5 Reasons Why a Content Audit Is Useful

By Nick Nelson

If you’re wondering how to move the needle on your website’s performance in search, conducting an SEO content audit is an essential first step.

This systematic review serves as a comprehensive health check for your brand’s online presence, surfacing issues that may be impeding your visibility and uncovering opportunities to make fast gains.

There’s a reason why, according to research from Semrush, 61% of marketers conduct content audits two or more times per year. Actually, there are several reasons!

What is the purpose of a content audit?

A content audit is essentially an SEO analysis of your website that focuses entirely on its content ecosystem, as opposed to technical factors and the like. This process is intended to help organizations manage, consolidate, prune, update, and add content to their website in order to provide a better experience for visitors while sending clearer signals to search engines.

An SEO content audit generally consists of eight primary steps:

Define your goals
Compile a content inventory
Perform Keyword analysis
Assess content quality
Evaluate Internal linking
Check for duplicate content
Perform content gap analysis
Develop an informed content plan

Why is a content audit useful for today’s organizations in a competitive digital environment? Here are some of the key outcomes and benefits that you can achieve by going through this important strategic undertaking.

“Whether your site is massive or tiny, a content audit can help you understand what you have, what you need, what you don’t need, and what actions you can take in the future to make sure your ecosystem of content is contributing to your goals.”
Julia McCoy, Search Engine Land

5 key practical benefits of a content audit

#1. Simplify and improve your site’s user experience.

The most important quality of any business website is that it reflects well on your brand and makes a strong impression on visitors. Many of the same improvements that will enhance your SEO impact – removing low-quality content, streamlining navigation, addressing content gaps – will also create a better experience for the people who arrive on your website.

This makes visitors more likely to explore the depth of your content, and engage with your site more extensively!

#2. Strengthen SEO performance

Of course, bringing more people to your website is a crucial goal alongside engaging them once they arrive. Content audits play a big role here as well, improving your visibility in search by making your site and its pages easier for engines to find, understand, categorize, and contextualize.

These are some of the actions driven by a content audit that can meaningfully impact your website’s SEO performance: