As one of the three core pillars of SEO, auditing content and on-page factors is a critical part of completing any SEO Audit.
Content makes up a large proportion of discovery and lead generation for websites, attracting users by providing informational content to answer questions and meet their needs. Similarly, on-page factors are core for effective optimisation and ranking highly for target keywords. This makes both of these a highly important part of any audit.
As an experienced agency with SEO audit services that have helped both large and small businesses, we’ve developed robust processes for auditing these factors. To help you with your own analysis, we’ll run through the steps we take to audit on-page factors and content.
What’s the Aim of an On-Page or Content Audit?
The aim of any audit should be identifying weak and poor performing content or pages, and then providing recommendations on how to optimise and improve it.
Good quality content provides useful information that meet the needs of visiting users and is written by qualified subject experts. Meanwhile poor-quality content tends to be thin, lacking in unique information, and is often written by someone with little to no experience on the topic. When completing a content audit, these key factors that should be identified.
The same can mostly be said for on-page factors, with the added caveat that these should be tailored for the search queries you want the individual page to rank for. All of this is usually completed in the context of a wider SEO audit, where all aspects of site performance are being audited.
Why Conduct This Audit?
By auditing your content and on-page factors, you can easily discover:
- Which content pieces are currently performing, which aren’t, and why.
- Whether there are topic gaps in your content offering.
- Whether your existing content reaches your standards for quality and brand or tone of voice guidelines.
- The improvements you can make when writing or briefing new content.
By focusing on one of more of these outcomes from your content and on-page audits, you can improve the content offering on your site and improve how it performs its function as content (for instance, if it provides users’ informational or transactional needs).
Let’s explore how you can conduct this audit.
How to Conduct a Content On-Page Audit in 7 Steps
A content audit is a large-scale audit that analyses all the content currently on your site and produces wide-ranging recommendations for improving content quality and effectiveness.
1. Define the Audit Scope and Objectives
Start by setting the boundaries your audit will operate within and the aims it will focus on completing.
It’s sensible to set defined, limited boundaries for your audit. Creating an audit scope that’s too wide-ranging can result in a process that takes too long and is too complex. You may spend too much time conducting it and end up with actions that are too far-reaching to sensibly complete.
Successful audits have a defined scope of the content that will be analysed and a set output objective. For example, you may run a content audit on all blog content on-site with the aim of identifying any content that currently receives less than 5 clicks per month for optimisation.
2. Create an Audit Inventory
Once you’ve specified the content that you want to audit, create a list of all the content assets that you want to include within your audit. This should be a full list of the URLs you want to analyse.
Before you start to assess the content pieces or add contextual or performance data, run through the content and categorise it. Categorise content pieces by:
- Content format: is it written, an infographic or image, or a video.
- Content type or intent: is it a blog or product page, or is the intent informational or transactional.
- Content topic: the primary theme or topic the content piece covers.
3. Collect and Map Data
Export and collect relevant data on the performance of the content you’ve listed in your inventory. This data can relate to the traffic, engagement, conversion, backlinks and crawlability of the content. Some typical data sources include:
- Google Analytics is one of the most commonly used data sources when analysing content performance. It provides metrics such as sessions and users to measure traffic, average time on page to measure engagement, as well as a register of events that occurred on the page to track conversions.
- Google Search Console contains data specific to the search performance of a content piece. This includes clicks, or entrances from search, impressions for visibility, as well as average search position.
- Screaming Frog is a comprehensive site audit tool that provides information on the site’s internal links, as well as crawlability and indexability.
- SEMrush or AHRefs both provide relevant data on page backlink profiles.
Map this data across all your content. If using a spreadsheet format, you can start to use custom formatting to visualise poor performing content.
4. Assess Content Quality
This step requires manual analysis of the content, evaluating the quality of the content specific to the topic it’s written about.
There are a few factors to consider when evaluating the overall “quality” of a piece of content. First, analyse the content’s relevance to the target audience. Does it meet their level of expertise, and does it meet their informational needs? Next, assess the content’s accuracy and timeliness – whether it is up to date. Consider its readability and style, as well as whether it is well-structured using headings. Finally, assess the originality of the content – does it stand out from the crowed?
You can also audit your on-page factors at this time. This should include:
- Metadata: page titles and meta descriptions.
- URL structures.
- Core headings, especially the H1.
Make notes on these and, if necessary, grade it with scores that reflect how it rates against these factors.
5. Analyse Competitor Content
Collect the competing content from your top competitors, whether that’s the content that directly ranks against your own audited content or from your business competitors.
There’s no need to go into too much detail, but your analysis should include an evaluation of how they perform versus your content. Asses the following: does it have a higher ranking? Is the quality of the content higher than yours? Add all of this information into your audit sheet.
6. Identify Content Gaps
Compare your content to that of your competitors and look specifically for the topic they cover and that you don’t. These are your content gaps.
Analyse the gaps and start to assess whether or not you need to fill them. Only fill them if your site and organisation have expertise in the topic at hand – creating content just for the sake of aligning with competitors can result in poor quality content that will not perform well.
Make a list of the content gaps you want to fill with new content.
7. Collect Insights and Develop an Action Plan
Now is the time to collate everything together. In a single location organise your performance analysis based on the data you collected, the content quality you graded your pieces against, any competitor insights you found and finalise with your list of content gaps. This forms the analysis section of your content audit.
Use these insights to develop an action plan. This strategy could include the following actions:
- Optimisation: rewrite content or optimise page headings or metadata.
- Content update: rewrite parts of the content or add new content sections.
- Write new content: fill content gaps with new pieces of relevant content.
- Content removal: if necessary, remove a piece of content from your site.
Conclusion
Unleash your website’s full potential with a comprehensive content audit. By following this process, you’ll uncover content gaps, benchmark against competitors, and develop a strategic action plan to elevate your online presence.
For those short on time or seeking expert insights, consider partnering with an SEO audit agency like POLARIS. Our specialized tools and experience can streamline the audit process, providing in-depth analysis and tailored recommendations to maximize your content’s impact and drive meaningful results for your business. Learn more about our process, including how much an SEO audit costs.