If you’re new to SEO, you’ve probably come across a range of terms that sound important but you’re not quite sure what to do, how to do it or when. One such term we’ve been asked about is content audits and, specifically, when the right to do a content audit is.
The best time to do a content audit for SEO is right at the start of a new campaign. This helps you to understand the health and quality of existing content, as well as identify high-priority tasks that need addressing. It can also be a good idea to perform a content audit six to nine months into a campaign and at the end of a campaign to determine the overall success of your efforts.
Read on to learn more about when to do a content audit and the factors that should be considered as part of the audit.
There are many reasons why you might perform an SEO content audit. However, you’ll typically do them on three key occasions;
Whether you work for an agency, in-house or freelance, one of the first steps in a new SEO campaign is to run a series of audits in order to understand the current health and performance of the website. One such audit is a content audit.
Running a content audit at this time not only allows you to understand the current state of the content on a website, but also gives you a benchmark upon which you can assess ongoing performance.
It also allows you to set goals and priorities based on actual data for a more strategic campaign.
SEO is a long-term strategy so it’s unlikely that you’ll see meaningful results before the six to nine-month mark. At this point, it can be a good idea to run your audits again to see how the campaign has progressed.
This information can then be used to feed your ongoing strategy or, if things aren’t quite going as planned, to help you rethink your strategy.
If, for whatever reason, a campaign is ending, it could be beneficial to run a final audit in order to gauge success. If you’re working on behalf of a client, this information can be used to showcase your work on the campaign and the success of your strategy. It could also be used to gain further work if you provide detailed recommendations.
If you’re working in-house or for yourself, this information will help you to plan future marketing endeavours and give you an up-to-date benchmark for success.
The purpose of a content audit is to evaluate the health and current state of content on your website. It encourages you to assess its strengths, weaknesses and how well it performs against a number of key factors for SEO. Typically, a content audit looks at the content assets on your website, such as landing pages, blogs and resources.
The information gathered during a content audit helps you to understand what’s already working well and where you might need to make improvements in order to see positive changes in search rankings.
For example, an audit might highlight content that is already performing well, but might just need a boost. But, it could also highlight pages that need a complete overhaul – perhaps the wrong keywords are being used, or the content just isn’t relevant to the topic.
Depending on the level of detail that your audit goes into, you might also find yourself cataloguing content and analysing its performance using tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console. This would provide you with additional insights in which to create a well-informed content strategy.
Coupled with other key SEO audits such as a technical site audit and an E-E-A-T audit, you should be in a good position to create a winning SEO strategy.
So, now you know why and when you should perform a content audit. But, how do you do it? Below we go through the seven key areas that you should evaluate to help you understand how to conduct a content audit.
Thin/no content means that there isn’t enough content on the page to either;
There needs to be a substantial amount of valuable content on your website to help both real users and search engines understand what you’re offering. Having enough content means that you have the space to sell your offering, and include key SEO ranking factors.
Learn more about thin/no content in our detailed blog, What is Thin Content and Does it Hurt SEO?
Once you’ve determined whether or not you have enough content on your web pages, you then need to assess the structure of your pages. Often, you’ll find that this section of the audit results in a number of high-priority tasks that can have a big impact on SEO.
Typically, you’ll be assessing things such as:
Another key area to assess is the use of keywords. Without the proper use of carefully selected keywords, your website will struggle to rank as you’d like it to. Your content audit will allow you to understand how, or if, keywords are currently being used across your website and what changes need to be made to start seeing improvements in search rankings.
However, it’s important to remember that there is such a thing as over-stuffing keywords. This can have a negative impact on SEO and may see your rankings suffer. You can learn more about this in our detailed blog, How to Avoid Keyword Stuffing – Keyword Best Practices.
Duplicate content comes in a few different forms but is, essentially, exactly what it sounds like. In its simplest form, you’ll be checking that content isn’t duplicated across the site, any subdomains, or across the internet as a whole. This can have a negative impact on SEO as it confuses search engines; they don’t know which version of the content to rank.
When checking for duplicate content, this also extends to metadata such as title tags and H1s. Additionally, it also includes URLs, but this is more technical SEO than content SEO.
Learn more about this in our detailed article, Why is Duplicate Content Bad for SEO?
This section of a content audit will only be relevant to websites that have a blog or news section. However, in those cases, it is worth reviewing. Not only will it reveal any potential content goldmines, but it could also highlight any technical issues that you were not yet aware of.
Blogs are typically low-priority, particularly at the start of a campaign, but some of the key factors to consider when auditing blogs include;
Learn more about what constitutes a good blog for SEO in our detailed article, How Do You Optimise a Blog for SEO?
“Helpful content” is a part of Google’s content guidelines that state that content should be genuinely helpful to users and not solely created for SEO purposes. When conducting a content audit, it’s important to check that the content on the website is genuinely helpful to users and is of high quality. Google may devalue websites that they believe to break these guidelines.
E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness. Whilst not necessarily a direct ranking factor, Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines use E-E-A-T to measure content quality, particularly within YMYL niches.
As such, it’s important to ensure that your website’s content highlights each of these factors. Learn more about how to write E-E-A-T content in our dedicated blog.
Learn more about what to include in your content audit in our dedicated blog, What to Include in a Content Audit, where we go into more detail about each key factor that you should assess.
If you’re not quite sure where to start when it comes to auditing your website’s content for SEO (and what to do with that information afterwards), get in touch with Wildcat Digital today. At the start of each and every campaign, our SEO experts take stock of your website, before putting together a tailored strategy. Even if you want to create your own content, we can help ensure that you’re starting off on the right foot and have a strategy in place that makes sense for your business.
