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You are here: Home / SEO Consulting Services & Audits / SEO Content Audits

SEO Content Audits

If you feel that your content isn’t driving the traffic that you know your website is capable of, it’s likely that you need an SEO content audit. Search engines (especially Google) are refining their algorithms to increase focus on overall website content quality, and having low-quality pages indexed in search engines puts your website at risk with algorithm updates and overall ranking potential. An SEO content audit will help your website uncover its true search engine ranking potential.

Dan Kern has conducted more SEO content audits than most consultants in the industry. Working with Kern Media ensures that your audit offers expert detail and actionable recommendations to grow your website’s organic search traffic and revenue.


SEO Content Audit

Why an SEO Content Audit Benefits Your Website

  • Improve overall content quality by identifying how to refine your website’s indexation in search engines.
  • Protect your website from Google algorithm updates and potentially benefit from future updates.
  • Increase search traffic and conversion potential by identifying pages, currently receiving traffic, that can be improved with better optimization, formatting, etc.
  • Creates more authoritative content by combining multiple pages about the same topics and increasing your ranking potential in search engines.
  • Increase conversions and drive more revenue or subscribers by identifying Calls-to-Action (CTA) improvements.
  • Improve search bot crawls and ranking potential by identifying and fixing technical SEO issues that may be holding your website back.
  • Increase and expand keyword ranking potential by identifying opportunities for metadata improvement, keyword targeting and keyword gaps.

 

 
 

Creating Your Content Audit

Content audits involve a complex process, and to do it right you need more than a content audit tool that you might find during your research. I’ve yet to see a content audit tool that can deliver the level of insight that an expert human review can provide. Let’s dive into the process so that you can see the extent of human review that is needed for a proper content audit to be conducted for your website.

Crawling Your Website to Produce an Content Audit Inventory

screaming frog logoMy process starts with crawling your website with search bot simulator software in order to create a “content inventory” which will serve as the foundation of the content audit. Important data such as URLs, HTTP status codes, meta page titles, meta descriptions, H1 titles, meta robots tags, canonical URLs, word count and other data is pulled together in an organized fashion via crawling your website with a tool such as Screaming Frog. This data is necessary for a detailed website content audit, and it lays the foundation for analyzing your website content in a similar manner to how search engines will analyze it to determine quality, ranking, etc.

The crawl report also helps to identify errors and missed opportunities. These errors include (but are not limited to):

  • Broken Pages
  • Internal Redirects
  • Redirect Chains
  • Missing Canonicals
  • Orphaned Pages
  • …etc.

Identifying these errors and missed opportunities is just the start of a content audit, and it often provides a number of “wins” to help create a more crawl-friendly website for search engines.

Discovery of Additional Pages in Google Analytics

google analytics logoTypically, website crawls don’t always identify all pages on your site. This is because some of your pages may not be properly linked from other internal pages. By exporting landing pages from Google Analytics, we can create a more complete inventory for conducting the content audit. This is an important step, and skipping it will result in an incomplete audit.

Aligning Traffic Metrics per Page

Once the inventory is complete, it’s necessary to pull in key traffic and conversion metrics in order to determine which content is “working” for your website. Typically, organic search traffic session and conversion data is pulled in for every page, along with key metrics from Google Search Console (clicks, impressions, CTR and average ranking position). This data is critical to conducting an in-depth content audit.

Conducting the Content Analysis

audit-symbol-smallOnce we have a complete inventory of your content, and appropriate traffic metrics, the real analysis will begin. The first step that I take is to tag all of your pages by “Page Type.” This allows for batch analysis. The worksheet is filtered to review pages by page type, and quality factors such as the following are reviewed:

  • Organic traffic and conversions per page
  • Google clicks, impressions, CTR + average ranking position per page
  • Word count
  • URL structure
  • Missing metadata
  • Duplicate metadata
  • Basic on-page optimization elements
  • …etc.

This is where the majority of work is done to determine the overall quality of your website. Recommended pages to remove from search engine indexes will be determined, along with which pages should be optimized and improved, and potentially pages to consolidate if there is clear topic duplication. I go the extra mile and also curate the overall recommendations so that you can see key takeaways at a glance, such as:

  • Number of pages that drive any organic traffic, out of all website pages
  • Total organic traffic for pages recommended to be removed from search engine indexes
  • Total organic traffic for pages recommended to be improved
  • …etc.

Creating the Content Audit Strategy

google-document-logo-smallThe final step is to create a strategy document that curates the findings from the content audit so that you and your team can digest the key takeaways. Typically, the findings are striking. Most companies realize that the vast majority of their content is not performing (driving traffic and/or conversions), and that some of the website content actually poses a quality risk to the website’s overall ranking potential in search engines (especially Google). Pragmatic, step-by-step recommendations will be made to help your improve your overall website content quality.

The content optimization strategy will also include keyword researching your top pages to better optimize the metadata and body content, which is critical to improving the ranking of your content in search engines. This typically becomes an ongoing process, where I work with clients to keyword research their entire website over a period of time.

Smaller websites can often be keyword researched as part of the initial content audit project, however most websites are large enough that the keyword research efforts can be extensive and require ongoing efforts. But, they pay off in a tremendous way.

Aligning your content pages with the keywords that your target audience uses to (potentially) can have an incredible impact on growing your organic search traffic.

Ready for a Content Audit? I Can Help

I have been conducting content audits since they first become popular, and I’ve done more than most people in the industry. I’ve refined my content audit process over years of analyzing many different kinds of websites (E-Commerce, lead generation, online publishing websites, etc.). I have the experience to ensure that you get an accurate content audit full of takeaways that can help you to improve your overall content quality. Let’s talk.

 

Dan Kern | Colorado SEO Expert Consultant I'm Dan Kern, a veteran Colorado SEO consultant. I help businesses to grow their revenue online through "white hat" SEO and content marketing, and help other online marketing professionals enhance their skills.

Need Help? Let's talk. I'm for hire.

Qualifications & Certifications

Have confidence when hiring Kern Media for SEO consulting services. Dan Kern is Google Analytics Certified, Inbound certified, and featured with quality reviews amongst other top SEO agencies.


What Clients & Colleagues Say

"Dan Kern has the unique mix of analytical and technical skills blended with creativity that mark a successful SEO these days. His expertise goes beyond "just" SEO in all its facets. Dan is also a solid marketing strategist with direct experience in most online marketing channels. I highly recommend working with him." - Everett Sizemore

 

"I've just finished reviewing your technical SEO audit - it's awesome. Thank you for taking the time to be thorough, clear and providing your personal commentary on items in the document." - Ed Caraballo (Seer Interactive)

 

"I had the privilege of working with Dan for five years where he helped transform the way the company thought about and utilized SEO and inbound marketing. Traffic skyrocketed, increasing 7x over the course of six months." - Winter Thielen

 

"Kern Media has provided only positive results for Costa Rica Explorations & Escapes since beginning our working relationship in 2012. Dan Kern continues to exceed our expectations on a daily basis as he works tirelessly to keep up with industry trends and keep our site optimized. " - John Rabenau

 

"Not only is Dan admirable at his profession, but he's also an incredible leader and teacher. He knows how to talk to someone to convey information clearly, and is driven by the goal of getting everyone educated and "on board" for a particular project or strategy." - Corey Hartford

 

"Dan is by far, the most passionate about SEO and strategic content development of anyone I know. He takes each project on with determination for success and positive results. Dan is innovative, strategic, and results-focused, and there isn't a responsibility that he doesn't put his full energy into." - Jill Simonds

 

"Dan uncovered several problem areas of our site, resulting in us being penalized by Google’s Panda algorithm, and contributing to decreasing organic growth. With his guidance, we were able to fix our SEO-problem areas and have since seen tremendous growth in our organic traffic year over year! He transformed not only this business, but provided a proven model with best practices we continue to employ today." - Amanda Ferm

 

"In short, Dan is fantastic -- a true SEO guru, who is also a pleasure to work with. He is diligent, creative and his excitement for SEO & Online Marketing is both deep and genuine." - Dan Sargent

Still looking around? What are you looking for? If you contact us, maybe we can help.

Simply email us. We like to help people, whether they're curious about a technical SEO issue, ranking troubles, content optimization, or anything else related to SEO and inbound marketing.

SEO Services

  • ECommerce SEO Services
  • Lead Generation Marketing Services
  • Staff SEO Training + SEO for Publishers
  • SEO Content Audits
  • Content Marketing Strategy
  • Technical SEO Audit

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