Keywords play a crucial role in the success of any website's SEO strategy. They are the foundation upon which search engines identify and rank content based on relevance to user queries. Therefore, it's crucial to perform a comprehensive keyword audit to ensure that your site's content is optimised for the right keywords and that you are targeting the right audience.
However, your site's performance isn't just about keywords. SEO encompasses a range of elements from mobile-friendliness, to quality content, layout and other technical aspects. All of these elements together can affect how you rank for particular keywords, particularly in a competitive marketplace.
In this article, we will provide a step-by-step guide on how to do a keyword audit of your site using a range of different tools, alongside a wider website audit for some essential components of SEO.
What is a keyword audit for SEO?
What are the aims of a keyword audit?
How to do a website audit
i. What you’ll need
ii. Find out what pages exist and are indexed on your website
iii. Retrieve data for each page
iv. Make sense of your data
v. Update your existing content
vi. Use the insights to plan future content
How often should you do a website audit?
A keyword audit is a process used in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to evaluate the effectiveness of the current keyword strategy used on a website.
A keyword audit is a fundamental part of any SEO strategy. Using a range of tools, you can uncover content that has previously been published on your site and the keywords that it ranks for, including how well it has performed with readers and in the SERPs (search engine results pages). It will also show you any areas you've overlooked.
Depending on the tools you use, a keyword audit can show you the following metrics:
To make the best use of your keyword data, it's also a good idea to do a wider audit of your online content. This is easy enough to do simultaneously and can show you:
A keyword audit requires a little time and access to a few tools to run some keyword research, which we'll come onto later.
The objectives of an audit are to:
Based on the results of the audit, recommendations can be made for new keywords to target and opportunities to improve existing keywords. The audit can also reveal any keyword stuffing or over-optimisation issues that may be harming the website's search engine rankings. Overall, a keyword audit is a crucial step in developing an effective SEO strategy for a website.
These steps show you the step-by-step basics of how to do a keyword audit of your site using a range of tools:
Once you know the pages that are on your website, you can check that they're being indexed. There are a few ways to do this, but one of the easiest is using Google Search Console.
If you have Google Search Console set up, then you can use this to see which pages are indexed. The advantage is that GSC can also give you details about the keywords each page is ranking for.
To find your pages:
Note that there may be a variety of reasons why a page is not indexed, such as duplicate content, low-quality content, or technical issues. You can click on each URL to see more information about why it has been excluded from the index.
If you find a URL in GSC that should be indexed but isn't, make the recommended changes and then click 'Validate Fix'.
You can also download a tool called Screaming Frog. Screaming Frog is a desktop-based crawler that can be used to scan your website and give you a complete list of all the pages found. Note it can only crawl up to 500 URLs/pages on one search using the free version, so if your website is larger than this you may need a more sophisticated tool:
You can also use your XML sitemap if you have one set up (and we recommend you do). A sitemap does not present metrics you can use but it can be compared against data from other tools to ensure your pages are being indexed properly:
Once you have your inventory of pages you need to run some analysis to retrieve data about how each one is performing both in search and with users.
If you're looking to perform a keyword audit, then using Google Search Console, you can find out what keywords each page is ranking for:
If you used Screaming Frog, you will have exported some useful data already. The first thing to do is to sort by Status Code high > low.
Those with a 200 response code are being indexed, but anything with a 301 or 404 indicates a problem that needs closer inspection.
You can also use Google Analytics to obtain performance data about your indexed pages:
Note that you might also want to retrieve keyword data from Google AdWords or Analytics (traffic sources > keywords) about any paid ads you're running. That's not the focus of this post, which is purely looking at organic traffic, but it can be useful when measuring your PPC campaigns.
This is the time-consuming part, but luckily for you, it's also the most rewarding. We would recommend using all of these tools side by side so you can get a better overview of how well your pages are performing in the search results:
With this tool, you can compare poorly performing pages above with the technical elements of your pages, including:
This easily lets you go behind the scenes and see whether there could be technical reasons why the pages you've identified from your GSC audit aren't performing as well as you'd hoped.
For instance, it could be that the pages lack sufficient words to go into enough depth, that the pages load slowly, contain broken links or don't have targeted headings and meta data (more on this below).
You can find out more about the performance of your pages with your userbase to see how effective they are, particularly once a visitor has landed on them. Using your dataset from GA, you can gauge:
Now you've amassed your useful keyword and performance data, you'll want to develop an action plan to update the existing content for better impact. These are the elements to consider:
Once you know what content has already been published, what is performing well and what needs a hand, you can plan your content strategy around this.
If you haven't published blog content on one theme or topic, or you are missing crucial landing page content to capture and convert customers using certain keywords, you can start planning this into your calendar. Blog content is a useful way to target specific, long-tail keyword queries in your URLs and provide relevant answers and information to searchers' questions.
Read More: How to create an editorial content calendar
It's a good approach to review your existing content every 6-12 months. If you can see some older content isn't performing as well based on your website audit, you need to plan to revisit this and update/improve the content and layout on that page. It could simply consist of making tweaks to headers and images, or you may want to lengthen and re-optimise the content for a target keyword as discussed above.
This is something you need to factor into your ongoing content marketing strategy. At the end of the day, sometimes it's more beneficial to remove old content that doesn't perform and doesn't serve you than keep it clogging up your sitemap.
As you can see, keyword research is a crucial part of an SEO audit - it should work hand in hand with the data you are getting about how well your existing content is functioning.
From here, you know whether you are hitting the keywords you want to be found for in your strategy, if you need to create pages and posts around these, or if you can begin looking at other semantic keywords relevant to your business and your audience.
Remember, once you make any changes to your site, it's best to let Google know. For subtle tweaks to pages that weren't indexed, you can click 'Validate Fix' in Google Search Console after making the recommendations.
If you make more substantial changes to your content, click 'Resubmit for indexing' via Google Search Console. You can find out how to do this on Ahrefs.
The answer to how often you should audit your website content and keywords varies. Some sites will only need an audit every few months, others may require one monthly or even weekly. You'll be able to determine your needs based on your content volume and frequency of publishing, as well as practical matters such as the size of your team and resources.
The most important thing is that you audit your content before starting any new strategy and that you check in with it periodically to eliminate obvious errors.