a rule of thumb, you should run a content audit at least once a year. The frequency will also depend on the volume of content you produce and the number of authors.
What are Common Issues Found During an SEO Content Audit?
An SEO content audit yields interesting findings for many organizations, and we found these to be the most common ones:
- Broken links
- Duplicate content
- Slow loading times
- Unoptimized images
- Missing meta elements
- Incorrect use of tags
How Do You Prioritize Actions after an SEO Content Audit?
Once the audit has been completed, you will receive a report of the critical findings. Afterward, we’ll need to create an action plan and prioritize your actions based on their impact on your SEO performance, the amount of effort required to achieve this, and the level of urgency.
Conclusion
By now, you probably already know why running a content audit is a fundamental step to becoming a top-performing website. An audit boosts your overall SEO performance, ensures high content quality, and brings new keyword opportunities to light.
At TrioSEO, we specialize in providing thorough content audits and are backed by over 10 years of experience in the growing SEO field.
We optimize your content strategy and drive better results: higher rankings, more traffic, and increased conversions. Consider us your fractional SEO team, and we’ll show you how you can build your online presence and achieve your business goals simultaneously.
