Everybody always says that content is king, but what if your content's crown is slipping?
According to statistics from the Content Marketing Institute, 73% of B2B marketers and 70% of B2C marketers leverage content marketing as part of their overall marketing strategy. But simply creating great, SEO-friendly content isn't enough. Just like technical SEO and off-page SEO, your content SEO efforts need to be continuously evaluated and tweaked to ensure your site stays at the top of its game.
Now, Google’s principle of E-A-T (that has recently become E-E-A-T) rewards businesses that create content that demonstrates experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. Businesses that want to stay competitive are having to focus more than ever on their SEO content strategies for creating and optimising great content.
So, how can you get the most out of the content on your website? The best place to start is with a comprehensive deep dive into your website's content that leaves no stone unturned, identifying every instance of duplicate content, broken internal links, keyword cannibalisation, and anything else that is damaging your performance in the search results. Yes, we're talking about a content SEO audit.
Content audits vs regular SEO audits
SEO audits are basically a way of evaluating your site's performance in the SERPs, encompassing a wide variety of elements and ranking factors that contribute to how highly your pages rank for searchers. A typical site audit for SEO will include a technical audit, backlink audit, and content audit.
Although an SEO content audit is part of this general SEO audit, businesses that want to focus on content marketing to outrank competitors can benefit from a content-specific site audit. This type of audit examines the content on your site and shows you opportunities to optimise existing content or repurpose it for your website to rank better in the search engine results.
With a content audit you can get a comprehensive evaluation of the strengths, weaknesses and areas for improvement with regard to your website’s content. The audit will look at a range of on-page SEO elements including keyword rankings, meta descriptions and titles, internal linking, blog topic clusters, and more to identify opportunities to boost your search engine performance.
So, why choose a content SEO audit? Here are five key benefits to consider.
5 benefits of an SEO content audit
From helping identify keyword cannibalisation risks to content that needs to be updated, there are many important benefits to running a content SEO audit.
Identifying problems in your site content
A comprehensive SEO audit will review your site content and help you identify low-performing and high-performing pages, fix broken links, and improve your site’s accessibility. With a thorough SEO content audit you can identify keyword cannibalisation risks – a problem common for eCommerce businesses where multiple pages on a site are competing to rank for the same terms. This evaluation can inform your keyword research and help you to curate content that targets different keywords.
In certain cases, your website might have under-utilised landing pages that may be ranking high on the SERPs but may not have any CTA (call to action) or links to sales pages. This can mean a high bounce rate and a major missed opportunity to boost your conversion rate. In such scenarios, a content audit will leverage key metrics such as time on page, click-through rate and bounce rate to identify such pages and flag them. Additionally you can also identify under-performing product pages through this SEO audit and reoptimise them to drive organic traffic.
SEO audits will also take into account the meta titles and meta descriptions of your content. Although meta titles are considered weak ranking factors and meta descriptions are not ranking factors at all, these can impact the click-through rate of your content and boost organic traffic to your website.
Maximising conversion rates
With a content audit you can examine the top landing pages in detail including the content, design and CTA (call-to-action). In order to maximise conversion rates, it’s important for these landing pages to be simple for the user to navigate through. SEO audit tools such as Ahrefs or Semrush can help you with this by optimising your content, headlines, meta description and navigation.
Content audits also help you gain a better understanding about the use of keywords, another aspect that positively affects conversion rates. If you are a small business it may be useful to include geo-specific and long tail keywords to help searchers find you and improve your conversion rates.
Effective keyword targeting
For any website that intends to compete for the top spots in the SERPs, it is important to target the right keywords and understand what you want to rank for. But how do you know if the keywords that you are targeting are right or not?
As mentioned above, an SEO content audit looks closer at your currently ranking keywords and compares this to the target keywords you want to rank for in the future. This informs content reoptimisation and future content strategy, allowing you to ensure that your content is maximising your likelihood or ranking for the right search terms.
Improving content quality
One thing that search engines like Google love is fresh and updated content. Google also penalises websites with content that is short, repetitive, and invaluable. With a good content audit you can evaluate the quality of the existing content on your website, the relevance of the content and its alignment with the target audience. Is there content that needs adding to? Content that should be deleted? Duplicate pages? Opportunities for consolidating content? All these things can be identified in the audit.
You can also identify content gaps, identifying where your website lacks information that your searchers are looking for and create new content to bridge these gaps. Content audit experts may also recommend archiving content that is useful but does not help in gaining traffic, backlinks or rankings for your site.
Identify target pages for optimisation
On-page optimisation is a very important aspect of SEO that can help your web pages to improve their visibility and relevance to search engines. A content audit can provide you with an excellent opportunity to evaluate and enhance your on-page optimisation efforts. Through a content audit you can focus on and review key elements such as reviewing meta titles and descriptions, optimising headings, subheadings and body text, ensuring proper keyword usage and semantic SEO and optimising URLs, image alt text and internal links.
Competitor analysis
For any business, it is important to know your competitors as well as you know your own brand. A content audit not only helps you gain an in-depth understanding of the content on your website – it also helps you get an idea of the content types that your competitors use and the ones that are working for them. You can also see the gaps in the content strategy of your key competitors and fill them with a cleverly targeted blog post, landing page, whitepaper or infographic.
Best Practices to Follow
If you want to carry out a content audit, here are a few things to keep in mind.
- Organisation is key: It is important to stay as organised as possible and lay out the steps that you need to take to perform a successful content audit. Map out the goals that you would like to achieve and how you would like to achieve them.
- Create an action plan: While a content audit could help you diagnose what’s lacking in your website in terms of content, the findings are useless unless you take proper action. Thereby remember that your content audit only ends when you have created a new content strategy that is aligned with the data that you have collected. This could mean minor edits from changing your titles and meta description to revamping landing pages and creating new content such as blog posts to rank better in the search results.
- Delegate your work: While starting an SEO audit, remember that it’s better to delegate the tasks and not carry out the entire process independently. A great idea would be to use one of the several SEO audit tools that are available in the market or to get professional help from an experienced SEO agency.
Talk to our experts and get started on your website content audit today!
There's no doubt that conducting an SEO audit is a crucial step towards optimising your website’s performance and achieving your online goals. However, conducting a site audit is no walk in the park and can be a complex and time-consuming process. Even when the audit is complete, the task remains to put the necessary changes into action and develop your new content strategy. It's no small task.
Fortunately, there's no need to go through an SEO audit alone.Viaduct Generation's SEO content audit service is a comprehensive solution to analysing your website content. Our team of experts will take a deep dive into your website’s existing content marketing efforts to analyse what is working on search engines and what is not. Then, we'll create detailed suggestions and guidance for your SEO next steps.
With our comprehensive content audit you can revamp your content strategy and help your website rank higher on the search results. Drop us a message and let’s unlock the full potential of your website today. Or, for a free taster of what we offer, book your free SEO audit today.
