By Nick Nelson

If your organization has been publishing content for many years, chances are your website has more content than you can keep track of. This makes managing a content strategy harder than it needs to be. When you don’t know what content already exists — or the quality of that content — any efforts to create new content may actually work against your overall search performance. 

To combat this, we recommend conducting an SEO content audit. This process will help you understand everything that has been published on your website so you can make an informed choice about how to use it more strategically. 

A step-by-step guide to SEO content audits 

Step 1: Define your goals 

Before you can start an SEO content audit, you need to know what you’re trying to accomplish. Without clearly articulated goals, the analysis derived from the audit is likely to lack focus and meaningful insights. Setting clear goals provides a framework for prioritizing tasks, evaluating the effectiveness of implemented changes, and demonstrating the impact of the SEO content audit on overall website performance.

When you define specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals for your SEO content audit, you set yourself up to have direction, purpose, and measurable outcomes. Whether the aim is to improve keyword rankings, enhance user experience, increase organic traffic, or achieve a combination of these, well-defined goals are the key to a targeted and strategic approach.

Step 2: Compile a content inventory

The first step in the content audit itself is gathering a comprehensive list of all the content on your website, including blog posts, articles, product pages, and any other destinations where content is crawled. This inventory clarifies exactly what content lives on your site, where it’s located, and its performance data. This lays the groundwork for all the work that comes next. 

Without this information, your audit could miss hidden opportunities or tackle irrelevant content, hindering your SEO efforts. But when you have a full picture of your content ecosystem, you can confidently understand what you have, what you need, and what you can improve.

Step 3: Keyword analysis

Once you have an inventory, review the keywords associated with each piece of content. This process reveals whether your pages are targeting the right search terms, attracting the desired audience, and ranking where they should be. 

Analyzing the keywords that your content targets and comparing them to search trends, competition, and user intent. Doing this will help identify missed opportunities, address keyword cannibalization, and guide your content optimization efforts. 

Step 4: Assess content quality

For each piece of content on your website, evaluate the accuracy, readability, and how closely it maps to search intent. High-quality helpful content is more likely to perform well in search engine rankings, especially after Google’s 2022 helpful content update. 

An abundance of content on …read more

Source:: Top Rank Blog

Author: Aaron