5 Top Reasons It’s Time To Do a Content Audit

You’ve probably heard plenty of marketing professionals tout content audits as one of the best practices in a content marketing strategy. But outside of optimizing performance, there isn’t much talk about when and why it’s important to conduct an audit.

If you’re looking for a clear, actionable guide that helps you understand when to conduct content audits, you’ve come to the right place. Here, we’ll dive into the details of when content audits aren’t just helpful — but essential. 

1. You can’t remember your last audit

If you’re scratching your head, wondering when your SaaS company last did a content audit for your SaaS company, it’s probably time for another one. But how often should you actually be doing these audits?

The frequency of your audits depends on several factors, including:

• How old your website is
• How much content you produce
• What type of content you create
• How your product and market have evolved
• Your website’s performance

For new websites, we recommend performing content audits within the first six months. This will help you get a baseline on how your website content is performing so far and identify any areas with poor traffic or engagement, so you can iterate to improve your strategy. 

For established websites, a good rule of thumb is to conduct a thorough content audit each year. A yearly audit allows you to examine your current content to see what resonates with your audience and produces results, while also allowing you to examine underperforming pages and try to improve them. 

Regular audits are important because they help website owners surface issues that are easy to overlook. 

For example, content decay (where a piece of content has been declining in traffic over a long period) may not be immediately obvious in regular reports. But once you look deeper with a content audit, it becomes much more obvious that the old content isn’t working as well as it did originally.

What to pay attention to during a routine content audit

As you conduct your content audit, focus on these key areas:

• Content inventory: Build a comprehensive list of all content assets, including blog posts, landing pages, product descriptions, and downloadable resources.
• SEO performance: Analyze key SEO metrics like organic traffic, backlinks, website search ranking, featured snippets, and click-through rate.
• User engagement: Look at metrics like time on site, bounce rate, and social media shares to measure user engagement.
• Content quality: Assess the relevance, accuracy, and readability of content and make sure it’s still valuable and matches your brand’s voice.
• Content gaps: Identify topics or content types missing from your current content strategy that readers may find valuable.
• Technical issues: Look for broken links, 404 pages, slow loading times, mobile responsiveness, and other technical issues.

2. You’ve noticed a decline in key performance metrics

Poor performance is one of the most compelling reasons to conduct a content audit. It’s a sign that your content doesn’t offer enough value to your audience — or the search engine doesn’t believe it should show up for users.

But it’s also important to distinguish between a temporary dip and overall website traffic decline. If a single piece of content falls in the SERPs, it’s likely just a loss of relevance or a backend issue. But if your overall website traffic declines, it’s a sign that you may need a more comprehensive content audit.

There are many metrics you can look at for more insight, including:

• Organic traffic from all sources (SEO, video, social)
• Conversion rates for sign-ups, sales, and other goals
• Bounce rate, showing how quickly visitors leave
• Time on site and how many pages visitors view
• SEO rankings over time
• Social shares on external platforms

Drops in any of these areas may indicate that it’s time for an audit. A comprehensive audit will help you identify whether it’s algorithm updates, technical issues, increased competition, or another factor that’s causing the decline.

How to uncover what’s causing a performance issue

There are several methods and tools you can use to get to the bottom of performance issues, including:

• SEO tools: Use content audit tools like Screaming Frog, Google Analytics, and Google Search Console to gather historical data and track performance over time. These tools can help gather page metrics, search performance over time, and user behavior — allowing you to determine when a decline began and what changes occurred that may have contributed to it
• Monitor algorithm updates: Monitor digital marketing news to look for signs of algorithm updates that indicate a reason for performance changes. Industry news often monitors search engine updates that point to potential algorithm changes (see: chaos).
• Competitor analysis: Analyze competitors that have overtaken your content to see what they do differently and if their content better serves your audience. Check for content they cover that you don’t, content structure and depth, content relevance, and content formats you aren’t using.
• Technical audit: Measure metrics like web page speed, mobile responsiveness, and other issues that may cause poor performance. Content issues like broken links, broken images, and poor formatting may also impact user behavior and lead to people leaving.
• User behavior analysis: Use tools like heatmap software to analyze user behavior and find where visitors drop off (such as the middle of articles, poor CTAs, and other website elements). You can then make small changes to these areas to split-test design elements to see which changes result in behavior that leads to more conversions.

3. You’ve just made a major site update

Major website updates, such as redesigns or migrations, are critical times to conduct an audit. Even if you’re careful and plan everything out, there’s a good chance that a significant backend issue will arise.

Some common site updates that require content audits include:

• Website redesign: You may find formatting issues that result in content not appearing correctly.
• Content management system (CMS) migrations: This can lead to all kinds of problems, including lost images, broken links, and indexing issues.
• Domain changes: Resources may still point to the old domain, resulting in broken links.
• Site architecture changes: This often leads to 404 errors and bad links.
• New website features: Unexpected bugs or configuration errors can cause downtime and content loading issues.

Some problems may be simple, like a few broken links. But other issues may cause a significant decline in performance, such as poor page speed, missing images, redirect loops, and other problems that ruin the user experience.

What to pay attention to during a post-update audit

As you audit your website content after a major change, look for common issues like:

• Indexing problems: Use Google Search Console to find any pages that are de-indexed from search engines.
• Broken links: Use tools like Screaming Frog to look for broken links.
• Redirect issues: Ensure all previous URLs properly redirect to new ones if any changed during the update.
• Content formatting: Design changes may cause old content to display incorrectly, so examine all content types to ensure the new design works everywhere.
• Page speed: Changes may result in increased page size and slow loading times, so use Google Pagespeed Insights to find bottlenecks.
• Metadata: Ensure titles, meta-descriptions, and other metadata are correct for SEO purposes.

4. You want to generate new ideas for your content strategy

Content audits aren’t just there to fix what’s broken — you can also use them to uncover new opportunities and generate fresh ideas your audience may find valuable. When you take a broad view of your current content, you can uncover content gaps, spot trends, and identify new directions for your content efforts.

A comprehensive audit will bring all your content pieces together in a central location — usually in a visual way. You can use a spreadsheet to do this, so it’s easy to organize and categorize.

Break your content down granularly by:

• Page type (infographic, blog post, video, service page)
• Category and subcategory
• Funnel stage (top, middle, or bottom of funnel)
• Target persona

As you do this, you’ll start noticing patterns. For example, you might find that some topics or types of content perform better than others. It’ll also be much easier to see content gaps or overlaps that you can address as you map a new content strategy.

What to pay attention to during an SEO content audit

Getting the most out of a content audit means understanding what you have, what’s currently working, and what others are doing. Here are a few areas to focus on:

• Top performing content: Start by determining what currently works well and why. Then use that knowledge to repurpose underperforming content or create great new content with similar themes or formats.
• Content gaps: Identify industry topics missing from your current content using tools like Semrush and Ahrefs.
• Search intent: Look for underperforming content that may not match search intent and may be better served with a different approach.
• Content depth: Determine if a piece of content only scratches the surface and could be revamped with a more in-depth look.
• Seasonal trends: Examine seasonal fluctuations that affect content performance and build content creation roadmaps to capitalize on those ebbs and flows. This is more common with retail and ecommerce companies, but it can also come up in B2B website audits.

5. You know your site could be performing better — but aren’t sure where to improve

Sometimes the metrics look good, with a general uptrend in the reports, and you haven’t seen any major issues. But you just know that there’s more you can do to grow and outperform your competitors.

Content audits are very useful in these situations. They can help you:

• Identify if your website performs inconsistently on certain pages, which may not show on higher-level website reports.
• Make small but impactful changes that boost visibility, traffic, and engagement.
• Understand why some pieces of content outperform others and tailor your content strategy accordingly.
• Find overlooked optimization opportunities to get the most out of your work.

Why it’s important to trust your gut

As a business owner, you have an intuitive understanding of your product, industry, and audience. If you feel like something isn’t quite right with your content’s performance, it’s important to trust your instincts — even if the data doesn’t support your hunch.

An audit can:

• Validate (or disprove) your suspicions about content performance.
• Uncover issues that may not be obvious in top-level analytics.
• Find subtle patterns that may impact results.
• Discover opportunities and optimizations that you may have overlooked.

Even if your content audit finds nothing, doing one isn’t without merit. It shows you what content is working and how readers are responding. These insights can help you plan for the future and replicate your success in other areas.

Lean on the experts at Ten Speed for your next audit

Running a content audit isn’t just about gathering data — it’s also about making sense of the data you have. It’s about understanding why visitors behave the way they do, how to best serve your audience, and whether you’re hitting all the key points your readers expect.

That’s why it’s so helpful to lean on the experts.

At Ten Speed, we have the experience and knowledge to turn raw data into actionable insights. Our numerous content audits have given us a deep understanding of what to look for, how to interpret the results, and how they impact your business goals. We’ll help you understand what areas of your website need improvement and give you a practical, actionable plan that delivers real results.

Learn more about content audits and how they can transform your website performance.