We’ve all heard that content marketing is one of the best ways to get organic website traffic. So, you’ve probably already created many great blogs for your website, but do you know how well they perform? Have you lost track of all the content you’ve created?
You’re not alone. It’s easy to be focused on keeping up with creating new content, but in reality, the content you’ve already created can be just as valuable as new content. An SEO content audit can help you determine how your current content is performing, help you optimize your site, and help you refresh your content strategy.
Not sure if you need an SEO content audit? You probably do, but here we will explain why.
What is an SEO Content Audit?
A content audit assesses the existing content on your website or websites, such as landing pages or blog posts. In an SEO content audit, you are specifically analyzing content to determine how you can get more quality organic traffic to each page by addressing quality, relevance, messaging, and SEO value.
What is SEO and Why Does it Matter?
SEO, or search engine optimization, is optimizing your web pages to be easily indexed by Google and quickly accessed by search engine users. There is a lot that goes into SEO; in fact, there are an estimated 200 factors that marketers need to consider when conducting SEO.
SEO plays a significant role in marketing and content strategy. A Smart SEO strategy will bring organic traffic to your site, leading to increased loyalty and conversions. Learn more about why SEO matters.
Reasons to Perform an SEO Content Audit
Perform an SEO content audit on your website if:
- You’ve never done one before
- You do not have a content marketing strategy, or you are using one put in place by a previous marketing team
- You are redesigning your website
- You’ve written on a broad range of topics
Benefits of an SEO Content Audit
Your SEO content audit should help to bring existing content up-to-date, improve the rank of your web pages, identify content gaps, and start creating better content.
Here are some of the benefits an SEO content audit can provide:
Eliminates Duplicate Content
There is evidence that having duplicate content on your website can hurt your site’s rank because it signals to the search engine that you’re attempting to cut corners on your marketing strategy. Simply removing duplicate content can increase your site’s credibility.
Provides Details of Content Performance
An in-depth SEO audit looks at your website data to determine how content is performing. This content analysis can help you make informed decisions based on factual information rather than assumptions. It enables you to decide what to do with existing content based on performance while informing future content and your content marketing strategies.
You can consider leveraging this into marketing materials for content that is performing well. And for content that isn’t performing as well, you can consider repurposing or updating it to improve its performance.
If you have a bunch of thin content, meaning content with little value to a visitor, an SEO audit may give you the perfect opportunity to expand the topic, run in an internal link or two, and really identify ways to improve the content quality and performance. It can also help you identify outdated content that is no longer applicable or relevant to your brand.
Want to learn more about writing a high-quality blog post? Please read our guide on how to write high quality blog content.
Identifies Pages That Require SEO Optimization
An SEO audit can help to highlight pages that aren’t optimized for SEO while there may be some technical SEO concerns, there will be lots of on-page updates you can do as well.
Structural SEO changes like adding metadata and image descriptions or improving overall structure can improve SEO and help your pages rank. This may also include updating old content so it has more up-to-date information, updating keywords to better match search intent, targeting a different keyword, or updating your internal linking structure.
Identifies SEO Opportunities and Content Gaps
SEO content audits help you find new opportunities to add SEO content to your site. This could include creating SEO friendly headlines or adding meta descriptions and alt tags.
Creating an inventory of content allows you to see at a glance all the content you’ve created and where there may be gaps in content. It can be helpful to consider the range of keywords you hope to rank for and consider whether your content has targeted all of these keywords.
If you do identify a content gap, you can tailor your content creation strategy to address this gap. Filling gaps in your content will allow search engines to view your page as an authoritative source, pushing all of your site content up the search results.
Creates an Inventory That Makes Content Management Easier
When you have an inventory of all your website content, you can see the bigger picture and better manage your content. As we mentioned previously, this can help you to identify gaps in your content but it can also help you to stay organized when using this content in other parts of your marketing strategy.
For example, with a content inventory, you can develop a strategy for social media or use the content metrics to determine how to maximize your content marketing efforts. Before you can properly manage and monetize what you have, you need to know what you have.
Getting Started With Your SEO Content Strategy
While you could see some benefits from auditing a portion of your website’s pages, you will see the best results by doing a full audit (read: auditing all pages). An SEO content audit can help you determine how your current content is performing, help you optimize your site to improve user experience, and help you refresh your content strategy.
Feel overwhelmed with how to get started on an SEO content audit? okwrite can help. We have SEO experts standing by and ready to help you improve your site.
Once your content audit process is complete, okwrite can assist you further with our Content Marketing services. We provide high-quality content that your audience is sure to love.
Don’t wait any more time trying to figure out what you have, how it’s performing, and what you need to do to land on page one! Contact us to get started.