It also involves all types of content, including:
…and there are content conditions, like
Comments: A comment moderation tool is best for this but if you don’t have one, this is something to look over when auditing your posts. Make sure there are responses to comments (good and bad) and that there are no spammy comments that could get you a Google penalty for unnatural external links. You can also use comments to come up with unique blog post ideas.
Make a copy of this Google Sheet, edit, add, and remove data points accordingly, and let ‘er rip.
What is a content audit?
A content audit is the inventorying and analysis of your business’s existing content according to a selected set of criteria—where criteria refers to what content you choose to audit as well as what data you want to analyze.
Average position: You can pull this manually from Search Console, but this is another metric you might want to gather using an audit or SEO tool. This can be especially useful if you’re looking to identify pages that are within striking distance of the first page of Google that you can focus on.
- Core website pages
- Landing pages
- Blog posts
- Learning center articles
- Guides
- Webinars
- Videos
- One pagers
- Podcasts
- Success stories
- Benchmark reports
- Battle cards
- Slide decks
- Boilerplates
- Branded templates
Bounce rate: This data point is helpful for many types of content audits. But remember that high bounce rates aren’t always bad. A blog post with a decent time on page and high bounce rate may indicate that it provides the exact information the searcher was seeking.
- Since the dawn of man or a specified date range.
- All of your content or just one format.
- All formats of content or just all formats on a particular topic.
An SEO content audit looks at website pages that are indexed on Google. The best way to conduct an SEO content audit is to use tools like ahrefs or Screaming Frog.
And what data might you want to analyze? Anything you can find with Google Analytics and the human eye.
Why conduct content audits?
Make a copy of this Google sheet, edit, add, and remove data points as needed, and get in the zone.
Inform your content marketing strategy
There are no right or wrong or finite steps to a content audit, but here are some tips to conduct yours successfully.
My point? The sky’s the limit with content audits, so the definition of yours depends on how much content you’re auditing, the tools you have, and the purpose of the audit—which we’ll get into soon.
But not everyone does. In fact, many see them as tedious, time-consuming, and overwhelming. Which they usually are.
If you run paid ads for guides, you may want to audit those landing pages separately.
What should you include in a content audit?
You should be using regular reporting to stay on track with your content marketing strategy, but audits allow you to get bigger picture information and identify where to make adjustments, as well as to drill down and solve a particular problem or optimize for a specific goal.
A blog content audit could very well be one and the same with an SEO audit. But not all blog posts are meant for SEO, and they serve more purposes than driving traffic to your website.
Informational content audit data points
Competitor equivalent: Provide links to similar content created by other brands or competitors that you can gain inspiration from.
Incoming links: Number of backlinks; too many could mean something’s up; you don’t want to get a google penalty for unnatural links.
This will be a spreadsheet. Here are some tips to stay organized:
Keep in mind, this is not an exhaustive list and some data points fall into more than one bucket. Also, some of them are action items in and of themselves. And you’re not supposed to collect all of them! So treat it like a menu to pick and choose from based on your goals.
Make a copy of this Google sheet, edit, add, and remove data points accordingly, and dive in.
Ideas to improve: This is generally an open-ended item. The general idea is to leave a spot where auditors can leave any additional notes or ideas (that may part of our outside the goal of that particular audit.)
Time on page: This metric can help you identify if something on your page isn’t working or is off-putting, or if the content doesn’t match the intent of the keyword.
Informational data provides all of the objective facts about the content being audited. Some of it will have to be pulled manually but there are also website plugins and tools that can export the data for you.
Make a copy of this Google Sheet, edit, add, or remove data points as needed, and get to work!
Depending on what you’re measuring and how much content you’re auditing, some of this information you can get from Google Analytics and Google Search Console, and some of it you will need audit tools like ahrefs or Screaming Frog.
Make a copy of this Google sheet, add, edit, and remove data points accordingly, and get down to it!
On that note, if you’re including open-ended qualitative data points in your audit, having a clear goal will help you to discern necessary changes from nice to haves (or great ideas to be revisited).
In other words, I enjoy content audits.
Titles: Page titles may be different than their SERP title; this is a good data point to consider for uniformity across your site and ensuring that your anchor text and CTA buttons align with the page for a better user experience
Location: This is the link to the media file on your server.
For example, it may not be worth it to spend time optimizing a post that targets a super low-volume keyword. Or if a post is not getting much traffic for a high-volume keyword, you may choose to retarget it for a lower volume variation. Better to show up on page one for a keyword with 500 searches than keyword than on page 5 for one with 2,300 searches.
Summaries: This is a brief synopsis of the piece of content. If you’re including meta descriptions in your audit, this may not be necessary (or if you’re not including meta descriptions, you can use these as your summaries).
URL: This is the public-facing link to the content (blog post, YouTube link, etc.)
For some businesses, auditing all existing landing pages is not realistic, either because you have too many or because your URL structurer makes this difficult. It is also not necessary if your landing pages are not indexed (and therefore not impacting your SEO).
Quantitative content audit data points
Forms: Test forms on your landing pages and elsewhere to make sure the user gets what they need in the most convenient way, and that the information gets passed through into your CRM and other automation platforms correctly.
Keywords: This can include keyword targeted and volume and difficulty in separate columns. This way, if you’re looking for optimization opportunities, you can prioritize by ease and impact.
The result: The data and insights you gather in a content audit can be used to improve SEO, reveal strengths and weaknesses, discover new topics, better understand your audience, identify opportunities to verticalize, scale, or repurpose.
As you can see, content audits are essential to make sure you’re hitting your traffic, engagement, CVR, and ROI, goals; continuously producing high quality content; getting the most mileage out of your content; and keeping your brand and reputation strong. Hopefully the data points and templates in this guide have given you some direction to get started on and successfully carry out whatever content audit you need to do.
This type of content audit involves all forms of media your business has produced, including:
Language: You may need to go back in and change terminology if your branded terms have changed, if you’ve retired a product or service,
Accuracy/freshness: Is the information up to date? Could the stats be updated? Do the tools you’ve included in your listicles still exist? Could the content use the addition of some more recent links?
The purpose of an overall media audit as I’ve defined it in this post is to create or update a library of content. This type of audit is quite comprehensive so I’d suggest the action item be to do the inventory and as you collect the information, make minor fixes and improvements (worth your time) as you go. More involved action items and optimizations can be identified and carried out through format-specific audits.
Meta title/title tags: This is the title of your URL as it appears on the SERP, and can be correlated with CTR.
Make a copy of this Google sheet, adjust data points as needed, and let the games begin.
Bounce rate: Percentage of visitors who left without going to any additional pages.
The numbers give you a single source of truth and allow you to set measurable goals and track them with content marketing KPIs. They are also crucial when auditing for site health and performance.
Meta descriptions: This is the brief description of your page that shows up on the SERP. You’ll want to include this in an SEO audit to make sure they include keywords and are aligned with the current Google meta description character count.
Internal links: Number of internal links or checking to see if any are broken or could be replaced with newer content.
Note: Every template link goes to the same spreadsheet! They just link to their corresponding tab in the spreadsheet.
Organic pageviews: Number of users entering that page from search engine.
How to conduct a content audit (successfully)
So what content might you want to audit? Well, there are content types, like…
1. Have a specific goal
Word count: This is helpful for identifying short posts that can be combined into longer form content with a greater chance of ranking. It’s also useful when you’re looking at metrics like time on page. If you’ve got a 2,500 word post and the time on page is 10 seconds, something is up.
You can find more information about many of these data points in our SEO metrics post.
2. Stay organized
Though needless to say, content audits can become a black hole quick. There are infinite possibilities and metrics to gather. And you’ll almost always discover additional metrics to collect once you start. So be sure to have a clear goal so you can collect only what’s needed. Too much information will make it difficult to glean clear insights.
- Keep open-ended cells to a minimum, especially for large audits. This will make it easy to organize and sort your data in any way you want once it’s done.
- You may want to create drop down functionalities with specific options, especially if you have multiple people auditing in the same sheet.
Website content audit template
Although content audits can be time-consuming and tedious, they are essential for creating high-quality content, building your brand and reputation, and improving the overall output of your team. Let’s talk about each of these in more detail.
How to run an SEO content audit
Offers: Check to see if popups, bottom rail, and side rail offers need a refresh or to make sure they’re not appearing where they shouldn’t.
Example SEO content audit goals
Example SEO content audit data points
- URL
- Title
- Meta title
- Meta title character count
- Meta description
- Organic pageviews
- Keyword, volume, difficulty
- CTR
- Average position
- Word count
- Internal links
- Page load time
- # of images
Example SEO content audit insights and action items
- There are several blog posts on page two in the SERP; re-optimize to bump to page one.
- Overall Page Speed Insight score low; compress and resize images on top 30 trafficked pages.
- Blog posts <500 words have low organic traffic; combine and redirect into one long-form post.
SEO content audit template
Content audits can serve an infinite number of purposes, so there aren’t any cut-and-dry lists of data points to collect. Below, I’ve created a comprehensive list of information to potentially include in your content audit.
How to run a blog content audit
Image size: This includes the image’s dimensions as well as the file size.
Example blog content audit goals
- Identify topics to focus on.
- Strengthen branding
- Increase engagement
- Improve conversion rates
- Improve accessibility and inclusivity
Example blog content audit data points
- URL
- Organic pageviews
- Title
- Meta title
- Meta title character count
- Meta description
- CTR
- Category
- Product supported
- Images (inclusive, branded with new logo, quality)
- Image alt text (including keyword and accessible?)
- Comments
- On brand?
- Style guide-compliant?
- Top queries
- Target keyword, volume, difficulty
- Word count
- Information accurate?
- # of internal links
- Social shares
- Popup
Example blog content audit insights and action items
- There are several comments on post X about Y. Address in post.
- LinkedIn shares showing zero for all posts. Troubleshoot and fix
- Content in category X/in support of product Y is lacking. Perform keyword research and publish three targeted posts by end of quarter.
- Repurpose posts X, Y, and Z into webinars next quarter, combine posts A and B into a PDF guide.
- Identify posts targeting competitive keywords and tweak to target lower volume, lower competition long-tail keywords.
- Update popup for category X to improve conversion rate.
Blog content audit template
Linking sites: One site may link to one of your pages several times throughout its content, so this number is lower than total backlinks.
How to run a guide (or ebook or white paper) content audit
Conversion rate: Conversion rate is, of course, necessary to get an accurate picture of top performing content. Also, UX can impact conversion rate.
Example guide content audit goals
- Improve resources page conversion rate
- Prioritize rebranding efforts
- Identify guides to promote in pop-ups or ads.
- Prune content library
Example guide content audit data points
- Guide name
- Date created
- Date last modified
- Landing page
- Landing page traffic
- Landing page conversion rate
- Referring link
- Word count
- Pages
- Stage of funnel
- Vertical
- Boilerplate
- Offer at end
- Template
Example guide content audit insights and action items
- Keep guides A-L, update guides M-T, delete guides U-Z.
- Combine guides A, B, and C into a toolkit.
- Add guides X, Y, and Z to nurture email flows.
Guide content audit template
Another operational benefit of a content library is that it makes it easier for new team members, whether they’re managing the content or using it, to get up to speed.
How to run a landing page content audit
Exit rate: Exit rate shows you how often that page was the last one visited in a session.
Example landing page content audit goals
- Increase landing page traffic
- Improve conversion rates
- Check form functionality and CRM integration
Example landing page content audit data points
- Title
- Indexed?
- Meta title
- Meta description
- Offer
- Pageviews
- Sessions by source
- Conversions/CVR
- Average time on page
- Bounce rate
- Word count
- How can improve (clear value prop? Personalized? Add social proof? Reduce form fills? Better CTA? Is it missing information?)
- Form works
- Content delivered to inbox
- Lead routed properly
- Thank you page
- Ideas for improvement
>Example landing page content audit insights and action items
- Landing pages with higher word count have higher CVR. Increase word count on pages X, Y, Z.
- Bounce rate on pages A, B, and C is high; test
- Live chat needs to be disabled on a landing page.
- Landing pages X, Y, and Z need to be unindexed.
- Form broken on page Z, troubleshoot and fix.
- Homepage drives most traffic to landing page X. Since landing page Y converts so well, let’s test using that format for page X.
- Opportunities for thank you page CTAs.
Landing page content audit template
Readability: Readability ranks, but Grammarly and Yoast can only take you so far. Sometimes you need a human to scroll through to and make sure it’s compelling, easy to read, and skimmable.
How to run an overall content audit
Conversions: This is a better metric for landing page content audits, since conversions in Google Analytics can mean a number of things. But it could be helpful if you have goals set up in Google Analytics.
- Guides
- Infographics
- White papers
- Webinars
- Podcasts
- Videos
- Blog posts (perhaps only the top performers if you have a lot of these).
And if the content team has access to sales, product marketing, branding, and PR content (internal and external), they can find key themes to weave throughout their writing, important topics to cover, and have context for departmental requests.
- Educational
- Case studies/success stories
- Benchmark reports
- Product tutorials
- One-pagers
- Pitch decks
Example overall content audit goals
- Create or audit content library all departments use to reference and repurpose
- Update/prune content library
- Give new manager a full picture of existing content strategy output
- Identify repurposing opportunities
Example overall content audit data points
- Name
- Title
- Content type
- Content format
- Length, word count, pages, time to read
- Date last modified
- Stage of funnel
- Product supported
- Internal or external
- Vertical
- Traffic to page
Example overall content audit insights and action items
There are also sales metrics like CPA, leads generated, leads nurtured, closes, and ROI, but that’s not in the realm of the content audits I’m discussing here.
Overall content audit template
Something to know about me before you read this post: I’m the type of person who creates spreadsheets when shopping online for sneakers and whose idea of fun is inventorying Tupperware containers and covers.
Start your content audit with these tips and templates
And as if this post didn’t have enough lists, here is the final list of the spreadsheet links:
Shares: No, you don’t need to go into your social media platforms and start collecting those insights. But it might be good information for your audit if your blog posts have a share counter.
