Your website is not a one-and-done project for your business. It’s an ever-evolving entity that requires regular updates and check-ins to ensure it meets your customers’ needs and uses the latest SEO and website best practices. One factor that all great websites have in common is high-quality content. SMEs use their website content to drive traffic to their website, keep visitors engaged with their brand longer, and increase conversions (sales and signups). Your website needs a content audit right now. We want to make it easy, so we’ve created a six-step website content audit process for you:
But first, what is a website content audit?
A website content audit is a review of all content on your website to determine how well your content is performing. Content types included in your audit will consist of:
- Written content (web pages, blogs, resources…etc.)
- Images
- Videos
- Other media (freebies, PDFs, online courses…etc)
In a content audit, you list all these pieces on your website and review each for currency and appropriateness. The outcome of your content audit should show you what resources are:
- Still relevant (no changes needed)
- Needs updating (to meet audience and SEO needs better)
- No longer relevant (so far out of date or not used that updating it isn’t helpful, so it can instead be deleted)
Your first website content audit requires more time. However, by maintaining an up-to-date content inventory (such as a spreadsheet) you can streamline the process for future audits. This will help you stay organized and in control of your website content.
While you can manually do your content audit, some digital tools exist to make creating and maintaining a list of your digital content assets easier:
- Google Analytics
- Google Search Console
- Screaming Frog
- SEM Rush
- Ahrefs
- Google Sheets (or other spreadsheet or database software)
Benefits of website content audits
Every website can benefit from regular content audits. We suggest audits on smaller websites annually and larger websites semi-annually.
Here are the benefits you can expect from a website content audit:
- Improved SEO – Your content audit can measure what content drives the most traffic from organic search and social media. It helps identify content that can be updated to rank better and broken links that can be fixed to boost your SEO rankings.
- Better user experience – Customer needs and expectations evolve. You can use insights from your content audit to improve your website’s functionality and navigability and boost low-performing content.
- Optimized conversion rates and sales – By testing different call-to-actions and content, you can strategically align your content to lead prospects through the buying process and focus on content that drives the most conversions.
- Strengthened branding – A content audit can identify which assets conflict with your brand or have outdated messaging (such as mentioning old taglines or products).
- Improved content performance – Reviewing your content will identify the assets that perform best for your brand. This helps you know what content your audience wants and include more of that in your content calendar.
6 Steps for your website content audit
You can do a website content audit on your own or with the help of a marketing or content agency like picnic social. No matter which path you choose, you can expect to do these six steps:
Step 1: Set goals and objectives
Don’t do a content audit just because we told you so! You should have a reason or objective. Potential reasons for doing an audit may include:
- Your branding has recently been updated, so you want to ensure that all your content aligns with your new style and messaging guide.
- You’ve used content from multiple creators and want to check for brand consistency.
- You’re unsure what content leads to conversions and which are not being used.
- You’re planning your upcoming marketing or content calendar and want to see what content needs updating and where content gaps exist.
Based on your “why,” develop goals for your content audit, such as to:
- Improve SEO rankings
- Improve website usability
- Increase conversions
- Create content to fill buying journey gaps.
This is also the time to review and set up key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure your success (Google analytics, link tracking, conversion tracking… etc.).
Step 2: Inventory your content
Next, it’s time to list all your digital content assets on your website. The most basic way to do this is to create a spreadsheet to list all the content pieces. Customize the columns of your spreadsheet with the KPI data you have for each piece of content, such as:
- Original publish date
- Last updated date
- Views
- Conversions
- Search engine ranking on Google
- Action needed
You can quickly inventory your website content using online tools like Screaming Frog or Google Analytics.
Step 3: Evaluate content performance and quality
Based on your metrics and KPIs for each content piece, fill in the “Action” column to indicate your evaluation (keep as is, update, delete) of the content. Look at what content is viewed or used the most, directly leading to conversions, and what similarities exist between high-performing and low-performing content.
Look at your content to evaluate:
- It’s relevance
- It’s completeness (or up-to-date-ness)
- It’s usefulness
- It’s readability
- It’s performance towards lead nurturing or goal conversions
To avoid bias, a third-party content marketing agency can objectively look at your content to help evaluate its performance.
Step 4: Identify gaps and opportunities
Your audit will likely uncover content areas for improvement. These may include:
- Webpages with weak SEO keyword implementation to improve
- New keywords that could be used
- Content that is not helpful anymore
- Gaps in content for specific stages of your marketing funnel
- Opportunities to repurpose high-performing content into different mediums.
Identify any gaps and opportunities for specific pieces of content on your list. (Keep in mind some content may be effective as it is now, and will not require any updates or changes.)
Step 5: Develop and implement an action plan
Next, develop an action plan to determine which gaps and opportunities will have the biggest impact on your goals and objectives. Highlight these content pieces in your spreadsheet and decide how you’ll make the necessary changes.
Consider forming a marketing content task force to work on these projects. Assign individuals and deadlines to each task and develop a plan to ensure your content updates are done in a timely manner based on the priority you’ve set in your content audit inventory.
Step 6: Monitor and review
As you begin updating your website content, keep your spreadsheet up-to-date. Regularly pull metrics for each updated piece of content to see if your changes are having the desired effect. If not, audit that content again to see what changes may be more effective.
Do a comprehensive content audit semi-annually or annually to keep your content in alignment with your business and content marketing objectives and any best practices guidelines for the web.
Overwhelmed? Get help to do your website content audit
A content audit ensures that your website and content marketing strategy always meet your audience’s (evolving) needs and best practices for web and SEO assets.
If you’ve never done a content audit before, now is the perfect time (especially as you’re about to begin your 2025 business and marketing planning calendars and budgets). picnic social would be happy to help you do a content audit on your website and digital assets.
You may feel attached to specific content pieces and fear changing them. Rest assured, as an objective third party, we can give you our honest and unbiased assessment of your content performance so you can make an informed decision.
Book a complimentary consultation to learn how we can help your website content audit.