Content Audit: How to Optimize Your Site By Cleaning Up Old Content

Content Audit — Table of Contents

+ Content Audit: An Overview
+ Cleaning Up Bad Content
+ SEO Lensing and Content Consolidation
+ Questions to Ask When Performing a Website Content Audit
+ Website Content Audit Data
+ Content Audit Data Review aka “What Do I Do Now?”
+ SEO.co: An Internal Content Audit Case Study
+ Starting Your Website Content Audit

Content marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) remain two of the best strategies for increasing traffic to your site—and growing your reputation at the same time. Even better, the two approaches work together so tightly and beneficially that they’re often treated as practically indistinguishable.

The longer your content marketing campaign runs, the better. You’ll build an archive of more content, attract and build more links, and ultimately generate more traffic. But there’s a problem that comes into play with long-running campaigns.

Over time, your content will decline in value. Some of your articles will be from your earliest days, and they may not be as detailed or well-written as your more mature pieces. Some of your content will become outdated. Some of it will simply cease to be relevant to your modern priorities. Whatever the case, your old articles will no longer bring as much value as they should, and your SEO campaign will suffer because of it.

That’s where a content audit comes into play. With a content audit, you’ll evaluate the current state of your onsite content, including posts from the past and present, then use that information to cull, combine, and improve your content. If done right, it should improve your average visitor’s experience and simultaneously help you increase your search engine rankings.

Content Audit: An Overview

Let’s start with a brief overview of what a content audit is, and ultimately what it’s meant to help you do. In this guide, we’re going to explore two primary applications for your content audit:

• Cleaning up “bad” content. Goal one is cleaning up your “bad” content. Over time, your site will accumulate content that’s out of date, out of touch, or out of your element. A content audit will give you the chance to get rid of these pieces, upgrade them, or otherwise transform them. With less “bad” content on your site, you’ll have a simpler, more streamlined sitemap—and a better reputation with both search engines and human visitors.
• SEO lensing (aka, content consolidation). Goal two is using the “SEO lensing” strategy, or content consolidation, to combine and transform your older pieces of content (and new insights), ultimately producing much longer, more impactful, higher-quality pieces. Think of it like Voltron-ing your content, except instead of a giant super robot, you’ll end up with a thorough article that attracts lots of links and improves your brand reputation.

Before you can execute these initiatives, you’ll need to follow three high-level steps:

• • Asking initial questions. It’s a good idea to set some specific objectives for your organization, and define the areas that concern you the most. For example, are higher rankings in search engines your main priority? If so, which keyword terms are you targeting? Are you more interested in getting a higher conversion rate? And is this type of SEO audit meant to serve as a one-and-done way to improve your existing assets, or is it establishing the foundation for your future content strategy?
  • Gathering data. You can likely spot some underperforming and underwhelming articles on your own, relying on your instincts and past experience. However, your strategy will be much more effective if you rely on objective data. After setting a course for your goals and content direction, you’ll start gathering the metrics necessary to evaluate your past content performance.

• Reviewing data. Then, you’ll analyze the data in combination with your own subjective takeaways and come to a conclusion about not only your existing content, but what type of content will help you most in the near future.

If this overview seems vague or overwhelming, don’t worry; we’ll use separate sections to explore each of these concepts in detail.

Cleaning Up Bad Content

Remember, goal one is cleaning up the “bad” content on your website—the content that’s simply taking up space and not providing any value to your domain or your users. But what, exactly, do we mean when we say “bad” content?

There are many potential definitions, but these are some of the most applicable:

• Content that’s too short to rank. In the early days of SEO, it was common to churn out as many blog posts as possible, diversifying your URL structures and optimizing for a much wider range of long-tail keywords and phrases. But these days, longer content is where it’s at. In the strictest sense, content length doesn’t have a direct bearing on your rankings; on any given search engine results page (SERP), you can find entries with 300 words, 1,000 words, 10,000 words, and everything in between. But generally speaking, longer content tends to perform better; because it contains more information, it’s more likely to attract citations. And because it’s rich with natural keywords and phrases, it’s more likely to turn up as relevant for related searches. Accordingly, any short posts (i.e., less than 1,000 words or so) could probably be improved with expansion, combination, or simple removal.
• Content with no backlinks. Links are the ultimate conduit for SEO success; not only do they offer a direct channel for authority to pass, directly increasing your rankings, but they also forward referral traffic, which can boost the visibility and shareability of your page. If you have a piece of content that’s been published for months, but it hasn’t attracted or earned a single link, it probably has no place in your strategy; it isn’t generating any authority for you, and the fact that it has no links is a good indirect signal that the content just isn’t that noteworthy. The only exception here is new posts, which may not have had a fair chance to generate backlinks.
• Content with bad syntax or poor wording. This is one of the more subjective factors to evaluate, but it plays an important role in your strategy. Google’s search bots have built-in quality evaluators; in other words, they can tell the difference between eloquent, clear content and poorly written, clunky content. Google publishes a list of its quality rater guidelines (and boy, is it comprehensive). While there are many indications of quality that Google looks for, many of those factors tie back to common themes of expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (or E-A-T criteria). If your content reads like it was written by a non-native speaker or someone who isn’t an expert, it’s not going to do much for you; even if it somehow ranks in SERPs, it’s not going to form a good impression with your readership.
• Content with little traffic. This is where Google Analytics seriously comes in handy. We’ll explore some of the metrics you can analyze in Google Analytics a bit later in this guide, but for now, understand that your most important (and most valuable) content is going to be the content that attracts the most traffic. There are many potential sources of traffic, including direct traffic, organic traffic (from search engines), referral traffic (from links), and social media traffic; cumulatively, these serve as an indication of how well your post has performed. If your article isn’t getting much traffic from any source, what is it really doing for you? It’s time to get rid of it or transform it.
• Content that’s outdated. At SEO.co, we write a lot of content about SEO. Makes sense, right? But back in 2001, we might have written about the importance of stuffing exact match keyword phrases into as much onsite content as possible, and building links only on forum posts whenever you get the chance. Things have changed dramatically since then, so if we had content like this on our modern site, it would be downright laughable—or potentially provide inaccurate information to newcomers. “Outdated” doesn’t necessarily mean old; it means “no longer relevant,” so keep that in mind. Some posts written in 2001, like a positive review of the first Lord of the Rings film, might still be perfectly relevant. Also, outdated content doesn’t always need to be discarded; sometimes, a simple update is all that’s needed.
• Content that isn’t ranking as intended. Google’s search ranking system isn’t entirely predictable, so sometimes your best-laid plans will go awry. The long article you wanted to rank for “best cheeseburger recipes” is somehow ranking for “cheeseburger cookout ideas,” and the “cookout ideas” post you created doesn’t seem to be getting any ranking traction at all, but seems to be getting a ton of referral traffic. This is a bit of a mess, and it’s not exactly clear what the “right” solution is, but with a few adjustments, you can probably get yourself closer to the results you originally wanted.
• Content with messy organization. Sometimes, you sit down to write a long post about a complex topic (like, say, how to diagnose an engine problem), and there’s just no simple way to organize things. You might end up with a meandering post that’s hard to parse. This is bad for your readers, obviously, because they might have trouble following your logic or finding the section they need. But it’s also bad for search engines, since they rely heavily on H1 headers and other structural data to “understand” the structure of your post (and in some cases, provide users with excerpts). Any messy blog article from your past is begging to be cleansed, one way or another.

If you find articles that fit many of the above criteria (and many of them do go hand-in-hand), you can be resolute in your decision to cull it.

Why Should You Clean Up Bad Content on Your Website?

But why are we doing this in the first place? In the course of your discovery, you’ll likely encounter some posts you just subjectively like; you think they’re educational, or entertaining, or both, yet they don’t have any links or much traffic to speak of. Why would you spend time cleaning these?

• Negative customer experience. What are your immediate thoughts when you read a blog post that’s outdated, poorly written, or inaccurate? You probably laugh to yourself, leave the page, and write off the brand altogether. Customers who encounter “bad” content aren’t going to be engaged with your brand. At best, they aren’t going to be more likely to convert. At worst, they’re going to think your brand is behind the times or unauthoritative. Because of this, it’s almost better to have no content at all than “bad” content; removing these posts proactively will spare you the consequences of having customers encounter them.
• Higher bounce rates and lower rankings. It shouldn’t surprise you to learn that poorly written blog posts have higher bounce rates and exit rates, meaning they’re more likely to be the last thing a person sees before they leave your site. This plays into the “negative customer experience” effect, but it’s worth calling out on its own, because bounce rates are about more than just a lost conversion opportunity. The higher the bounce rate of a given page, the less likely it is to rank, and in extreme cases, your bounce rate may completely prevent your page from achieving visibility in SERPs.
• Traffic and ranking diffusion. We also need to consider the effects of traffic and ranking “diffusion,” which occurs when your efforts are inefficiently split between competing resources. For example, let’s say you currently have 5 blog posts covering a broad topic like how to buy an engagement ring. Each of these posts is doing okay, ranking around position 10 for keyword terms related to engagement rings, and getting about 100 visitors a month. But consider the fact that top-ranked entries in SERPs far outperform even the second-highest ranked entries, and returns diminish further from there. If you combined those posts into one capable of getting the top position, you might get 10,000 monthly visitors (instead of the 500 between your 5 discrete posts).
• Crawl rate effects. Google populates its SERPs based on stored information in its index. It builds and maintains its index by “crawling” different sites with an automated bot (Googlebot). The more complex your site is, the longer it will take Googlebot to crawl your site, and due to the number of pages involved, more potential crawl errors could arise. In some cases, Googlebot’s crawl rate could even interfere with your server’s bandwidth, which could cause performance issues for your users. You can manually adjust Googlebot’s crawl rate, but that still won’t solve some of the bigger issues. Overall, it’s much more efficient to simply clean your content base and reduce the number of URLs on your domain.
• Streamlined navigation. The simpler, smaller URL structure is also beneficial to users. If they’re looking for a specific piece of information, like how to plan an office holiday party, they don’t have to bounce back and forth between 10 similarly-named articles; they can go to a single, comprehensive source. Also, overall navigation will be streamlined. Think of it this way; if your site has 2,000 URLs, how many clicks, on average, will it take for a user to find the page they need? You can do some “six degrees of separation” math to figure this out, and if your pages are tightly interlinked, this figure can be lowered, but users will always be able to get to their intended destination in fewer clicks if there are fewer URLs to choose from.

At this point, you should understand what constitutes “bad” content, and why you should clean it. In the next section, we’ll discuss one of the best cleaning methods: SEO lensing and content consolidation. From there, we’ll discuss how to prepare for your first content audit, and how to find and analyze the relevant metrics to guide your strategy.

SEO Lensing and Content Consolidation

You’ve got a list of articles, blog posts, whitepapers, and other pieces of content that simply aren’t working for you. Should you delete those posts and just move on?

You may not need to. Through the process of SEO lensing, otherwise known as content consolidation, you can take all the best elements of those articles and recombine them in a complete and much higher-quality form. This is highly beneficial because it preserves some of the content you spent so long creating, while also maximizing the potential of your strategy.

The term “SEO lensing” comes from the effect of a magnifying glass or similar lens. If you hold a magnifying glass in such a way that it captures sunlight and focuses it onto a single point, an otherwise benign collection of sunbeams can instantly become powerful enough to burn a hole through most materials, or start a fire from kindling. Similarly, if you take the unimpressive power of a menagerie of separate posts and focus them into an all-encompassing piece, you can ignite an otherwise lukewarm strategy.

There are a few main steps to this process.

Identify Diffuse Content

First, you’ll take the time to identify pieces of “diffuse” content. In many cases, these will just be the “bad” blog posts we identified from earlier; they aren’t generating enough traffic or aren’t detailed enough to stand on their own. However, there’s one additional element we need to consider—their topical focus.

Generate a list of all the blog posts that have disappointed you in some way, and try to evaluate them in terms of their broader focus. For example, our SEO blog might have articles like “How to Correct Inaccurate Local Citations,” “How to Write Better Local Content for SEO,” and “How to Get Better Online Reviews for SEO,” but these all relate to the broader topic, “local SEO.” You can establish topical connections and what constitutes a “broad” or “specific” topic at your own discretion. The point here is to identify posts that, by themselves, are disappointing, but together or in a different form could serve an important user need.

Discover Points of Overlap

Next, you’ll need to discover some points of overlap. In other words, how do these diffuse, discrete pieces of content relate to each other? Are there opportunities to eliminate redundant sections? Are there ways to segue one article into another?

There are a few approaches you can take here, but the easiest is to group similarly-themed articles together in batches, and review them together. For example, you might have 10 posts that all have something to do with local SEO. Are some of them entirely redundant? Does one article seem to serve as a follow-up to another? Do you have an article that thoroughly covers a sub-topic that’s only mentioned in passing somewhere else?

If after this step, you have some “islands” of content that don’t relate to any other posts, you’ll need to decide whether you want to update them or delete them entirely.

Stitch Together Related Posts

Let’s assume you now have a batch of posts with a similar topic, and you’re ready to stitch them together into a single, comprehensive post. How should you go about this?

• Define and solidify a core idea. First, you’ll want to define and outline your core idea. For example, let’s say you’ve found 10 posts related to learning how to play the guitar. You might come up with a title like “The Ultimate Guide to Guitar for Beginner’s,” or take a different angle like, “The X Most Important Lessons for Beginning Guitar Players.” Your most important considerations should be your target audience and your target keywords. With keyword research, you should be able to identify some valuable areas for optimization—keywords and phrases with high search volume, relevance to your target demographics, and relatively low competition. Use this as your basis, and consider what type of post would be most valuable to your readers and customers.
• Present content in a logical order. Once you have a core idea, you can start to organize your posts. There will likely be multiple logical options for you; for example, let’s say you’re instructing someone how to lose weight. Do you start with a section on the importance of physical exercise, or do you begin with nutrition? Do you lead in with an overview or start digging into the details? Generally speaking, it’s good to start with a brief, general premise, walk through detailed sections in order of increasing complexity, then summarize with a unique conclusion. Play around with different options, and see which one “feels” best.
• Eliminate or edit introductions and conclusions. If you’re linking your blog posts together in a single coherent narrative, you can probably get rid of (or at least edit) the introductions and conclusions of those articles. Introductions and conclusions are meant to briefly summarize the main topic of the article, but if you’re already introducing the broader topic and you have both lead-in and follow-up sections in the context of this article, these are largely unnecessary. They’re also the most common points of redundancy in a massive post like this.
• Make use of subsections. One of the easiest ways to minimize your spent effort while maximizing your SEO results is to create a separate subsection for each of your former articles. You can use the headline from each separate article as a header tag, which will allow you to continue capitalizing on them if they contain valuable long-tail keyword phrases. It’s also a convenient way to stay organized as you go through the editing process. Just make sure you keep your sections, sub-sections and sub-sub-sections organized neatly enough to remain both easy to read and easy to follow.
• Edit for redundancies. Your biggest enemy here is redundancy. If you’re pulling together many different posts that cover similar or overlapping areas, and you wrote them so long ago you barely remember them, there will likely be sentences and sometimes entire sections that essentially say the same things. This is bad for the coherence and perceived value of your work, so comb through your evolving comprehensive post and try to spot these problem points. Sometimes, all it takes is a simple rephrasing, to make the redundant statement a reminder, rather than a simple repetition. After all, if your post is especially lengthy, people may not read the entire thing in one go, or may navigate only to one relevant section.
• Edit for keywords and phrases. When you plan the title and direction of your piece, you’ll likely choose one primary keyword to serve as the focus of your content. However, due to the massive and powerful nature of your work, it’s a good idea to choose several secondary and even tertiary keywords. You’ll want to edit your work to include these keywords and variations of those keywords naturally throughout the text, including in headers and major points. The operative word here is “naturally.” Thanks to semantic search and improved quality standards, exact matches aren’t as important as they used to be.
• Future proof your work. Ideally, you’ll also have the opportunity to future proof your work. In other words, you’ll create this post in a way that prevents it from becoming irrelevant in the future. Try to avoid dated references, if possible, and focus on “evergreen” topics and advice when you can. Obviously, there are some types of content that will necessarily include dated references, or content that will eventually expire. If this is the case for your piece, you can build in structures and formatting that make it easy to update in the future; for example, you can include evergreen sections as well as sections that are specific to the year in which you’re writing the piece. That way, you can update the post every year and only focus on this dated section.

Create 301 Redirects

If you’re eliminating or combining posts that have existing links, it’s important to set up 301 redirects. A 301 redirect will divert traffic to a new location without compromising the functionality or authority-passing value of the original link. It also shouldn’t harm your SEO strategy, as long as your new destination is relevant to the original link context and similar to the original destination. All links pointing to the individual “bad” posts that once occupied your blog should automatically divert traffic to your new, comprehensive post.

It’s a bit tricky to set up a 301 redirect if you don’t have any technical experience, but there are a few different routes you can take. If you’re using Apache, you can edit your .htaccess files, adding a line like “RedirectPermanent /obsolete-article-1.html http://www.yourdomainhere.com/new-article.html”.

If you’re using IIS on a Microsoft Windows Server, you can set up 301 redirects with the Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager, found in Administrative Tools in the Start menu. Once you select a site, you can use (or install) the URL Rewrite module. With it, you can add an inbound rule like “Old Domain Redirect” or “Old Page Redirect” to forward traffic from an older URL to a new one.

There are a few other alternative methods to set up a 301 redirect as well, but all of them result in the same final outcome.

Questions to Ask When Performing a Website Content Audit

If you’re starting a content audit for the first time, it’s natural to feel a bit intimidated. There’s a lot to consider here, and few obvious “right” or “wrong” answers. You’ll need to dig into your content performance data before you can start making decisions, but before that, you’ll need to understand what you’re trying to achieve in the first place. This section will help you better understand your goals, and give you the tools you need to direct your strategy when you begin executing it.

Setting Your Goals

Let’s start by setting your initial goals. What, exactly, are you trying to accomplish with your content audit? Obviously, you want to improve your content strategy, but what does that really mean?

There are several competing objectives you could potentially be after:

• Ranking. Search engine rankings and SEO progress are a common top priority for businesses, and for good reason. Getting to the top of an SERP can practically guarantee relevant traffic to your site for as long as you hold the top spot and simultaneously restrict traffic to your competitors. You’ll also get brand visibility benefits by being featured prominently. If this is your top goal, you’ll need to focus more heavily on search engine metrics, and make decisions that favor your potential rankings—potentially at the cost of subjective user experience.
• Traffic. Traffic and search engine rankings tend to go hand in hand, but it’s important to think of them as distinct concepts. If your ultimate goal is getting more traffic, search engines may only be a secondary priority; for example, if you have a piece of content ranking halfway down most SERPs but it’s getting 10,000 hits a month from its backlinks, you can hit all your traffic goals without improving your rankings at all.
• Customer experience. How important is customer experience to your strategy? You might be getting a lot of traffic, and you might be dominating the SERPs, but how do people feel about your brand? Are they engaging with your calls to action? Are they telling people they know about the quality of your content? If you’re optimizing for customer experience, you might need to sacrifice some technical SEO components for the sake of providing streamlined content, and an overall better experience.
• Thought leadership. Do you want your brand to be known as a thought leader in the industry? And more importantly, how important is this factor, compared to how much traffic and rankings you’re getting? Thought leadership is about more than just attracting more people to your site; it’s about making a statement, and building a reputation for yourself as an authority in the industry. In many cases, it’s a much longer-term strategy than traffic acquisition or SEO, since its emphasis is on building your reputation.
• Future proofing. Sometimes, your content audit is less about boosting your marketing results and more about creating a more sustainable system. If your site has been messy and hard to navigate for years, your top priority might simply be cleaning it up—and keeping it easy to maintain for as long as possible. If that’s the case, you might turn your emphasis to future proofing. In other words, you’ll be creating the most sustainable, manageable system possible for the years to come.

Are you aiming for a combination of all these goals? Are some more important than others? Are there priorities for your business that aren’t on this list? There aren’t any right or wrong answers here, but understanding your goals and motivations can help you substantially if you’re forced to make a hard decision in the near future.

Website Content Audit Questions

In the next major section, we’ll explore how to gather the data you’ll use to begin the true “audit” process, but during that process, there are a few questions you’ll need to keep at the forefront of your mind:

• • Which posts and pages are underperforming? An audit, in any capacity, is an inspection with the intention to uncover errors or problem points, and that should be your intention here. Which posts and pages are underperforming? Where would you like to see improvements? Be critical and discerning here; this is your opportunity to make positive changes everywhere, so don’t give a pass to mediocre content just because you think you can’t do better.
  • Which metrics are most important to you? What does “underperforming” really mean? You’ll be using objective data to determine which posts need to be addressed, but with so many data points to choose from, how will you determine which data are most important? Refer to the goals you set (or at least considered) in the previous section, and make a list of the metrics that matter most to you. For example, are you most concerned with the inbound links pointed to your content, which will support both your search engine rankings and total traffic? Or are you more concerned about user experience metrics, like the number of conversions on each of your pages, or time spent on page? Again, there isn’t a right or wrong way to prioritize these factors, but you need to know what’s most important for your business.
  • How will you “clean” your underperforming content? The “bad” or underperforming content on your site needs to be addressed, but as you’ve seen, there are multiple ways to address it. Are you more interested in cleansing the bad material altogether and starting from scratch, or would you rather reuse as much of your old material as possible in the form of new, bigger-and-better posts? If you’re like most businesses, you’ll want a bit of both—but that leads to another important question.

• How will you determine what to cut and what to reuse/reinvent? If you’re going to discard some posts altogether, and repackage others with SEO lensing, how are you going to discern between these two candidates? If you find a mediocre post that categorically belongs with some of your other stronger material, will you spend the time rewriting and updating it to fit? Or will you determine it to be beyond saving? In the latter scenario, which performance metrics or subjective evaluations will get you to this point?

Website Content Audit Data

Once your strategy is conceptually sound, you can start digging into the metrics that will, hopefully, guide you on the rest of your content audit journey. In this section, we’ll explore the most important data that will guide your SEO content audit—and where to find it.

Gather Your Full Site URL List

To start, you’ll need to pull some raw data from your own site. Generate a full list of your site URLs; you’ll use this for several different purposes. There are a few easy ways to do this. If your site has fewer than 500 URLs, you can use XML-Sitemaps.com for free to generate an XML sitemap with all your URLs. Otherwise, you can use a tool like ScreamingFrog to generate a list of URLs; this tool (and others like it) will also help you discover broken links, point out duplicate content, and visualize your site architecture.

This is going to be an important high-level tool for you; you might be surprised to see just how many URLs you have, and how few of them are actually bringing value to your site. It’s also going to be useful in helping you set goals; for example, if you have 1,500 URLs, you might try to whittle those down to 700.

While you’re at it, generate a list of all the categories and tags associated with your blog. This can be done manually without much effort. Are there categories or tags that no longer make sense for your content strategy? Are there some that are hardly used? This is your opportunity to evaluate and restructure this system to fall in line with both your SEO goals and your customer experience strategy.

Rely on Google Analytics Historical Data

The easiest way to determine how your content is performing is to look at historical data. How has this content performed in the recent past? Has it provided a lot of value to your site, or has it been disappointing? In this endeavor, it’s hard to recommend a tool higher than Google Analytics; Google Analytics is incredibly robust, can help you visualize metrics across different sections of your site and in different time intervals, and best of all—it’s completely free.

With it, you can scope out the following metrics:

• Organic traffic. Under the Acquisition tab, you can generate a report to tell you how much traffic each of your pages is generating. From there, you can break down the type of traffic being generated. Organic traffic refers to visitors who discovered your site in search engines, and is a good reflection of your pages’ individual ranking potential. Pages with little to no organic traffic aren’t providing much value from their search engine rankings; even if they’re ranking for a handful of terms, they aren’t generating many clicks.
• Referral traffic. In the same area, you can look at each page’s referral traffic. This is a reference to the amount of traffic coming to your site via external links. You can also break this down by individual links, determining which of your external publishers or which external citations are proving to be most valuable. If a page isn’t getting much organic, referral, or other types of traffic (like direct traffic or social media traffic), it’s a good sign that it needs to be cleansed as part of your audit.
• Bounce rate/exit rate. In the Behavior tab, you can take a look at your bounce rates and exit rates to determine how compelling your content is. Bounce rates refer to people who visit the page and leave without exploring further, while exit rates refer to people who leave your site after visiting this page, regardless of which pages they’ve visited on your site previously. Generally speaking, the higher these rates are, the less engaging your content is. There are exceptions, of course—you might just lack enough internal links to invite readers to explore further—so use bounce rates and exit rates in the context of other metrics.
• Average time on page. Also in the Behavior tab, you can look at the average amount of time spent on your pages. The longer this is, the more engaged your users are; of course, this must be considered alongside the length and depth of the content itself. Still, your content audit should be optimized to favor pieces of content with high “average time on page” metrics, and select low “average time” pages for SEO lensing or deletion.
• Conversion rates. Conversion rates aren’t necessarily a direct byproduct of content quality, though content quality can play a role in producing conversions. Take a look at the conversion rates of your best (and worst) pieces of content, and see how they stack up. It can help you break the tie when you have a blog post that’s performing reasonably, but could be a suitable candidate for SEO lensing.

With Google’s intuitive search feature, you can also generate on-demand reports for things like “worst pages by bounce rate” using natural language. Experiment to see what you come up with.

Conduct a Backlink Audit

Backlinks should also play a heavy role in your content audit evaluations. This is partially because they serve as an indication of value (content that has earned many powerful links is usually high-quality), and partially because they’re existing assets you may wish to preserve. If you set up 301 redirects, you can usually preserve the authority gained and maintained by your incoming links, but the more dependencies you have, the more it makes sense to preserve your existing structure.

There are a few ways to conduct a backlink audit, but the most straightforward is with Google Search Console. Google Search Console has several helpful analytics features, some of which we’ll discuss in detail in an upcoming section, but for now, head to the Search Traffic section, and click “Links to your Site.” Here, you’ll be able to evaluate the number and quality of links pointed to your site. You can also click “Your most linked content” and generate URLs of your best-performing site content (and worst-performing site content).

You can also use a third-party tool like Moz’s Link Explorer, which also gives you the opportunity to scope out competitors’ sites and see how your link profiles stack up.

Use Rank Tracking Tools

Search engine rankings can be tricky to track, since Google intentionally tries to keep these metrics opaque (so as not to encourage rank manipulation). However, there are an assortment of third-party tools you can use to see how the pages of your site are ranking for keywords relevant to your brand. Top names in the industry include SEMRush and Ahrefs, though there are many options available.

Most rank tracking tools will give you detailed metrics, including your average visibility, how your rankings are changing over time, how much traffic you’re getting from your positions, and even how your competitors are performing. Use these data to determine which of your pages are providing the most value to you through search engines and which ones leave something to be desired.

Check Out Google Search Console

Remember when we visited Google Search Console earlier? There are a few more ways you can use this tool to evaluate the performance of your onsite content.

• • Keyword analysis. With the Search Analytics bar, you can generate a detailed report to help you analyze your performance for different keywords and phrases. This isn’t as precise or as illuminating as you might want it to be, again, because Google likes to keep ranking information somewhat opaque, but it should help you better understand your positions and how those positions are helping or hurting you. Under the Queries tab, you can organize your results by Clicks or Impressions, then review how specific pages are performing under the Pages tab. It’s good not just for helping you weed out bad content, but also helping you find powerful, overarching topics you can use for SEO lensing.
  • Broken links. Broken links are a bad deal all-around; if there are pages of your site that simply aren’t working, it’s your responsibility to get rid of them (or fix them). Head to Crawl > Crawl Errors to generate a list of any and all errors Google has encountered while crawling your site. There are many types of errors that could appear here. Sitewide errors include DNS errors (where your server is down, usually temporarily), Server errors (where infinite load times or server overload prevent Googlebot from crawling), or Robots failures (related to your robots.txt file). More commonly, page-level crawl errors result from 404 errors, which could be due to a wide variety of root causes.

• Schema markup and structured data. You can also check to see how your content pages are appearing in SERPs by heading to Search Appearance > Structured Data. There, you’ll see a preview of what search users might see when they perform a relevant keyword search. Sometimes, this can illuminate a low-organic-traffic issue, or help you determine just how appealing a piece of content is to new users.

Content Audit Data Review aka “What Do I Do Now?”

After consulting these sources, you’ll be left with a massive pile of data. You’ll have a long list of URLs, and metrics in multiple dimensions to help you understand the context of those URLs. So what are you supposed to do now?

Keep your goals at the forefront of your mind, and come up with a system of comprehensive evaluation and/or categorization that works for your business. As a generic recommendation, we can tell you to use a marking system to note your best-performing and worst-performing content in several areas. For example, you can use multiple columns in a spreadsheet featuring all your URLs, and mark each URL as “good” (green), “bad” (red), or “neutral” (blank) in each of several categories, one for each column; you can create columns for organic traffic, conversions, links, or any number of other metrics. Eventually, you’ll see patterns emerge, and you’ll be able to mark entire URLs for deletion, retention, or transformation.

Once you have this markup complete, you can refer to our initial sections on discerning “bad” content and SEO content lensing.

Action Plan Recap

As a review, here is a brief review and recap of each action (or inaction) you should take on your page-by-page review of your site:

• Leave as-is. If the content is “good enough” to compete and already ranks, sometimes the best course of action is: “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
• Improve. You may have content in your arsenal that needs serious updating to either quality or the data included may be outdated. Identify those pieces that are not worth trashing and give them a hearty refresh.
• Delete & 404. If something is non-performing and has no links pointing to it, it is sometimes best to simply delete it from the index and let it die.
• Consolidate & Redirect. Consolidate pieces that are similar and redirect them all to a single masterpiece.
• Noindex. If a page should stay live, but does not need indexed, it is sometimes best to mark it as noindex and remove it from search.

It’s also important to use this content audit as an opportunity to set new content standards for your brand. You might be efficiently weeding out your worst-performing posts, and stitching them together in much-improved, comprehensive articles, but what are your future onsite posts going to look like?

Take this time to set some new standards for your content moving forward. How long should these posts be? What keywords and phrases will you be targeting? How often will you publish? What steps are you going to take to future proof your work?

SEO.co: An Internal Content Audit Case Study

If you’re wondering what a content audit looks like in practice, you’re in luck; we actually did one for ourselves, and quite recently.

We started with more than 1,300 URLs—and while many of these links were to decent blog posts and internal pages, the end result was a cluttered mess that neither search engine bots nor users appreciated. We had redundant blog posts competing with each other, pointless internal pages, and a number of articles that simply weren’t performing. Once we dug into the analytics, we quickly realized our content lacked direction—and that we were missing out on some major opportunities.

We started by removing some of the blog posts and internal pages that simply weren’t relevant anymore, and those that didn’t have any real value. Then, we completely restructured and redirected all our categories and tags, streamlining our system of organization.

From there, we started our most intensive work—using SEO lensing to combine elements from many different underperforming posts, and convert them into singular, much more detailed posts. For example, take our page on Local SEO; it’s the combination of more than 15 different blog posts, but if you read it today, it looks and reads like one massive, comprehensive guide. Our page on Online Marketing is the combination of more than 20 different posts.

In this small section, we took 35 individual posts, and consolidated them to just 2. So now, instead of having 35 pages that weren’t generating much traffic, weren’t ranking, and weren’t of interest to our customers, we have 2 content juggernauts that are pulling thousands of visitors and climbing the rankings for some highly competitive terms. It’s a perfect, real-life example of quality over quantity.

Though we started with over 1,300 URLs, we eventually ended with less than 300. And if you take a waltz through our SEO blog, you’ll see the fruits of our labor firsthand.

Starting Your Website Content Audit

Are you ready to conduct a content audit for your own website? You can follow the steps in this guide if you’d like, or you can contact us for a bit more hands-on help.

Either way, after conducting your content audit, you’ll need to take steps to refine your approach to content marketing and SEO. You’ll need professional writers to help edit and polish your existing assets, as well as writers to continue writing excellent content with your new, higher quality standards. If you’re looking for a new partner in your content marketing goals, contact SEO.co today for a free consultation or get in touch for info on SEO pricing.

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Sam Edwards

Chief Marketing Officer at SEO.co

In his 9+ years as a digital marketer, Sam has worked with countless small businesses and enterprise Fortune 500 companies and organizations including NASDAQ OMX, eBay, Duncan Hines, Drew Barrymore, Washington, DC based law firm Price Benowitz LLP and human rights organization Amnesty International.

He is a recurring speaker at the Search Marketing Expo conference series and a TEDx Talker. Today he works directly with high-end clients across all verticals to maximize on and off-site SEO ROI through content marketing and link building. Connect with Sam on Linkedin.

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