How to do a content audit step-by-step

When you want to produce content that converts, the first step might surprise you.

Doing a content audit before you create content might sound a bit chicken-and-egg, but hear us out.

The content audit process helps you understand what’s working and what’s not working in your current strategy. It can reveal gaps and opportunities in your strategy versus competitors. It also encourages you to base your content marketing plan on data, metrics, and insight (“I know our prospects are looking for this information”), rather than assumptions (“I bet people would like to read this!”)

If you’re already producing content, even if it’s only a handful of blogs, then a content audit should be the next step to take before you produce anything else.

In this guide, we’ll teach you how to do a content audit and explain the power of content audits for SEO and B2B sales. Let’s go!

What is a content audit?

A content audit is a structured review of your existing content to evaluate its performance, quality, and alignment with business goals. 

Typically, the content audit process involves analyzing quantitative content performance metrics and a qualitative review of how well your content reads and how well it meets your ideal buyer’s needs. The end goal is to create a content marketing machine that generates more leads and drives B2B sales.

By conducting a B2B content marketing audit, you:

• Get a clearer picture of the strengths of your current content: What topics are most engaging to target buyers, which help move prospects through the buyer journey, etc.

• Identify weak points in your current bank of content: What you need to update for SEO or other reasons, what you should consolidate to support the buyer journey, and what you might want to delete if it’s jeopardizing your goals.

• Can develop a stronger content plan moving forward: What opportunities you have to improve your content performance and help drive more sales.

  
  

Why do content audits matter for content marketing and SEO?

Content audits are important because they help you drive ROI from your content marketing efforts. Why are you producing content? What are your content goals and why do they matter to your business?

A content audit measures your current content against these goals and helps you develop a plan to improve its performance. 

As part of a content audit, you’ll look at content metrics like organic traffic and keyword ranking. Assessing your performance here and identifying ways to optimize your approach will help support your SEO — getting your content seen by the right people (and more of them). 

Competitor analysis is also part of the content audit. What keywords are competitors ranking for that you’d like to rank for instead? 

Search engines favor content that’s regularly updated and helpful to the reader. And old or underperforming content can dilute your site’s overall performance. By conducting a content audit and following up with next steps, you’ll make existing content more search-engine-friendly, improving its performance. 

In fact, auditing and optimizing existing content can sometimes be more impactful for your content performance than creating new content from scratch.

When should you do a content audit?

No matter how much content you’ve published (just a little or lots), it’s always important to measure if your content is working as desired. You can audit a huge volume of content (speak to us if you’re not sure how) or the few pieces you have when you’re just getting started.

That said, some parts of the content audit process will be more helpful to brands with a decent volume of content to evaluate. For those earlier on in their content marketing journey, it’s worth focusing on competitor analysis and qualitative assessment. Focusing on these steps in your content audit strategy will help you generate content ideas and understand the market.

How to do a content audit step-by-step

Here’s how to do a content marketing audit from start to finish:

Step 1: Start with your content goals

Now’s the time to set your content goals, if you haven’t done so already. 

In a B2B environment, content marketing ROI usually comes from goals like:

• Earning and increasing organic traffic

• Generating qualified leads

• Improving SERP rankings on key topics

• Increasing brand awareness.

You might also have a goal of cleaning up or removing outdated content from your site — and that’s relevant and fair. But try to start with content goals that align with business goals, like driving sales, capturing a specific market, and increasing revenue. 

Choose your top one or two goals to focus on and move to the next step.

Learn more about setting content marketing goals.

Step 2: Make a list of your existing content to audit

A thorough content audit will review every piece of owned, indexable content you’ve published to date. We’re talking blog posts, web pages, landing pages, case studies, and so on. 

In reality, there will be even more content associated with your brand if you figure in earned and paid content, as well as social content like LinkedIn. For this content audit and SEO improvement, we’ll focus on what’s hosted on your website. So, make a list of all your blogs and pages on your website.

Top tip: You can pull a list of all your blog posts and pages from the backend of your website and/or Content Management System. Tools like Screaming Frog and SEMrush can help, too.

Step 3: Analyze your content performance data

Your first round of analysis is all about the numbers.

(We’ll get to the qualitative assessment of your content next.)

At this stage, the aim isn’t to find out if you’ve got perfect, 10/10, masterclass levels of quality content. Because A) No one does. And B) Even if you do, that wouldn’t be very helpful for content optimization. 

Instead, we’re looking to find your content performance patterns, areas of improvement, and where you’re strongest today.

Key metrics to monitor include:

• Organic traffic to each piece of your content (use Google Analytics for this)

• Your keyword rankings and changes over time (SEMrush is our fave here)

• The number of keywords each page/piece of content ranks for, and which of these keywords rank on the first three pages of Google (Again, you’ll find this in SEMrush)

• Which keyword queries are driving the most clicks and impressions (A Google Search Console “Performance Report” will make this clear)

You might be surprised at the results! It’s not unusual to see a piece of content ranking for a keyword or phrase you never set out to rank for. In this case, consider deleting the content if it’s inconsistent with your strategy. Not all traffic is “good” traffic — you want to present a single-minded message to search engines to help establish your positioning.

Step 4: Evaluate your content quality and relevance

Backed by data, you can now turn to a more qualitative assessment of the content you currently have.

Here are some questions to ask: 

• How accurate, relevant, and fresh does each piece feel?

• How aligned is it with your brand, products, and target audience?

• Does it offer clarity, depth, and useful information for a prospect along the buyer journey?

• Does the content match the search intent? (Basically, does what you’re saying in the content fit the keyword you’re targeting and its place in the B2B marketing funnel?)

It’s important to use the quantitative and qualitative audit in tandem. Data is there to remove guesswork and tackle internal bias (you might think a piece of content reads really well and makes your brand appear smart, but if it’s underperforming or ranking for “wrong” keywords, then you know it needs work). 

It’s also worth pointing out that lower-quality content can still rank well. Good SEO requires both visibility and quality — it should perform as well as it reads.

Step 5: Compare your content to competitors

Competitors can be categorized into two groups: branded and organic.

Branded competitors are those who operate in the exact same space as you and offer a (very) similar product or service. You can also call these your “direct” competitors.

Organic competitors might be in a totally different space or have a different value proposition, but Google still sees them as similar to you based on your current keyword profile.

Both matter in a B2B content marketing audit.

You likely already know who your branded or direct competitors are. But organic competitors might not be something you’ve thought about until your first content audit process. Head to SEMrush and take a look at the “Organic Research” tab. Here you’ll see a list of your top 5 organic competitors.

For both types of competitors, look at:

• How visible your content is in SERPs versus theirs

• If your competitors dominate any key topics

• Where you have the opportunity to overtake their ranking (on the keywords that matter)

If competitors are outperforming you in most or all areas, don’t be disheartened. SEO is a marathon and not a sprint. Identifying what they’re doing well and what you can improve on is hugely helpful and can help hone your content strategy and improve your content ROI.

Step 6: Summarize your findings and set your next steps

The time has come to bring your content audit output together — and, let’s face it, you’ll have a lot of output so far!

You’ll have gathered a bunch of data and might have a long list of content pieces to work on. Prioritization is key, so pick your next steps based on your business goals. At Scribly, our content audit services always include a summary of the most relevant takeaways and our recommended next steps.

Your post-content audit action plan might be:

• Keep all high-performing, relevant content as-is (for now—optimization is crucial in every content marketing strategy!).

• Update content that’s performing well but could benefit from some readability tweaks.

• Consolidate pieces of content that overlap or cannibalize each other.

• Remove or redirect content that doesn’t serve a strategic purpose or mispositions your brand.

As for what to work on first, look for high-impact, low-effort improvements (the “low hanging fruit”) and improvements to content pieces tied directly to business goals. For example, you might start with blogs or pages targeting bottom-funnel phrases (to drive sales).

Don’t worry, you don’t have to fix everything all at once! 

SEO isn’t a switch you can toggle on or off. Incremental gains, delivered over the course of a consistent and targeted strategy, make all the difference long term.

We’ll share our proven content audit strategy with you!

For all the reasons shared above, a content audit is a powerful tool for SEO and sales generation. The content audit process marries cold, hard data with what you know in your heart to be high-quality content. 

When you move forward with both data-backed insights and greater confidence in your content creation strategy, you’ll feel unstoppable!  

Need some help getting there? That’s where we come in. Content audit strategy is a key pillar of Scribly’s content marketing services. We can support you with any or all stages of the content audit process, so you end up with a content strategy primed for performance.

Get in touch to learn more our content audit services today!