A content audit prevents you from spending too much time and money on low quality work. It shows you which articles are responsible for your traffic, leads and conversions while also identifying the ones in need of an update or removal. By understanding what it is that matters to your audience, you can develop a more intelligent, strategic content plan to improve your SEO, boost engagement and grow your brand. Without a content audit, you are essentially flying blind.

Preferably you’d do a content audit once or twice a year. But if you update your website often, or have a huge amount of content on it, every 6 months can help you keep up with performance and SEO trends. Frequent audits keep stale or irrelevant content from tarnishing your brand and undermining your search rankings.

An in-depth audit considers every piece of content you have on your site: blog posts, landing pages, product descriptions, videos,podcasts, infographics and even downloadable resources such as eBooks or whitepapers. The idea is to get a grasp of performance by format — so you can maximize, repurpose or eliminate content.

There are two types of metrics you can use to measure a content audit: quantitative and qualitative. Commonly analyzed metrics include:

Traffic: Number of visitors to the page.
Engagement: Time on page, bounce rate, social shares and comments.
Performance SEO: Keyword rank, backlink profile, meta tags and internal links.
Conversion: Number of leads and CTA clicks, number of downloads.
Quality of content:, appropriateness, readability and level of freshness.

Content audit: Here’s how you can supercharge your results By highlighting poor quality, redundant or outdated pages, a content audit enables you to refresh or remove those that are not doing anything for your rankings. It also enables you to focus on meta tags, headings and keyword positioning. This increases the authority and relevance of your website in search engines, resulting in greater organic traffic and visibility.

Absolutely! A content audit provides knowledge about the topics that resonate most with your audience, which channels are working best and where there are holes in your messages. Using this information you can write targeted content that will help to boost engagement, authority and work towards meeting your broader marketing goals.

A content audit is the DIAGNOSTIC step, where you evaluate your existing content. Your content strategy is the roadmap, your blueprint on exactly what content you should be creating, which pieces of content need to be updated or removed and how best to distribute it for maximum effect. If the audit is the diagnostic, think of the strategy as the prescription.

The length of time it takes will depend on the size of your website. Small sites, with only a few dozen pages or so, might require a week, where larger ones running into the hundreds of pages or more may need several weeks. It’s all about doing a comprehensive job — trying to rush through an audit could mean missing key details that might affect your SEO and content performance.

So, after finishing a content audit, you should:

Update: Modernize old or low-quality content.
Remove or group: Remove crap content and combine pages with duplicates.
Tune: Improve SEO, readability and engagement for high-value content.
Create a schedule for future content: Find your gaps and make a plan to fill them.
Keep an eye on progress: Follow progress of your plan and fine tune your approach continuously.

A content audit is never a single event—if planned and executed properly, it’s just another step in your ongoing effort to keep your website valuable, relevant, and impactful.