How To Perform A Website Content Audit In 2025? – Steps To Follow

Whether you perform B2B content marketing or you cater directly to consumers, you need to perform a content audit.

This way, you can keep your website updated and optimize it for better search engine behavior. Basically, with this process, you will have a better idea of what content to keep, update, and delete.

In this article, you will learn in general about content audit and how to perform it for your website. Apart from that, you will also learn about certain content audit tools, benefits, and common mistakes. Hence, to learn more, read on to the end of the article.

Content Audit: A General Overview

Basically, when you perform a content audit, you do a systemic review of your website content. Here, you asses its quality, relevance, and performance to your target audience. This way, you can identify existing problems and take steps to optimize your website for better performance.

Objectives Of Content Audit

Here are the major objectives of content audit:

1. To improve SEO performance by identifying poor-performing and outdated content.

2. Identifying resonating and relevant content for the target audience to increase user engagement.

3. To identify content that helps to drive the most traffic to the website so as to boost conversions.

4. To create an effective marketing strategy by identifying content gaps through content audit.

5. Providing a better experience for visitors by optimizing the website and creating engaging content.

Types Of Content Audit

Generally, there are two main types of content audit: Quantitative and Qualitative.

Basically, in a quantitative audit, you will have to deal with only factual information. These include data and metrics.

On the other hand, when it is about qualitative audit, you have to deal with business-driven and audience-driven insights. In fact, it depends mostly on best practices.

How To Perform Content Audit? – Steps To Follow

The following are the steps you must follow if you want to perform a content audit for your website:

Step 1: Define Your Goals And KPIs

Your first step is to set clear objectives for the audit. Once you have a clear goal from the start, you can determine your content performance better. Also, you can evaluate whether your efforts were successful after the necessary changes.

For instance, you might perform a content audit to improve SEO results. Here, you can check whether your existing content is performing well in organic search. Also, it will help you identify opportunities to increase search rankings and traffic.

Additionally, content audits also let you understand your current level of user engagement. Hence, you will find ways to improve this factor. This way, you can also work towards conversion goals for your business.

Step 2: Collect All Your Content Data

Here, you need to create an inventory of existing content. For instance, you can start with a list of all the content pages on your site. This includes blog posts, landing pages, white papers, etc. This is important because you cannot overlook your pages during the auditing process.

Moreover, if you miss out on key pages, you will not get a complete picture of your content performance. Hence, you will miss out on opportunities for improvement and optimization. Additionally, if your website is small, you can manually collect all your links. However, if you have too much content on your site, you will need a site audit tool.

You will learn about essential content audit tools in a subsequent section.

Step 3: Analyze The Content

Now, it is time to assess content quality and relevance. This way, you can get a good idea of the state of your content. While you analyze your data, make sure to consider the following factors:

• Find out what content is missing on your website that is interesting to your target audience.
• Look for content that is underperforming. Also, check what content pieces are bringing in more traffic than others.
• Find the number of outdated content. Also, figure out ways to update or remove them as per requirement. This will help you in the optimization process.
• By using various SEO tools, find out content that performs extremely well. This way, you can find out content gaps and redundancies with other content.

Depending on the results and analysis of your content, organize the data in your spreadsheet. Make sure to organize this area properly so that you can access those data later.

Step 4: Evaluate Performance Metrics

Once you decide what you want to achieve with your content audit, you must start gathering data on your content. For instance, based on the above data, find patterns, connections, and trends that are hard to see when you are looking at a standard report.

The following are the factors you must consider if you want to evaluate performance metrics for your content:

• Check for outlier posts that exceed expectations both in terms of ranking and traffic.
• Determine whether there are new topics that are getting more attention now. For instance, these topics might not be in vogue a few months ago.
• Check whether certain content pieces are getting more organic backlinks or not.

This way, you can recognize happy accidents that are impacting your content performance. Moreover, you can also use this data to develop new content strategies and tactics.

Step 5: Make Recommendations

Now, you need to create actionable insights for content improvement. Here, you must finalize and clean up your audit. Moreover, you need to decide what posts to update, delete, restructure, and rewrite.

For instance, you can add another column on your spreadsheet to add as a remark. This way, you can prioritize content updates and removals. Hence, you can know what action you can take on specific URLs.

Also, make a timeline that fits your content audit. Here, you can consider your initial goals and rank them accordingly to execute what to do and when.

Step 6: Implement Changes

To successfully implement changes and monitor results, you will need to go through these two stages:

A) Executing The Recommended Updates

You must execute updates in the following ways:

1. If a content page is meeting expectations or exceeding performance goals, you must leave it that way.

2.  You must update a page when it is not meeting the performance goals that you decided in your audit. Moreover, you must also update a page if it is meeting performance goals, but the information is irrelevant and outdated.

3. Delete those pages that are not only not meeting performance goals but also consist of outdated information. However, before you delete a page, check whether it is getting high traffic from other sources, or whether it is driving a high portion of conversion. For instance, if you delete such a page, it will negatively impact your business.

B) Monitoring Results And Continuous Optimization

Once you update your content with the help of an action plan, it is time to review your SEO performance. Also, use different SEO tools to analyze user engagement and traffic data. However, a big question is how long one must wait to measure content data.

Actually, there is no right time. However, since your goal is to improve SEO results in the first place, you must consider waiting for three to four months. After that, consider analyzing the web performance.

Hence, search engines will get enough time to process the updates that you have in your content now. Moreover, if your content pieces get a better ranking, it will result in better traffic.

Then, collect the new data and compare the new data with the old ones. Here, you must assess whether you have hit your new goals or not. This way, you can evaluate your performance metrics and make progress toward your goals.

Common Mistakes To Avoid While Performing Content Audit

Here are some of the major mistakes you must avoid while performing a content audit:

• Not performing audience research every month.
• Not checking SEO updates and best practices.
• Dealing with wrong keywords and mistargeting.
• Focusing on search engine demands rather than people.
• Not depending on data to create strategies.
• Focusing on quantity rather than quality.

Essential Tools and Resources for Content Audit

The following are some essential tools you need for content audit:

1. Ahrefs
2. SEMrush
3. Screaming Frog
4. WooRank
5. Google Analytics
6. Google Search Console
7. Vidyard
8. Google Sheets
9. Casted

How Often You Must Perform Content Audit?

Most top content marketing services recommend performing a content audit once a year. However, if you produce a lot of content, you must consider performing an audit at least twice a year. This is because once you perform a content audit, it takes three to four months (at least) to see results.

However, if you update your content frequently, you might need to perform an audit quarterly. Moreover, to adapt to industry trends, performing quarterly audits is better.

Perform A Content Audit Now

Hence, you can see that performing a content audit is crucial for your website if you want to ensure it stays relevant.

Moreover, it also helps you to optimize your website as per search engine requirements. This helps you to rank your website better and get more traffic. Therefore, you must audit your website now.

Do you have more suggestions on how to perform a content audit? Please share your ideas and opinions in the comments section below.

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