How to Run a Content Audit (2025 Update)

Struggling to keep track of all the content on your website? You’re not alone. 

But the truth is that the content you’ve already made is just as valuable as anything you’re yet to create. Optimizing it, even just a little bit, can lead to more revenue and progress towards your business goals.

A website content audit will help you see what you’ve already got and what you can do to make it better.

In this article, I’ll show you the benefits of organizing a content audit, what tools to use, and how to run one step-by-step.

Key Takeaways

• A content audit helps you identify and optimize underperforming content, ensuring your website remains relevant and effective.
• Consistent content audits ensure alignment with SEO best practices like E-E-A-T and adapt to evolving search algorithms.
• Content audits go beyond text, evaluating multimedia, accessibility, and user experience for a comprehensive analysis.
• Leveraging tools like Google Analytics, Ubersuggest, and Screaming Frog simplifies audits and drives better results

Table of Contents

• Key Takeaways
• What Is a Content Audit?
• Why Does My Website Need a Content Audit?
• Determine Your Content Audit’s Purpose
• Content Audit Tools
  • Ubersuggest
  • Google Analytics
  • Screaming Frog
  • Ahrefs Content Explorer
  • Accessibility Checkers
• Website Content Audit Steps
  • 1. Create a List of Your Content Assets
    • Content Audit Templates
  • 2. Create a List of Content Issues to Identify
    • Metrics to Focus on
  • 3. Address Content Issues
• Common Content Audit Mistakes to Avoid
• FAQs
• Conclusion

What Is a Content Audit?

A content audit involves cataloging and evaluating all content on your website to improve performance.

By content, I mean any assets you use to promote your brand and encourage customers to find out more about your products and services. For example:

• Articles and blog posts
• AI-generated content
• Landing pages
• Testimonials and case studies
• Infographics
• Videos
• Webinars
• E-books and whitepapers
• Interactive content like quizzes and calculators
• Podcasts
• FAQs

When you have identified all the content on your website, you can assess the quality and performance of each piece. You can then decide whether to:

• Keep it as is.
• Consolidate it with another piece of content.
• Update it.
• Redirect it.
• Delete it.

For example, let’s say your website content audit uncovers an article you created in 2017. This article is extremely out-of-date and doesn’t get much traffic. However, the data shows it has potential, so rather than deleting it, you refresh it and optimize it for new keywords.

The main reason why a content audit is so useful is that it’s a strategic process.

Rather than looking at content and going, “Yes, that’s a good page” or “No, we should get rid of this”, you’re using the data available to you to determine which content to improve and what the best way is to do it.

As a result, you’re making decisions based on how your customers interact with your site, increasing the odds of success.

Why Does My Website Need a Content Audit?

A good SEO content audit offers a heap of benefits for your business. It helps you:

• Identify SEO opportunities. Is a competitor outranking you is a piece of content not performing as well as expected? You can use a content audit to identify potential new keywords to optimize for, as well as issues like missing meta descriptions.
• Meet accessibility standards. Content audits help you identify small, overlooked issues that might make your content less accessible. For example, missing alt tags or images with low color contrast.
• Improve the user experience. Content that’s not mobile-friendly or loads slowly can drive visitors away and harm SEO performance. A content audit lets you pinpoint issues and resolve them.
• Keep up to date with the latest developments. Search engine algorithms change several times a year. Regular content audits give you an opportunity to update your content, stay up to date with best practices, and increase the chances of appearing at the top of search engine results.
• Achieve your marketing goals. Your marketing goals may change over time. A content audit helps you understand the purpose of each piece of content on your site and ensures all content works towards the same goal.
• Build an asset library. Having a list of all content on your website can save time and resources. For example, if you’re low on social media post ideas, you can look at your existing content and see what you can repurpose.

Determine Your Content Audit’s Purpose

Before you start your content audit, you need to determine what you want it to achieve. 

This ensures you review the right elements and optimize your content to help you meet your business goals.

For instance, if you want to use a content audit to improve your SEO, you’ll want to focus on identifying content gaps, matching user intent, and optimizing your pages, for example, through SEO-optimized images.

You’ll also want to pay attention to technical SEO issues like missing headings and meta descriptions. 

However, let’s say your goal is to enhance E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness) on your website. You’ll want to use your website content audit to identify low-quality content, find relevant sources to cite, and add quotes from knowledgeable experts.

Content Audit Tools

If you only have a few pieces of content on your website, it’s OK to go through them manually. However, if you have a lot of content, this can be a long and frustrating way to run an audit.

In this situation, automating the process with software tools can save time and ensure you don’t miss out on anything. Here are some great ones to get you started.

Ubersuggest

If you’re running an SEO content audit, Ubersuggest is essential. 

Running a site audit is easy. Just enter your URL, click “Search,” and select “Site Audit” on the left. This will show you:

• How much monthly traffic you’re getting.
• How many keywords you’re targeting.
• How many backlinks you have.
• How fast your page is.
• If your page experiences any crawling issues that might affect its search engine rankings.
• If there are any SEO issues you need to review.

You can also use Ubersuggest to find new keywords to target, identify new backlinking opportunities, and even write fresh new content for your site.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics provides you with a wealth of data about your page performance. This can help you see which content is popular with visitors and what they engage with most, as well as potential issues you may need to resolve.

For example, let’s say a page gets a lot of traffic but has a very high bounce rate. This could mean that your page title and meta description in the search engines do not match the intent of your content.

Screaming Frog

If you want to focus on technical SEO issues that may hamper your content, Screaming Frog is a valuable tool.

The free version of Screaming Frog scans up to 500 URLs on your site to identify broken pages, broken links, and spot missing alt text. It also helps you detect duplicate content. 

Ahrefs Content Explorer

If you want to identify your top-performing content and see if there are any content gaps you can take advantage of, Ahrefs Content Explorer provides in-depth insight.

One thing I really love is that it’s easy to analyze your competitor’s websites—looking into how their content is doing and which keywords you can use to outrank them.

See how Ubersuggest and Ahrefs compare.

Accessibility Checkers

Ensuring your content is accessible doesn’t just improve the user experience but helps you comply with regulations like the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

There are lots of free accessibility checkers online, but my favorite is WAVE. Enter a website URL and it will show you what errors and issues are on each page of your site, including missing alt text, incorrect heading structures, and overly small text.

Website Content Audit Steps

A content audit may seem daunting, especially if you have a lot of content on your site or have never run one before. However, an audit is a lot easier when you break it down step-by-step.

1. Create a List of Your Content Assets

The first step of a website content audit is to create an inventory of all the content on your website. Not only pages, but other content including visuals, videos, and interactive elements.

Seeing all your assets in one location makes it much easier to analyze content performance, highlight areas to improve, and update each asset methodically.

While you can identify all your content manually, a spidering tool like Screaming Frog is the easiest way to automate the process. You can also find your website’s sitemap and use that as a starting point.

When you’re ready, export your assets into a spreadsheet in your platform of choice. 

Content Audit Templates

While you can build a content audit template from scratch, there are free ones available online that you can download and customize. Here are some of my favorites:

• Ahrefs
• CoSchedule
• HubSpot 
• WordStream

2. Create a List of Content Issues to Identify

Now you have all your content assets in one place; you’ll need to add the relevant data points you want to track.

Which data points will you include? It depends on the goal of your content audit—which we looked at earlier in this article. 

Remember that it’s better to focus on actionable data points rather than tracking excessive metrics that don’t drive results.

Here are a few things to look for to get you started:

• Target keyword: Does the content target a particular keyword and include it in the copy? If not, or the keyword is no longer relevant, optimize the content for a new keyword.
• Duplicate content: Duplicate content can confuse the search engines. If you have duplicate content you’ll want to remove it or implement a rel=canonical tag.
• Thin content: Short or low-quality content (whether written by humans or with AI) doesn’t provide value to your site visitors. Either rewrite, consolidate with another piece of content, or remove it.
• Outdated content: People don’t want to read outdated content, and search engines overlook it. Update it wherever possible.
• Content gaps: What’s missing in your content? Are there topics you haven’t addressed yet? Target markets you haven’t spoken to? Being able to look at everything at once can help you find the gaps and fill them in.  
• Schema markup: Does your content use schema markup? If so, is it accurate? If not, could implementing it help your SEO? 
• Metadata: Do you have unique, relevant page titles and meta descriptions for all pages? Your spreadsheet will help you see which ones need to be written and refreshed. 
• Images: Check the file size of any images and review the file name, captions, and alt text.
• Accessibility: Is your content accessible to visually impaired people and people with mobility issues? Consider the placement of clickable links, color contrast, and the usability of elements like forms.
• Featured snippets and AI overviews: Do your pages have featured snippets or AI overviews? If not, showcasing your expertise and revising your content can increase the chances of getting them. 
• The user experience: Is your content easy to access and understand? Consider the loading time, visual appeal, and the hierarchy of the content.

When you have your list, go through each piece of content to see how it’s performing. You’ll be able to pull some data through the tools you use, while you’ll need to review some other data points manually.

Keep track of everything by creating a note next to each asset about why it needs improving. 

You can also color-code your spreadsheet based on the type of optimization required, but this can become complicated if a single asset has multiple issues.

Metrics to Focus on

While you can use the same template for future website content audits, it’s worth looking at new data points each time to keep up to date with marketing trends and search engine algorithms.

Here are some useful metrics to focus on:

• Core Web Vitals. The Core Web Vitals are Google’s way of measuring website performance, and it considers these when ranking websites.
• Customer engagement. Your content might get a lot of traffic, but this doesn’t necessarily indicate that your content is appealing to customers. Consider metrics like conversion rate, time spent on page, and page ratings.
• Return on investment (ROI). Understanding how much money your content makes can help you identify what assets are worth keeping as is and which ones need optimizing.
• Qualitative data. While quantitative data like page visits and bounce rates are valuable, qualitative data like user feedback and reviews can help you understand what customers think of your content.

3. Address Content Issues

Chances are that you’ve discovered many content issues that need resolving. You won’t be able to fix them all at once, so you’ll need to prioritize them.

The easiest way to do this is to rank each issue by difficulty (how hard it will be to do) and impact (how much it will positively affect your website.) If you use Ubersuggest, it prioritizes your SEO issues for you automatically, meaning one less thing to worry about.

Focusing on tasks with a high impact and low difficulty will give you a series of quick wins. Alternatively, you could prioritize all the easy tasks to give your team a confidence boost.

Adding a deadline date for each task to be completed by gives you something to work towards and adds an element of accountability.

Finally, content audits work best when several people get involved, so don’t be afraid to ask for help and split up the work. 

If you do this, make your spreadsheet available in the cloud (for example, in Google Drive) so everyone can update the document and see how things are progressing.

Common Content Audit Mistakes to Avoid

While content audits are a brilliant way to optimize your website, they can be done incorrectly. This can mean you make the wrong changes to your content and risk damaging your search engine rankings.

Here are some of the most common pitfalls to avoid:

• Not having a goal. This means you don’t have an objective to work towards and may mean you choose the wrong data points to focus on.
• Not documenting your findings. Adding your findings to a spreadsheet makes it easier to track progress and monitor your success.
• Failing to prioritize issues. Not prioritizing your findings can mean the most critical problems get overlooked.
• Over-relying on tools. While they do help save time, over-reliance on tools can lead to misinterpretation of data. Always validate automated insights with manual reviews.
• Only doing a content audit once. Website content audits aren’t a ‘one-and-done’; you need to regularly review your content to make sure it stays relevant, credible, and SEO-optimized.

FAQs

What is a Content Audit?

A content audit is the process of creating an inventory of all your website’s content. 

You can then analyze the content and optimize it so it appeals to visitors and performs better in the search engines.

Why Do I Need to Do a Content Audit on My Website?

Content audits help you identify problems with your content and determine what you can do to make it better. 

This means more high-quality content that is SEO-optimized, fast-loading, and provides value to visitors, which helps you rank better in Google and get more clicks and conversions.

How Do I Do a Content Audit?

There are three steps to a good content audit:

Prioritize all issues and resolve them accordingly.

Create a list of all the content assets on your website.

Review your content and identify any potential issues.

What Are Some Tools I Can Use for Content Audits?

Good tools for managing your SEO content audits include Ubersuggest, Ahrefs Content Explorer, Screaming Frog, and Google Analytics.

Accessibility checkers like WAVE are helpful too.

Conclusion

Whether you want to update your old content or check that your website provides an exceptional user experience, a content audit is a must.

Let me leave you with one final tip—you get the most out of website content audits when you carry them out regularly. I recommend running them once a year, or even more frequently if you create a lot of content. The good news is that once you’ve organized your first content audit, managing your assets moving forward becomes a breeze!