Not everything you publish will be a home run. Even if you pour your heart and soul into your content, it’ll often fail to rank, convert, or do anything for your business. It’s frustrating. But you don’t have to leave these pages to die a slow, painful death. You can revisit them, figure out what went wrong, and take action to improve their performance. This is the content audit process in a nutshell. Let’s go through how to do one using our template and interactive process. USING WORDPRESS Our SEO WordPress plugin automates and handles many of the steps in the content audit process below.
How to do a content audit (our process)
Every content audit process is roughly the same. You ask questions to figure out what, if anything, is holding your top industry data content back, then make improvements in those areas. To do this, you need two things: A list of pages to audit A robust* content audit process SIDENOTE. *I can’t stress how important this is. Most content audit processes are far too basic and lead to harmful recommendations. Getting a list of pages is easy and free with an Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT) account. Just crawl your website with Site Audit, go to the “Bulk export” tab, and export “Internal HTML URLs, status code 200.”
Does the page get organic traffic?
Go to the Search results report in Google Search Console and BM Leads filter for the page. You’ll see how many clicks it got from organic search over the last three months. Viewing page-level organic traffic in Google Search Console If you don’t have Search Console set up (hint: you should, it’s free), you can plug the page into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer or our free traffic checker for a rough estimate. Checking estimated organic traffic in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer Does the page get traffic from another source? This is something that only your analytics can answer. If you’re using Google Analytics, go to Reports > Lifecycle > Engagement > Pages and screens. From here, you can filter for a particular page by adding a “Page path and screen class” filter and pasting in the URL slug.