Content audit: A step-by-step guide to boosting your blog's SEO

You've poured hours into creating blog posts, optimizing product pages, and crafting comprehensive guides. Your organic traffic is stagnant, your rankings are slipping, and your competitors keep outranking you. Sound familiar?

You're not alone. Many businesses churn out content only to watch it collect dust, ignored by search engines and potential customers. The harder you work, the more it feels like you're spinning your wheels.

Your competitors? They're capitalizing on your audience with better-optimized content while you waste time guessing which pages to fix.

Stop the guesswork. A strategic content audit is your roadmap to reclaiming lost traffic, refreshing stale content, and finally aligning your efforts with what search engines—and your customers—actually want.

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What is a content audit?

A content audit in SEO is a process of examining and evaluating the quality of your existing content. You're checking if it aligns with your business goals, the needs of your ideal customer, and SEO best practices.

The audit will reveal how well your content serves its intended purpose and find areas for improvement. Based on its effectiveness, you'll learn if you need to update, repurpose, or remove any of it.

There are a few main types of content audits, such as:

• Full audit: A detailed review of all content on a site
• Partial audit: Focuses on specific sections or categories of the site
• Rolling audit: Conducted periodically (e.g., monthly or quarterly) to maintain content quality over time

» Track your content's effectiveness with the top SEO KPIs.

What are the benefits of a content audit?

• Enhance SEO performance: Optimize for relevant keywords, improve interlinking, update old content, and address technical SEO issues (e.g., crawled but not indexed pages) to boost search engine rankings.
• Find strengths and weaknesses: Understand content performance to replicate successful strategies and identify areas for improvement.
• Improve user experience: Find and address outdated, irrelevant, or unclear content to improve overall user experience, engagement, and satisfaction.
• Align content with business goals: Ensure your content strategy effectively supports your business objectives and resonates with your ideal customer.
• Prepare for website changes: A content audit in SEO can make migrations, website updates, and other content platform changes more efficient and effective.

» Let us handle your content audit and unlock your site's full SEO potential. Book a consultation.

When should you do a content audit?

The timing of a content audit depends on your goals, resources, and the state of your website.

Here are some key moments when you might want to do an audit:

At regular intervals

Many SEO experts recommend annual or biannual content audits to keep content fresh. Think of it like spring cleaning for your website—regular audits prevent content from becoming stale.

If you have a high-volume website or are in a fast-changing industry like SaaS, you may want to conduct quarterly or even monthly audits to ensure content remains up-to-date and competitive.

» Learn how to create content that converts.

Before major projects

If you're planning to redesign your website, a content audit can help you avoid unnecessary work. You'll find outdated blog posts with low traffic or product pages of discontinued items and remove them from the list of content to migrate.

By looking at your content in detail, you'll decide on what to keep, update, or remove before the redesign so your website is clean and focused on your current brand identity and messaging.

During campaigns

• At the start of a campaign: By auditing at the beginning, you can assess the current state of your content and prioritize accordingly.
• Mid-campaign (6–9 Months): If you audit mid-campaign, you can evaluate progress and adjust the strategy based on performance data.
• Post-campaign: Audits at the end can help you measure success and find out what went well and what you can improve for your next campaign.

When performance issues arise

Let's say you've noticed a worrying trend: your website traffic is declining, fewer visitors are engaging with your pages, or your online sales are dropping. This is exactly when you should do a content audit.

You can take a look at your blog, which has hundreds of posts. Are posts from years ago dragging down your site's overall SEO? Maybe these older articles are outdated, no longer relevant to your audience, or causing keyword cannibalization.

» Check out the SEO goals you should aim for in 2025.

If you're scaling your content strategy

If you're scaling your content strategy by, for example, adding video tutorials for a younger audience, an audit would reveal if your existing blog posts have a tone and style that resonates with this new demographic.

You might find that you need to simplify language, add more visuals, or create videos you can also share on social media to bridge the gap.

How to do a content audit

Step 1: Define your goals and metrics

First, you should define a clear goal for your content audit. Do you want to increase revenue or improve brand awareness? Translate these goals into a content-specific objective.

Want to boost online sales by 20% in 6 months? Your goal should be to optimize product pages and blog content specifically for conversions.

Here are more common SEO content audit goals:

• Increase organic visibility

• Enhance user engagement

• Boost conversions

• Update outdated content

• Identify content gaps

Then, you need to choose SEO metrics that reflect progress toward your goal:

Here are some tips to make defining your goals and metrics easier:

• Record your current performance to compare with post-audit results. You can use tools like SEMrush (backlinks), Hotjar (heatmaps), and Entail CRO (conversion tracking).
• Focus on high-impact goals first, like fixing broken links.
• To make the audit holistic, combine quantitative (traffic, conversions) and qualitative (user feedback, tone) metrics.
• Ensure your goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound (SMART). For example, "Increase organic traffic to blog posts by 15% within 3 months by updating 20 outdated articles."

» Learn how to measure content marketing ROI.

Step 2: Create a content inventory

Next, decide which content is the most relevant for your content goal. We'll assume you picked a blog. Then, use a web crawler tool to gather all relevant URLs on your website.

Then, collect data from GA4, Google Search Console, and tools like Semrush or Moz. Export it to a spreadsheet and add columns for relevant data points.

Here are the combined data points from GA4 and the web crawler you might use for your content inventory:



» Find out how to reduce content creation costs.

Step 3: Analyze content quality and relevance

Review each piece of content and rate its quality on a scale of one to five while considering its:

• Accuracy and relevancy of information
• Alignment with brand voice and style
• Relevance to your target audience
• Clarity and readability
• Visual appeal (images, formatting, etc.)

» Learn the key steps of content editing to create better content.

Let's add the rating to our spreadsheet (see the shaded column):



» Check out the best content marketing KPIs to track in 2025.

Step 4: Perform an SEO analysis

Next, evaluate the on-page SEO elements of the piece. You should look at:

• Keyword usage in the title, H1, and body
• Meta description
• Image alt text
• Internal linking structure

Also, be sure to check the following:

• Page load speed (use Google PageSpeed Insights)
• Mobile-friendliness
• Proper use of schema markup
• Crawlability and indexability

Add any issues that you might come across in the "notes" section (see the shaded column):



» Need more specific guidance? Talk to an SEO expert.

Step 5: Find content gaps and opportunities

Now that you've audited content quality, relevance, and SEO performance, it's time to find untapped opportunities to refine your content marketing strategy. Here's how to do it systematically using your content inventory and tools:

• Use keyword research tools to find queries your competitors rank for that your blog doesn't target.

• Evaluate engagement by format—are short-form blog posts outperforming guides? Are videos increasing dwell time? Use this data to refine your approach.

• Analyze search intent by checking SERP results for targeted keywords.

• Check website assets, such as whether key content pages are buried deep in navigation or if certain URLs have poor internal linking.

As for opportunities, check the keyword research tool for:

• Low-competition keywords: Target keywords you're close to ranking for (positions 4–10 in Google).

• Long-tail queries: Google the keyword you want to rank for and take a look at the "People Also Ask" section to find niche questions your audience asks. You should naturally answer them throughout the post.

Based on your analysis, assign one of these actions to each content piece:

• Keep: High-performing content that needs no changes
• Update: Content that needs minor refreshes or optimization
• Rewrite: Content that requires major updates or restructuring
• Merge: Similar or duplicate content that can be combined
• Delete: Underperforming or irrelevant content to be removed

Let's add a column for the action right underneath the "notes" section in our spreadsheet:



» Identify content gaps easily with Entail's content strategy software.

Step 6: Develop an action plan

You've now completed the biggest chunk of your content audit, but the hardest part is still ahead. You need to create a detailed plan of action that outlines the following:

• Specific tasks for each piece of content
• Team members responsible for each task
• Deadlines
• Resources required (e.g., writers, designers)

» Learn how to manage content using AI.

Step 7: Implement changes

Following your content audit, implement changes to optimize your content and technical SEO. First, refresh existing content by updating outdated posts with new information, fresh data, and relevant keywords.

Then, create new content to fill identified gaps, making sure to align it with user search intent and repurpose successful formats. At the same time, fix technical SEO issues by optimizing meta tags, internal links, page speed, mobile responsiveness, and schema markup.

Finally, implement any 301 redirects for deleted or merged pages, update internal links, and submit a new sitemap.

» Struggling with indexing? Ask Google to index your site after making the changes above.

Step 8: Monitor and measure results

Once you've made the necessary changes, keep a close eye on the results to see what works and guide your next steps. First, track key metrics aligned with your initial goals.

These include:

• Traffic (sessions, pageviews)
• Rankings (keyword positions)
• Conversions (form submissions, sales)
• Engagement (bounce rate, time on page)

Remember the original data you saved in Step 1? Now, it's time to compare it to the data after your changes and see the impact.

Next, build dashboards to visualize these metrics. You can use tools like Google Looker Studio to compile data from GA4, Search Console, and CRM systems. Make sure to include widgets for traffic trends, top-performing content, and conversion funnels.

Make it a habit to check in regularly and adjust your strategy as needed. A monthly review will help you see if your metrics match your goals and fine-tune your approach based on your performance.

Putting your content audit into action

Conducting an SEO content audit is a critical step in maintaining and improving your website's performance, user experience, and search engine rankings. By evaluating your content, you can find strengths, address weaknesses, and align your site with user expectations and SEO best practices.

Make SEO content audits a recurring part of your strategy to stay ahead of algorithm changes and shifting audience preferences. Also, standardize the process with a checklist to ensure no critical aspect is overlooked—whether it's technical SEO elements, keyword optimization, or content quality.

» Get a tailored content audit from our experts. Book a free consultation today.