What is a Content Audit?

I’ve written 130 blog posts for my blog between 2020 and 2025

That’s over 130,000 words

Can I recall every one in perfect detail? Not by a long shot. My goals and style have changed over the past few years. I’ve learnt new information and updated my approach. As well as writing my own blog, I’ve written thousands of other blogs, articles, and web copy. Today would be an ideal time for me to carry out a content audit. But what is a content audit, and why would businesses like ours benefit from one? In this article, I’ll explain what’s included in a content audit and how it can help a company enhance its content strategy.

Content Audit Goals and Purpose

The main objectives of a content audit are as follows;

1. Collate and catalogue existing content. Older websites may have 1000s of web pages and may be unaware of what they actually have on their site.
2. Analyse the content and identify what’s working and what isn’t.
3. Use the information to create a plan for content optimisations and ongoing content strategy.

Businesses that will benefit from this sort of audit include those with websites that are very old, have a lot of content, are looking to rebrand or have been taken on by new owners or management. An audit allows the current team to see where their business stands in terms of content.

A successful audit will provide you with a straightforward overview and a clear plan of action.

What’s in a Content Audit? Content Audit Checklist

Different SEO and content marketing freelancers and agencies will have their own way of completing an audit, but the general format will likely remain the same.

The content audits I create for my clients consist of:

• A Content Inventory
• A Performance Analysis
• Issue Identification
• A Content Plan

Here’s what each of those entails.

Content Inventory

A content inventory is the first step in any content audit, which involves cataloguing everything that exists on your website. This includes not only your main pages and blog posts, but also supporting content such as case studies, PDFs, images, and any other on-site assets.

Typically created in a spreadsheet or database, the inventory brings together key details about each piece of content to help you assess its purpose, performance, and strategic value.

What’s Included in a Content Inventory?

Each row in your inventory represents a single piece of content, with columns capturing key attributes such as:

• Page Title and URL
• Content Purpose (e.g. informational, transactional, lead generation)
• Content Type and Format (e.g. blog post, landing page, video, downloadable PDF)
• Word Count
• Topics, Categories or Tags
• Number of Internal Links
• Number of External Links
• Target Keyword(s) (if applicable)
• Date Published or Last Updated (optional but helpful)

Why Is a Content Inventory Important?

While it might seem like a dry admin task, a content inventory is the backbone of a good audit. It gives you a complete, structured view of what exists on your site — often revealing duplicate or forgotten content, outdated assets, or pages with no clear purpose.

Having this overview enables you to:

• Prioritise content for review or optimisation
• Spot gaps or overlaps in your topic coverage
• Understand how your content is structured and interlinked
• Lay the groundwork for your performance and SEO analysis

Website Content Performance Analysis

Once you’ve catalogued your content, the next step is to assess how it’s performing. This stage of the audit involves analysing data to understand what content is attracting traffic, engaging users, and contributing to business goals, and what’s falling short.

While performance benchmarks vary by business and industry, most content audits will include a mix of traffic, engagement, conversion, and SEO metrics. These insights are then added to your audit document to support strategic decision-making.

Key Performance Metrics to Evaluate

• Traffic and User Sessions: Total visits and unique users over a defined period, broken down by traffic source (e.g. organic search, referral, social media).
• Engagement Metrics: Including bounce rate, average session duration, and pages per session — helpful indicators of how users interact with your content.
• Conversions and Goal Completions: Whether it’s purchases, form submissions, newsletter sign-ups, or internal actions like downloads or click-throughs, track how well each page supports your goals.
• Technical and On-Page SEO Scores: This includes metadata, page speed, mobile usability, internal linking, and content structure.
• Backlinks and Referring Domains: Measure the authority and trustworthiness of content through its inbound links.
• Domain Authority / Page Authority: Use tools like Moz or SE Ranking to assess how strong your content appears in the eyes of search engines.

Why This Matters

This part of the audit transforms raw data into insight. It helps you answer the most important question:
Is your content doing what it’s supposed to do?

By tying performance metrics to purpose and goals, you’ll be able to make informed decisions about what to keep, improve, repurpose, or retire — setting the stage for a smarter content strategy.

Technical Issue Identification

Even great content can underperform if technical or structural issues get in the way. This stage of the audit identifies any barriers preventing your content from ranking well, engaging users, or delivering results.

Common problems stem from poor historical SEO practices, lack of optimisation, or content that hasn’t been updated to reflect current standards. This section of the audit digs into those issues and offers actionable recommendations.

Common Issues Uncovered in a Content Audit

• Page Structure and Hierarchy: Is the content well-organised, easy to navigate, and aligned with user intent?
• Keyword Targeting Issues: Are relevant keywords missing, poorly integrated, or not targeted at all?
• Repetitive, Duplicate, or Thin Content: Low-value or overly similar content can harm SEO and user trust.
• User Experience (UX) and Design Problems: Is the content easy to read and interact with across devices? Poor layout, font choices, or cluttered pages can reduce engagement.
• Technical and On-Page SEO Gaps: This includes missing or duplicate metadata, uncompressed images, slow loading speeds, lack of alt text, or broken links.
• CMS or Workflow Challenges: Sometimes the problem isn’t the content — it’s the system behind it. Your audit may uncover whether your content management system is limiting performance or making updates unnecessarily difficult for your team.

Why It Matters

Uncovering technical and structural issues helps you understand why content may be underperforming — even if the topic or writing is strong. Addressing these problems ensures your content not only reads well but works hard for your business.

Pairing a content audit with a full SEO audit is the most effective way to ensure your site is aligned with both user experience and search engine expectations. From there, you can plan meaningful improvements that move the needle.

Content Marketing Strategy & Plan

The final, and most actionable, outcome of a content audit is the creation of a content marketing strategy and plan. Once you’ve catalogued your content, analysed its performance, and identified any issues, you’re in the perfect position to make informed decisions about what to do next.

A well-structured content plan aligns your content efforts with your business goals. It also helps ensure consistency, relevance, and maximum return on investment.

What Should a Content Plan Include?

Your content plan may vary depending on the nature of your website and goals, but typically, it will include:

• Content Gaps & New Opportunities: Identify missing topics, under-served audiences, or untapped keywords — and plan future content around them.
• Optimisation of Existing Content: Highlight posts or pages that could benefit from updates, improved keyword targeting, or restructuring. Historical blog optimisation is particularly valuable here.
• Revisions & Rewrites: Flag content that’s outdated, inaccurate, or off-brand and needs to be refreshed or rewritten to better reflect your current offering or tone.
• Repurposing Opportunities: Spot high-performing or evergreen content that could be repurposed into new formats such as social media posts, videos, lead magnets, or newsletters.
• UX, Design & Technical Improvements: Recommend updates to layout, navigation, mobile experience, or technical performance that could improve how users engage with your content.

The Role of Strategy

Beyond the practical to-do list, a content audit gives you strategic direction. It helps you:

• Set realistic publishing goals (e.g. frequency, formats, channels)
• Align content topics with audience needs and search intent
• Support broader business objectives like lead generation, SEO growth, or brand awareness

Whether you’re managing a blog, e-commerce site, or service-based business, a content plan gives you the clarity and structure to move forward with purpose — and keep your content working as hard as possible.

Content Audit Tools & Resources

Conducting a comprehensive content audit requires the right mix of tools to gather data, analyse performance, and draw meaningful insights. Whether you’re running a small business website or managing a large content-heavy platform, these tools and resources can streamline the process and help you get accurate results.

1. Content Inventory Tools

These help you catalogue all your content quickly and efficiently:

• Screaming Frog SEO Spider: Crawls your website and pulls key information like URLs, metadata, word count, response codes and more. Great for large sites.
• Sitebulb: A desktop crawler that offers powerful visualisations and audit data, including content structure and internal linking analysis.
• URL Profiler: Combines crawling with data from third-party sources such as Google Analytics, Ahrefs and Moz to enrich your content inventory.

2. Performance Tracking Tools

These tools help you understand how your content is performing in terms of traffic, engagement, and conversions:

• Google Analytics (GA4): Offers insights into user behaviour, session duration, bounce rate, and conversions.
• Google Search Console: Provides keyword ranking data, impressions, clicks, and indexing status for each page.
• Matomo: A privacy-focused alternative to GA4 that gives you detailed traffic data and user flow tracking.

3. SEO & Technical Analysis Tools

Use these to assess the on-page and technical SEO health of your content:

• Ahrefs / SEMrush / SE Ranking / Moz: Offer keyword tracking, backlink data, content gap analysis and domain authority metrics.
• PageSpeed Insights (by Google): Evaluates load speed and technical performance of each page.
• GTmetrix: Offers in-depth performance reports, including Core Web Vitals, speed issues and UX metrics.

4. Content Quality & Readability Tools

These tools help evaluate the clarity, tone, and grammar of your content:

• Grammarly: Checks for grammar, spelling, readability and tone consistency.
• Hemingway Editor: Highlights complex sentences, passive voice and adverbs to improve readability.
• Originality.ai: Useful for checking duplicate content and AI-generated text, especially if you’re auditing outsourced content.

5. Collaboration & Audit Templates

Organise and share your audit with stakeholders using structured templates:

• Google Sheets / Excel: Create customised audit templates with filters for content type, performance metrics, priority and action items.
• Airtable: Offers a database-style approach with rich tagging, filtering and collaboration features.
• Notion: Ideal for documenting the audit process, keeping notes, and embedding tables for client collaboration.

What Are the Benefits of a Content Audit?

You might assume you already know what’s on your website, but that’s rarely the whole picture. Especially for businesses with years of content, multiple contributors, or staff changes, content can become outdated, duplicated, or simply forgotten. A content audit shines a light on what you have, how it’s performing, and where the opportunities lie.

Here are the key benefits of conducting a content audit:

1. Understand What’s Working, and What Isn’t

A content audit reveals which pages are driving traffic, engagement and conversions — and which ones are underperforming. High-performing pages can be used as templates or inspiration, while low-performing ones can be improved or removed.

2. Refine Your Content Strategy

By identifying gaps, overlaps and outdated content, you’ll gain clarity on what topics to focus on next, which formats work best, and how to align content with your current business goals or SEO strategy.

3. Identify Keyword and Topic Gaps

Auditing your existing content helps uncover which keywords you’re already targeting and highlights missed opportunities. You can then plan new content to fill those gaps and better support your search engine visibility.

4. Improve Technical and On-Page SEO

A well-executed audit will surface technical SEO issues — such as slow load times, broken links, missing metadata or poor internal linking — that can hinder performance. Addressing these can enhance UX and boost rankings.

5. Maximise the Value of Existing Content

Not all content needs to be brand new. An audit helps you spot opportunities to:

• Update outdated blog posts
• Repurpose content into new formats (e.g. infographics, social media, video)
• Consolidate similar articles to avoid duplication

This can save time and resources while increasing the lifespan and reach of your content.

6. Support Business Changes or Website Projects

If you’re planning a rebrand, redesign, site migration, or onboarding new team members, a content audit provides a clear picture of your current content landscape. It becomes a foundation for consistent messaging and improved content governance.

The Bottom Line

A content audit gives you clarity, direction, and a plan. It’s not just about reviewing what exists — it’s about making your content work harder for your business. By identifying what’s performing, what needs improvement, and where the opportunities are, you can build a more effective, streamlined, and strategic content ecosystem.

Book a qualitative content audit with Middleton Marketing

The content audits I perform for my clients allow them to hit the refresh on their content strategy. When you don’t know what to do next, it’s time to sit back and evaluate. Plus, every one of my audits provides at least a 3-month optimisation plan as standard, with up to 12 months, depending on the package. I also offer website audits and SEO audits, and can create bespoke packages for your business.

My content audits can be provided on a one-off basis or as part of an extended SEO or content marketing campaign. If you would like just an audit, there is no obligation after completion. You can choose for me to implement the plan, give it to another contractor or sign up for one of my consultancy packages if you are ready to take on the challenge and do it yourself. However you want to work, we can grow your business together.