How to Run an SEO Content Audit On My Website?

Time to review your website content? Take the time to understand which performing content and other SEO factors are providing value for your site and providing value for readers.

Why run an SEO Content Audit 

An SEO Content audit finds the strengths and weaknesses of your content and opportunities to improve and assesses all areas of SEO performance. 

By running an SEO content audit, you can review and rework your content strategy with a better understanding of the content which performs best and how people are receiving the content. 

Our team at ROAR is offering free SEO audits to businesses for a limited time: get yours here!

How to Run an SEO Content Audit 

Depending on the size of your site, the SEO content audit process may feel like a massive overbearing task. Let’s break it down into manageable chunks to help you review your content and get optimising.  

Set Goals

Before diving straight into assessing your SEO content audit, you need to decide what you deem as successful. 

This can be based on how competitive your industry is. For businesses in competitive industries to have content ranking on page one may already be deemed a success. However, some businesses may see success as being in the top three search engine results for a given term. 

• What are you trying to achieve by auditing your content? 

Knowing what you want will help you determine exactly what steps to take with underperforming content. It may be improving older content, removing redundant content, or improving SEO results for specific pages or the whole site.

Whatever you decide as categorically successful, you need to stick to it; otherwise, post-audit, your content will be just as mismatched.

Collect Content

Collecting content should be relatively simple if you have a solid SEO content management system set up. If you don’t, fear not – but here’s why you need it “Why you need SEO Content Management”

Collect the URLs of the content you want to audit, and mark down the title and type of content it is. However, if your website is bigger than just a few pages, you’ll need a way to organise it to make it a much more manageable process for you or your team.

Review Content

When assessing the SEO value of your content right now, you need to consider plenty of factors. 

• How long has the content been published?

Google takes its time ranking content and, in some cases, can take up to six months to really decide the value of the content. So, if the content has been published for less than 6 months, leave it be, and you can always come back to it next time.

• Is your content ranking in the top three? 

Your metrics might not be top three on SERPs it may be page one. Regardless, does your content rank within the range you’re deeming successful? If yes, you can leave it to continue, if not, look into it further and see the opportunities to improve.   

• Does it have a targeted and relevant keyword?

For older articles, keywords may be too broad or, in some cases, too niche. Take the time to review the article and do some keyword research around it to find a more relevant keyword where you need it.  

• Does that keyword have any search volume around it? 

Keyword volume and stats always change based on what people are actually looking for. It may be worth seeing if your keyword still has volume and traffic around it, and if not, doing some keyword research and finding another relevant keyword with volume around it. 

You can use Google Trends to see the volume around your keywords individually, or if you’re a user of ROAR’s DIY SEO Platform, you can use your Keyword Sitemap to see the page, the keyword, the volume and your ranking all in one place. 

Through this link, you can get a 7-day free trial of ROAR’s DIY SEO Platform to improve your organic rankings and develop your SEO knowledge today! 

• Are people reading your content?

Through analytics, you can see your bounce rate; this determines the number of people who land on your page and then leave without taking any further action. 

Bounce rate won’t directly affect how your page ranks, but it does give an overview as to how actual people are interacting with your content. The average bounce rate for organic search content is 43.60%, but they can vary drastically. 

Adjust content accordingly

And you’ve done it! An SEO audit for all of your relevant content, but what next? 

At this stage, you have some decisions to make; you could choose to do nothing and leave all of your content exactly the way it is. Making the whole exercise of the SEO content audit pointless… or we could make some changes.

• Keyword Research 

For content without a relevant keyword or no search volume. Perform some keyword research and optimise the content for the new keyword. 

Check out our YouTube Video – Optimising your content for SEO, to make sure you’re optimising your content to the best of your ability.

• Merge content 

If you’re finding that a lot of the content needs to be improved or re-optimised links together, you may choose to merge the content into one big guide or blog. 

This can help you target broader and more competitive terms and help boost your business’s authoritative voice in the industry.

• Delete or leave? 

If a piece of content isn’t ranking within the top 20, but the ranking for that keyword isn’t crucial, you can leave it as it is or even delete it. 

When deleting content, ensure to take into consideration internal and external links that lead to the page and amend any links that become broken when you delete the content. 

• Successful Content 

As time goes on, make sure to keep an eye on ranking and if content begins to drop, boost and add to it to keep it up-to-date and relevant. However, if you’re pleased with how your content is performing, you can relax and take a breather – you can’t fix something that isn’t broken.

Speak to our team of SEO specialists today for more on our SEO Management Services and Consultancy.