Drive more traffic with this simple, 4 step SEO content audit

December 5, 2022

by Sam Carney | 5 min read

Continually reviewing and improving your on-site content is an integral part of any SEO campaign. In this post, I’m going to show you how to do this effectively.

Continually reviewing and improving your on-site content is an integral part of any SEO campaign. In this post, I’m going to show you how you can keep on top of things by providing a step-by-step guide for auditing your pages, identifying what’s working and what isn’t and targeting areas for improvement.

Step 1: Gather your site’s content using Screaming Frog

In order to perform an effective SEO content audit on your site, you’ll first have to gather all of your content. The best way to do this is to download Screaming Frog, which will scan your site’s URLs and analyse pages from an SEO perspective, saving you browsing through each page manually.

After Screaming Frog has completed its crawl through your site – this could take a few minutes, depending on how much content your site contains – filter as necessary and export the URLs and page titles you want to check to a spreadsheet; leaving plenty of columns free – you’ll need these to add the ‘SEO data points’ that you’re going to be analysing later.

There are many different data points you could consider. In his guide for Quicksprout, Neil Patel recommends creating columns for:

URLs
Date Audited
Title
Description
Content
Keyword
Alt Tags
Last Updated
Internal Links

Feel free to add and delete columns as appropriate.

Step 2: Pull in data from Google Analytics to work out what you’re doing well

For the next step, you’ll need to sign in to Google Analytics. Navigate to ‘All Pages’ (Behavior > Site Content > All Pages in the toolbar) so you can obtain a list of your site’s most popular pages. As Patel highlights, “this will help you audit your most important pages first… [giving] you results as soon as possible.” Narrow or expand your dataset using the filters and, when you’re happy with the selection, export to a new page in your spreadsheet.

You should now have a list of your content, in descending order in terms of performance, with the following data: page views, average time on page, entrances, bounce rate, and exit percentage. Kristi Hines suggests doing this so you get an insight into what you’re doing right on your top performing content; you can then apply this to the rest of the pages you’re auditing or optimise further.

Step 3: Analysing your pages

Now comes the difficult part: going through each page on your site in order to determine its effectiveness. There’s no quickfire way of doing this, you’ll simply have to trawl through each page, analysing content in terms of the ‘SEO data points’ mentioned earlier and make a record of how each page performs – several sources, including DynoMapper, recommend grading content on an A to F scale, with pages ranked ‘A’ being the very best and requiring little improvement and those awarded D, E, or F meriting action, which I’ll come to later.

As a minimum, you should analyse the following:  Page titles and URLs – Page titles and URLs should be unique, containing a maximum of 65 characters and, ideally, the keyword you’re targeting on that page.  Page description – If you’re using WordPress as your CMS, download Yoast’s excellent SEO plugin to make the auditing process easier. The plugin flags up missing aspects of your on-page SEO with a red light, so you should easily be able to edit your auditing spreadsheet accordingly. Page descriptions should be 160 characters or fewer, and should adequately convey to your audience what your content is about.

Content – Check each piece of content to determine if it’s relevant and insightful to your audience, grammatically flawless and well laid-out.
Keywords – Content should contain a selection of your targeted long-tail keywords, so ensure you have this information to hand at this stage of the auditing process.
Alt tags   – Images should be under 100KB to minimise page loading times, but alt text should also be filled out. Remember: search engines can’t ‘look at’ an image the way humans do, so you need to tell the bots what’s included in the picture with a descriptive tag containing relevant keywords.
Internal links – Content should contain at least three links to other pages or blogs on your site, as well as external links, if possible.  If your page is missing any of the above, make sure you flag it up in the corresponding column of your spreadsheet. Moz’s exhaustive guide lists other aspects of your content you can examine for SEO, but how far you go is up to you.

Step 4: Actioning the changes required

The whole SEO content auditing process is worthless if you don’t take any actions to remedy the faults you’ve found.   Remember the rating scale we talked about before? A good starting point in terms of recommended actions would be to either rewrite, remove, or optimise any pages which scored a D or less. The elements in Step 3 are fairly easy to change (if your page is lacking a meta description, include one, fix any broken links or images etc.); just remember that, if you’re removing pages or changing URLs, you should redirect the user accordingly.

Set yourself a deadline to implement the changes, and also outline the date you’re going to perform your next audit, so you can deduce how effective the process has been. As long as you’ve been thorough, and you’ve done what you said you would, you should see results.