Content and SEO Audit – 5 Ways It Helps You Build a Marketing Plan

MotoCMS Editorial 4 January, 2021

Analyzing the performance of content and SEO tactics have often been regarded as an integral part of digital marketing as they help track performance and improve future campaigns. Likewise, performing a content or SEO audit regularly can help you better understand your website’s inner workings. Hence, here are five ways of doing a content and SEO audit that helps you build next year’s marketing plan.

What Is Content and SEO Audit?

To put it simply, a content or SEO audit is a way of checking your website’s content and SEO practices to evaluate them and see how well they perform. It’s a way of analyzing all these different content and SEO elements on your website either separately or together to see how you can improve them and how well they have performed in the past.

According to KWD SEO Auckland, here are three ways to perform an audit. A full content audit includes all the elements on your website that will be checked (e.g., index number, URLs, titles, SEO titles, main and secondary keywords, etc.) A partial audit focuses on the part of your website (like a page or a product category), and a sampled audit only focuses on a small piece of content on your website.

#1 Update Old Content

First and foremost, by performing a content or SEO audit of your website, you will be able to update your old content by finding the bits that need to be updated through your content analysis. If you were a student, you’d probably think, “How can I rewrite my paper to make it better?” but as a website owner, you probably think, “How can I rewrite my content to make it more effective?” – and updating your old content is the perfect solution in this situation.

After your content audit, you will have several articles and posts (and any other types of content like product descriptions) that will need to be updated. Some content will need more new findings to keep the claims up-to-date, while other pieces can be rewritten completely, giving you more ideas for new content.

#2 Adjust Poor Content

Just like finding outdated content on your website, content, or SEO audit can help you adjust poor content, making it perform better and attract more traffic to your website. In a way, adjusting content that is performing poorly is somewhat similar to updating old content. Still, the difference is that you are focusing on the SEO side rather than the topic of your content itself.

So, for example, you might have an article about climate change. Updating it would mean rewriting it completely or adding some new research on the topic to support your claims. Adjusting it to perform better would include adding more relevant keywords, optimizing the page, checking and adjusting the links, and so on.

#3 Increase Keyword Effectiveness

Speaking of keywords, performing a content or SEO audit can significantly increase the effectiveness of the keywords you use on your website’s different parts. In some cases, you might have no idea which keywords work better (for example, if you have an essay for sale, it’s not always easy to decide which keywords to use), while in other cases, the problem might be that the keywords you used before are now outdated.

A full or even partial content or SEO audit will help you get a general idea about which keywords aren’t performing well on your website and could be used more to maximize their effect. Simultaneously, a sampled audit can help you focus on a specific part of your website to get even more insight into the keyword performance in the content of that part of the site.

#4 Find New Marketing Opportunities

Because performing a content or SEO audit is so insightful, you will be able to find an array of completely new marketing opportunities for your future digital marketing campaigns of all kinds. Perhaps you want to plan a giveaway or a contest, or maybe you want to launch an email marketing campaign tied to your website, or maybe you want to do something else related to your site – all of these could be influenced by the results of your content audit.

For instance, if you find out that there is a lot of traffic coming into your site from social media platforms, you might want to focus on your social media strategy to maximize your campaigns’ results. The audit will help you find your website’s strengths so that you can use them effectively.

#5 Improve Your Overall SEO

Lastly, a well-managed content or SEO audit will ultimately help you improve your overall search engine optimization. For example, students might want to know whether they need to pay to write their essays on a special platform. If you provide such services, you will need to use relevant keywords to be discovered by that student.

Moreover, SEO is not just about keywords. It would help if you also thought about your on-site optimization, metadata and meta description, URLs, image tags, internal linking, the backlink profile, site navigation, and so much more.

Content and SEO Audit Checklist

So, what exactly should your content/SEO audit entail? Here’s a checklist to go through:

Set Up A List of Elements to Check. This list of elements you will be checking on your website, including index number, URLs, titles, SEO titles, keywords, etc.
Define Your Goals and Metrics. What is the purpose of your content or SEO audit apart from making the next year’s marketing plan? You might want to improve the conversion rate, increase engagement, or improve your SEO metrics.
Collect Performance Data to Analyze. Perform the audit and collect all the necessary performance data. Then, analyze it to complete the audit.
Adjust Your Future Marketing Plan. Create and optimize your next year’s marketing plan according to your content and SEO audit findings.

Content and SEO Audit – Final Thoughts

To sum up, performing a content or SEO audit even once a year can help you better understand how effective your past marketing campaigns were and help you plan for the future. Use the tips in this article to improve your next year’s marketing plan by doing a content or SEO audit.