Insights

SEO Content Audit: Step-by-Step Ultimate Guide

SEO audits are the best way to understand your website’s performance. By conducting an SEO audit, you can understand SEO practices’ benefits. Many kinds of SEO audits are available to try, and each has many benefits. In this blog, you will understand different types of SEO audits, and from the list, you can choose the best ones. Besides, you will learn the best SEO audit tools.

seo content audit checklist

What does SEO audit mean?

SEO is essential for businesses to thrive online in the world of websites. Understanding how SEO audits work and what your business requires to do an SEO audit is an important step to harness SEO’s marketing power. Businesses conduct SEO audits to determine certain results and create strategies to attain new ones based on the findings. Whether you have a small-scale business or a large-scale, a content marketing audit is a must for every business’s growth strategy.

Benefits of content SEO audit

Performing a content seo audit offers several long-term benefits that help enhance your online business presence. Let’s understand what they are:

Helps remove duplicate content: Having duplicate web content affects online rankings and makes it harder for search engines to find out which one is the original version. A SEO content audit allows discovery and removal of such content with ease.

Repurpose existing content: Repurposing existing content on your site helps achieve more reach and visibility. With an SEO audit, it is possible to identify such content and repurpose it into different formats, such as infographics, videos, or social media posts.

Increase SEO performance: If your SEO strategies ain’t performing well as expected, you can increase them with content audit seo. The technique allows you to identify the areas that are not optimised for search and make the required changes.

Discover content gaps: Creating content is essential for getting better visibility and traffic, but where to start? That’s where content audit SEO helps. You can discover content gaps in topics and provide better insights that help create the right content for your target audience.

Realign business goals: Running a business for a considerable amount of time, or if your brand is rebranding, can result in a shift in priorities. Performing content audit for seo helps evaluate SEO performance and realign business goals that match the interests of your target audience.

Maximise conversion opportunities: Sometimes your website might have webpages that have the potential to drive significant traffic. With a dedicated content SEO audit, those pages can be found and used to increase their value by implementing proper optimisations.

Determine Content Quality: When writing content, it has to be authentic, valuable and of high quality. Is your web content high, medium or low quality? Discover it with seo content audits and make the necessary changes to get better rankings. This is because search engine crawlers are aware of repetitive, invaluable content and can penalise such, resulting in lower search rankings.

How to perform an SEO content audit: Step-by-Step Guide

Before you figure out how to perform an seo content audit, there are certain factors which you must first learn about. This includes setting up your goals, allocating resources, monitoring the progress, etc. We have compiled a list of steps involved in running a content audit below:

Determine Your Goals

You must first identify and set your goals before doing an SEO content audit. What are you trying to achieve? Improve page rankings? Figure out why you aren’t getting conversions. Whatever goals you have, make sure to set them early. Having clear goals makes the content audit seo process successful.

Check if your site is indexed

Indexing is the process by which search engines discover your site and store it in databases so that whenever a user searches, the site is retrieved. To know whether Google indexes your site, type “site:yourdomain.com” in Google search, which shows a list of the pages that have been indexed. If you don’t see any results, your site might be blocked from indexing.

Identify all content assets

Once your goals are set, the next step is to identify the content assets on your site to do a content seo audit. This includes meta tags, descriptions, headings, visual assets, and more. You can use Google Search Console and third-party tools such as Ahrefs, SEMrush, etc, to crawl and index the pages. The collected data must be organized in a spreadsheet or using a content audit template.

Measure the SEO performance

Once you have listed out all the web content pages, each one’s performance has to be evaluated to know where your content is currently ranked. This can be done by measuring various key performance indicators, some of which are as follows:

Keyword Rankings: You have to check where your content pages are ranking for their primary keyword. This process allows you to determine the current performance of your pages and identify which ones must be optimized.

Organic Traffic: This is one of the crucial metrics that should be measured for SEO success. If your webpages are getting higher organic traffic, this translates to more conversions.

Backlinks: Having backlinks for your web content helps build trust and authority, which are good for achieving better rankings. Getting the backlink data for each of your content pages helps identify which ones are performing well and not.

Implement an action plan

By now, you must have set your goals, identified the content assets, and organized them into a spreadsheet or a template. The next phase is to review each page manually and choose the right action plan for each page’s content. When it comes to that, you have four options to choose from, which are as follows:

Keep: If your webpage content meets the performance goals as expected, then keep it.
Update/Refresh: Change the content when it isn’t meeting the goals or if it is outdated.
Consolidate: Merge similar content pages into a definitive one
Delete/Redirect: Remove the page if it doesn’t have any value, backlinks, or organic traffic.

Monitor and measure progress

Once the seo content audits process is complete, the work isn’t done. This is an ongoing process that has to be done periodically, particularly if you wish to achieve higher traffic and conversions. You’ll have to set goals, measure the performance, tweak the content and see whether it is producing these changes. Using an seo content audit tool helps streamline the process, and following an seo audit guide ensures all essential steps are covered.

When to perform SEO content audits?

This is pretty much important to know to achieve better results in the long run. The following are the various scenarios where content audit SEO must be performed. 

Your website is pretty new

If you have developed a new business website, it is recommended to perform content SEO auditing before launching it. Early auditing using an seo content audit tool helps ensure content quality, consistency and checks whether it aligns with your brand goals. It also allows pinpointing issues such as thin content, duplicate pages before they become bigger problems.

Website Redesign & Revamp

Performing a seo marketing audit before redesigning your website helps evaluate the existing content and decide which content must be retained, identify content gaps and figure out which content must be updated to meet the newer marketing strategies.

Website CMS upgrade & change structure

If you are planning a website CMS upgrade or changing the site’s structure, a content SEO audit helps understand the current situation of your website’s content within the CMS. You can determine the potential URL changes and how the content will be migrated into the new CMS and structure. Following an seo audit guide can be beneficial during this phase. After the upgrade process, it is essential to ensure that all content has been migrated without issues.

Rewriting & refreshing the content

Web content over time can lose its relevance and become outdated whenever the information gets updated, search engine algorithms change, or user intent evolves. In such cases, the content has to be identified and updated to keep it competitive. 
The content audit process helps with these tasks by identifying underperforming areas, content gaps that require a refresh. The different types of seo audits can help you tailor your approach to specifically address content freshness and relevance.

Types of SEO audits

  1. Technical SEO audit – Technical SEO audit refers to checking your website’s technical aspects of your website. Performance metrics such as speed, security, navigation, and page loading speed are targeted to identify if any attributes need a fix or elimination. What happens if you fail to determine the benefits of a technical SEO audit just like an SEO content audit? Your online exposure and brand identity will suffer as clearing technical aspects linked to credibility and trustworthiness online.

Technical SEO audit tools

These are the most famous SEO tools you can rely on. Each tool provides easy navigation, and a ready template and recommends solutions for issues. In-built attributes are helpful to identify problems and solve them. You need to use the paid version to get the maximum benefit from the platform. 

  • SE ranking
  • Screaming Frog
  • Semrush
  • Google search console
  • Moz
  • Ahrefs
  • Serpstat
  • Lighthouse
  • Mobile Usability
  • SEO browser
  1. SEO content audit – The SEO content audit checklist is a must-have if you are just starting out or established a long time ago. It primarily focuses on the content and finds ways to improve the content by analyzing it with an SEO content audit checklist. Such an audit may reveal areas for improvement. Besides, it also checks the cohesiveness, quality, and search intent optimization of the content in terms of page. Most of the time, an SEO content marketing audit template suggests refreshing and creating content to the core.

SEO content audit checklist

Usually, an SEO content audit checklist contains the following:

  • Overall content performance
  • Inclusion of target keywords
  • Audit content for backlinks
  • Fix duplicate content issues
  • Indexing
  • Page speed
  • Meta tags
  • Check content quality
  • Ensure a content repository
  1. On-page SEO audit – On-page SEO audit ensures all on-page elements such as headers, footers, content, navigation, meta tags, image optimization, mobile friendliness, URL, and internal links are included on your website as intended to be. SEOptimer, SEOmator, and Ahrefs are tools to be used for on-page SEO audits. Content marketing audit templates comprise an on-page SEO audit and you may need help from a veteran professional.

On-page SEO audit tools

  • SEoptimer – SEoptimer is an SEO auditing tool that focuses on the on-page attributes of the website. Famous businesses Deloitte, Shopify, and Ogilvy use the service of SEoptimer.
  • SEomator – SEOmator is a tool that stands out providing ranktracker, backlink explorer, and keyword research. Any guide to SEO content audit needs a tool like this one for a complete analysis.
  • Ahrefs – Ahrefs is an easy-to-use SEO auditing tool that showcases several issues on your website. The site boasts it can solve more than 170 issues in one go. A little time and effort provide great insights. For example, the tool provides recommendations so that you can tackle one by one as you go.
  1. Local SEO audit – Local SEO audit is the core SEO content management methodology that your business needs. Your business needs to reach out locally and a local SEO audit reveals the effectiveness of a local SEO campaign. People from nearby locations need to know you are providing the exemplary service that they are searching for. If your website lacks local pages and location-based service pages targeting local keywords, you can start writing content to boost local SEO ranking. Though it is relatively smaller and cheaper, Local SEO audit suggests many areas of improvement. This includes Google My Business optimization, keyword research for local SEO, on-page SEO best practices for local SEO, consistent citation, domain authority, and quality of backlinks.

Local SEO audit tools

  • Google search console – How well your local SEO performs can be easily determined with a Google search console. It points out areas of improvement by making reports. A site map and some analyzing queries are only required from your path.
  • Semrush Local – SemRush Local is designed in a way that the platform manages your online presence on every platform.
  • Bright Local – Bright Local is an SEO audit tool that provides SEO audit services for small as well as big businesses. It is perfectly fine-tuned to reach out to target people and you will get to know ratings, reviews, and fully automated reports.
  • Localo – Free AI-powered website builder is the specialty of Localo. It segregates data from various sets and diagnoses it closely to provide actual feedback.

Free seo content audit template

Performing SEO content audits is crucial for achieving long-term online success. To make things easier for you, we have included a list of free templates for different types of seo audits offered by various sites that can be used accordingly.

Technical SEO audit

A technical content seo audit ensures your site is crawlable and easy to index by search engines. You can make a copy of this free template from Moz to get started.

Technical SEO (and Beyond) Site Audit Checklist

SEO content audit

With an SEO content audit tool, you can evaluate the performance of your existing web content and find out key areas for improvement. Just like above, you can use the following basic template and start your audit process.

SEO Content Audit Template // Semrush

On-page SEO audit

On-page seo content audit checklist primarily focuses on optimising the on-page elements of a website, such as headers, meta titles, keywords, internal links, etc. If you plan to do an on-page SEO audit, you can utilise the free template below.

WORDSTREAM | CONTENT AUDIT TEMPLATES

Local SEO audit

When you want your business to reach out locally, conducting a local SEO audit targeting a specific geographic area is essential. If you are looking for a template for that purpose, feel free to make a copy of the one below.

Local SEO Audit Checklist_TEMPLATE by Whitespark

So, you have understood the relevance of having a content marketing audit template at hand to get maximum results from search engine optimization. If you are unsure whether your website needs an SEO audit and what kind of procedures you need to follow, you can hire a search engine optimization agency near your business. Our search engine optimization company in Dubai specializes in creating customized audits for businesses of all sizes.

SEO Audit Services in Dubai is a renowned name that your business can rely on. Experts conduct SEO content audits to understand if there are any changes, modifications or eliminations for on-page SEO as well as off-page SEO. There will always be room for improvement in determining your site’s ranking position but types of SEO audits can help. For example, you may require a guide to SEO content audit. 

FAQ: content audit SEO

Why Should You Run an SEO Content Audit and How Often Should You Do It?

Performing a content audit seo helps understand how your web content is performing based on the searches made by users. It also allows you to uncover underperforming areas that need improvement and ensure that the updated content aligns with your seo marketing audit goals. Conducting seo content audits from time to time enhances your content marketing strategies.

Is It Possible To Do a Free Content Audit, and Which Tools Can Help?

Various tools, such as Google Analytics, GSC, etc, can be used to do a free content audit for seo. Using spreadsheet tools, you can use them as seo content audit template for organising data. Despite premium tools offering advanced features, you can get started with the free versions.

Are SEO Audits Worth It & How to Perform Them?

Of course, a content seo audit is worth the effort. Not only do they provide data-driven insights that boost organic visibility and rankings, but learning how to perform an seo content audit is a crucial skill for improving your website’s content strategy. To learn more, you can check out a dedicated seo audit guide and online articles for reference.

List Out the Key Steps and Metrics for an Effective Content Audit

There are several steps included for an effective seo content audit checklist. Most audit process starts with defining goals, identifying content assets, and measuring SEO performance through metrics. This is followed by creating an action plan. Understanding the different types of seo audits helps tailor your approach. The process can be further streamlined using an seo content audit tool.

Omkar Khatale Jangam

Recent Posts

Dynamic Landing Pages That Convert: What Works, What Fails, and How to Test Smartly

Static vs dynamic web pages: The difference lies in the bounce rate and the conversion.…

1 day ago

How To Use Pinterest for Local Business Visibility [Best Hacks]

Saying about Pinterest, most people perceive it as an aesthetic platform with DIYs, home decor,…

1 day ago

Google AI Max for Search Campaigns: What Marketers Need To Know In 2025

Google AI Max has just been released, and it is designed for advertisers to enhance…

2 days ago

SEO for Lawyers: How Law Firms Can Rank Higher and Attract More Clients Online

The importance of SEO for lawyers is increasing day by day, as most people search…

3 days ago

Instagram Shopping Made Simple: How to Set Up Your Shop and Start Selling

There has been a boom in online shopping since the COVID-19 pandemic. There are several…

3 days ago

Semrush vs Ahrefs: Which One Is Better for SEO In 2025?

Digital marketing is getting popular day by day, and businesses and agencies alike find SEO…

4 days ago