If your website has been live for a while, chances are a lot of your content is outdated, underperforming, or off-track. A content audit helps you find what needs fixing, updating, or removing—fast.

In this guide, you’ll learn exactly how to run a content audit that’s simple, effective, and built for better SEO, traffic, and results. We’ll also give you templates to make the process easier.

Let’s get started.

What is a content audit?

A content audit is a systematic analysis of all content elements and information assets on your website to evaluate their performance and effectiveness. 

Unlike a content inventory (which simply catalogs what exists), a content audit answers the critical question: “Is this content any good?”

In short, a content audit is about taking a detailed look at every piece of content on your site. You’re essentially taking stock of what you have, evaluating its performance, and determining what needs a tweak or two.

When you perform a content audit, you’re assessing factors, including:

• Metrics: Evaluating page views, bounce rates, and engagement levels to see how well each piece of content is doing.
• Relevance: Ensuring your content is still relevant and valuable to your audience.
• Accuracy: Updating any outdated information to keep your content accurate and trustworthy.

Why is a content audit useful?

SEO content audits deliver substantial value across multiple areas of your digital strategy:

• Improved SEO performance: Identify opportunities to optimize existing content, fix issues like broken links or duplicate content, and discover keywords you could rank for but currently don’t.
• Enhanced user engagement: Identify and fix content with high bounce rates or low time-on-page metrics to keep visitors engaged for longer.
• Aligned content strategy: Reveal whether your content effectively supports your overall business goals and customer journey.
• Data-driven insights: Instead of guessing what works, gain concrete information about which content types, topics, and formats resonate most with your audience.
• Identification of content gaps: Discover topics you haven’t covered yet that represent opportunities for new content creation.
• Brand consistency check: Ensure all content follows your voice, style guidelines, and stays current with your brand positioning.
• Resource optimization: Instead of constantly creating new content, audits help you maximize the value of existing assets through strategic updates and repurposing.

Remember that content audits are not one-time projects but ongoing processes that help maintain quality, relevance, and effectiveness. 

Even if they seem tedious or time-consuming, their value in providing a high-level perspective on your content efforts makes them essential for sustainable content marketing success.

When to run a website content audit (and when not to)

Running content audits too often wastes resources, but waiting too long leaves outdated content hurting your performance. Finding the right balance means understanding your website’s needs and available resources.

How often you should audit depends on your content type:

• Awareness content (blog posts, articles): Every 6 months
• Consideration content (guides, comparison pages): Every 3-6 months
• Conversion content (product pages, landing pages): Quarterly
• Retention content (customer resources): Annually

For websites with high traffic volume or frequent updates, quarterly audits provide timely insights while remaining manageable. 

Annual content audits work well for sites with more stable content or fewer resources, providing you with comprehensive data to identify clear patterns of engagement.

Beyond regular schedules, certain situations call for content audits, such as:

• You’re planning a website redesign
• Your organic traffic suddenly drops
• You’re developing a new content strategy
• Previously successful content starts underperforming
• Your business undergoes significant changes (rebranding, new markets)
• Major search algorithm updates happen
• You complete substantial content campaigns

If your website has hundreds of thousands of pages, focus only on key sections rather than the entire site. For example, an e-commerce store might prioritize auditing blog content, guides, and educational materials instead of every product description.

Remember that content audits don’t always require analyzing every page. Sometimes, just examining your 100 most-visited pages from the past year can reveal valuable patterns about what’s working and what isn’t.

💡Also learn: How to Perform a Local SEO Audit Like a Pro!

How to conduct a content audit: Step-by-step process

By now, you’re probably confused about how to do a content audit effectively without an experienced content auditor. 

But breaking it down into manageable steps can make the process straightforward and highly insightful for you and your team. 

So here’s a helpful checklist that covers how to conduct a content audit effectively:

Step 1: Define your content audit goals

Before you touch a spreadsheet, be clear about what you’re trying to achieve. Every website content audit should start with a specific purpose. 

Are you doing this to clean up outdated blogs? Improve SEO performance? Tighten up your brand messaging? Your goals will shape what metrics you track and what actions you take.

Here are some common content audit objectives:

• SEO audit: Improve keyword rankings, fix technical SEO gaps, and consolidate cannibalized pages
  
• User experience: Identify content with poor engagement or confusing layouts
  
• Brand consistency: Make sure your tone, visuals, and messaging align with your brand across the board

If your goal is SEO performance: You’re looking to improve rankings, fix underperforming content, eliminate keyword cannibalization, and close content gaps. You’ll need to measure keyword movement, internal link coverage, traffic per URL, and crawlability issues.

If your focus is user engagement: You’re aiming to reduce bounce rates, improve time on page, and optimize on-page SEO. Here, metrics like scroll depth, heatmaps, and interaction rate matter more than just clicks.

For brand consistency: You’re ensuring your messaging aligns with your current positioning. That means scanning for tone of voice, outdated offers, inconsistent visuals, or legacy pages that contradict your latest GTM narrative.

Whatever the focus, define your targets upfront. You can’t track progress later if you haven’t set the baseline.

Some examples of measurable content audit goals:

• Increase organic traffic to optimized pages by 25% in 90 days.
• Improve the readability score of all top-funnel pages to above Grade 8.
• Remove or repurpose 15 outdated pages that no longer align with the ICP.
• Boost internal link density across your pillar pages to at least 8 links/page.

Without this clarity, your audit will turn into a bloated spreadsheet that gathers dust.

Step 2: Build your content inventory

Building a comprehensive content inventory is the foundation of any effective content audit. Think of this step as creating your content map—you need to know what exists before deciding what to improve.

This step sounds tedious (and it can be), but this is the backbone of your content audit. Without a complete and clean inventory, you’ll miss patterns, duplicate efforts, or worse, draw the wrong conclusions.

To start, pull a full list of URLs from:

• Google Search Console (via Indexing > Pages > Export).
• Your CMS (like exporting all post/page data from WordPress or Webflow).
• A site audit tool like Writesonic for a complete crawl of your live URLs, especially useful for larger sites with orphan pages or complex architecture. 

With Writesonic, all you have to do is start a project and enter your website URL. It will automatically audit your site, showing you a list of pages that have been added. You can also add your own specific pages. 

Once you’ve got the URLs, enrich them with relevant metadata. At minimum, your content audit spreadsheet should include columns for:

• Title tag
• URL
• Content format (blog, guide, landing page, video, etc.)
• Funnel stage (TOFU, MOFU, BOFU)
• Target keyword(s)
• Word count
• Last updated date
• Author
• Primary topic/category
• Meta description
• Canonical status
• Traffic (last 3 or 6 months)
• Conversions (if applicable)
• Internal links (to/from the page)
• Backlink count
• Notes (for initial observations)

Step 3: Audit for SEO content performance

Now that you’ve built your content inventory, it’s time to figure out how well each page is doing on search engines. This is where your SEO content audit begins.

First, check how your content is ranking. To automate this analysis, use tools like Writesonic’s SEO AI agent to find out:

• Which keywords your page is ranking for.
• Where it appears in SERPs.
• How many clicks and impressions the page is getting.
• Which pages have dropped in rankings over time.
  

If you find pages that rank well but don’t get many clicks, try rewriting your title tags and meta descriptions. That’s usually a click-through rate problem, not a content issue.

Next, look at your top SEO metrics. Here’s what you want to gather for each page:

• Organic traffic (visits from search engines)
• Keyword rankings (current and past)
• Backlinks (links from other websites)
• CTR (click-through rate from search results)
• Bounce rate and average time on page

If a page has high impressions but low clicks, it’s a sign that the content or headline isn’t matching user intent. If traffic is dropping month over month, the page might be outdated and need an update.

If you want to automate content and SEO analysis, Writesonic’s SEO AI agent can scan your content for:

• Low-ranking pages
• Missing keywords
• Technical SEO issues (like slow load speed, broken links, duplicate titles)
• Internal linking gaps

This saves hours of manual work and gives you a clear list of action items. 

For example, if you want to identify key SEO metrics of a particular topic cluster on your website, just share the blog links with the SEO AI agent and ask it to provide a detailed SEO report for your content audit:

As you can see, the agent not only provides you with a detailed overview of your content pages’ SEO performance, but it also highlights technical issues and a list of action items for you:

Step 4: Audit for on-page user experience and accessibility

Search engines may send traffic to your site, but real people decide whether to stay, read, and take action. If the page feels confusing, clunky, or inaccessible, you’ll lose visitors in seconds.

Here’s what to look for when auditing on-page experience and accessibility:

1. Check how easy it is to read and scan:

Users don’t read every word—they scan. So your content needs to be structured for speed. During the audit, check each page for:

• Logical heading structure (H1, H2, H3 — no skips or random jumps)
• Short paragraphs (no more than 2–3 sentences at a time)
• Clear subheadings that guide the reader through the page
• Consistent formatting for lists, quotes, and callouts
  

If a page has huge blocks of text or no clear flow, mark it for restructuring. Even high-ranking pages can lose conversions if the content feels overwhelming.

2. Check how the content loads and behaves on mobile:

Google’s indexing is mobile-first. So if your content doesn’t work well on mobile, it doesn’t work, period. Run each top-performing page through Google Search Console’s Mobile Usability report and manually test it on different devices.

Here’s what to look for:

• Are headings readable without zooming in?
• Are CTAs tappable with one thumb?
• Do images or embedded media push text out of view?
• Is the core message still clear above the fold?

Flag any layout shifts or content overlaps. You don’t need to rebuild the entire page; just minor fixes like adjusting padding or reordering sections often make a big difference.

3. Assess how accessible the content is — not just visually, but structurally:

Accessibility isn’t just about screen readers — it’s about making your content functional for all users, including those with low vision, dyslexia, or motor limitations.

Here’s what should be part of your on-page website content audit checklist:

• Image alt text that actually describes the image (not just stuffed with keywords).
• Descriptive internal links (use the actual destination name, not “click here”).
• Headings being used to convey structure, not just for styling.
• No content locked behind hover-only interactions or animations.
• High-contrast text, especially for body copy and buttons.
• Form fields with labels and proper focus indicators.

When content isn’t accessible, users don’t just bounce—they can’t engage. And yes, Google pays attention to this.

4. Track behavior signals from real users:

Google uses signals like bounce rate, time on page, and pogo-sticking (when users click back to search results) as indirect indicators of content quality.

Pull behavioral metrics from Google Analytics and Search Console. Look for:

• Pages with decent impressions but low engagement
• High-exit pages in your content funnel
• Pages where users drop off without scrolling

These issues often point to UX blockers, not bad content. Mark these URLs as high priority for layout cleanup or content restructuring. The goal here isn’t just to “make it look nice.” It’s to remove friction.

When users find your content easy to read, quick to load, and simple to navigate, everything else improves: bounce rates, conversions, time on page, and rankings.

💡 You might also like: How to Implement Pagination SEO

Step 5: Check for technical SEO

Technical issues can silently sabotage your content performance, no matter how well-written your pages might be. 

Checking your website’s technical SEO means verifying that search engines can properly access, understand, and index your content. In fact, sites with proper technical optimization see a 10-30% increase in organic visibility.

Start by examining your site’s crawlability. Check your robots.txt file—the first file search engine crawlers encounter when visiting your site—to ensure it’s not accidentally blocking important content. 

You can view this file by adding “/robots.txt” to your root domain. This file should direct crawlers away from unimportant sections while allowing access to valuable content.

Next, verify your site’s indexation status. You can use Google Search Console to identify pages that aren’t being indexed properly. 

Pages with “noindex” tags or that return error codes will not appear in search results, regardless of their quality.

Check your site rendering as well. 

This process occurs after crawling, when Google executes JavaScript to see your page as users do. Use Google Search Console’s URL Inspection Tool and click “View Tested Page” to see how Google renders your content.

Mobile compatibility is another crucial aspect for Google. Test your site’s mobile-friendliness using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool, which also evaluates Core Web Vitals—metrics covering page load speed, interactivity, and visual stability.

If you’re looking for a way to flag technical issues across your website automatically, Writesonic’s Site Audit is a great place to get started. 

Step 6: Maintain a content audit checklist or tracker

Doing a content audit once is great, but if you don’t have a systematic record in place and don’t track and maintain your progress, there’s no point in your auditing efforts. 

Many content teams conduct a content audit, make a few changes, and then forget about it until the next crisis. 

A structured content audit tracker prevents that. It helps you log changes, assign action items, and keep your team aligned across pages, formats, and goals.

Here’s what your content audit spreadsheet or tracker should include:

1. URL-level tracking

Start with one row per URL. Even if you’re auditing just your blog or a few content categories, every page should be clearly documented.

Include these core fields for each page:

• Page title
• Full URL
• Content format (blog, guide, product page, etc.)
• Funnel stage (TOFU, MOFU, BOFU)
• Current performance metrics (traffic, conversions, rankings)
• Last updated date
• Assigned status (keep, update, merge, remove)
• Priority (high, medium, low)
• Assigned owner or writer
• Deadline for action
• Notes or quick recommendations
  

This becomes your single source of truth for what’s being changed, who’s responsible, and when it needs to be reviewed again.

2. Categorization and filtering

Next, group similar content types together in your spreadsheet to spot patterns:

• Which blog topics consistently perform well?
• Are your bottom-funnel pages outdated or thin?
• Is one author or time period linked to more underperforming content?

With this analysis, each page should be assigned to one of these action categories:

• Keep: Content that performs well, remains accurate, and aligns with your goals. These pages require no immediate changes.
• Update: Content that needs refreshing due to outdated information, poor structure, or optimization opportunities. This might include adding new sections, improving readability, or enhancing SEO elements.
• Merge: Overlapping or duplicate content that should be consolidated into a single, more comprehensive resource. This approach prevents keyword cannibalization and concentrates link equity on one definitive page.
• Delete: Irrelevant, redundant, or underperforming content with no strategic value. Always implement proper redirects when removing pages.
  
  

This gives you a high-level view of your content strategy, letting you make smarter decisions about what to prioritize next.

3. Prioritization framework for action items

Not all content improvements carry equal weight. Consider these factors when prioritizing your action items:

• Traffic potential: Focus first on pages that could drive significant traffic with improvements
• Conversion impact: Prioritize content directly connected to your revenue goals
• Resource requirements: Balance high-impact changes against implementation difficulty
• Seasonal relevance: Schedule updates before peak demand periods

To maintain momentum, assign clear owners and deadlines for each action item. Writesonic’s AI Article Writer can help expedite SEO blog updates. 

At the same time, the SEO AI agent ensures quick optimizations and offers insights that align with current search trends and real-time data. 

Plus, it integrates with Google Search Console and pulls data from Ahrefs and SEMrush, so you don’t have to juggle between different website content audit tools. 

Step 7: Measure your results

You’ve done the audit, made changes, and cleaned up your content. Now comes the most important part—measuring whether any of it actually worked.

Without tracking performance post-audit, you’re just guessing with no data-driven insights. The goal here is to prove (or disprove) the impact of your updates using real data, so you can double down on what works and tweak what doesn’t.

Here’s what you should prioritize when measuring the outcome of your content audit:

1. Focus on the right metrics

The metrics you track should align directly with the goals you defined back in Step 1. For most content audits, that includes:

• Organic traffic per page
• Keyword ranking changes
• Click-through rates (CTR)
• Bounce rate and time on page
• Conversion rate (depending on the page intent and if there is a CTA)
• Number of indexed pages (after removals or redirects)

Instead of watching all your analytics data and hoping for a spike, compare before-and-after performance for each page you touched. This keeps your analysis clear and your wins measurable.

2. Use Writesonic’s SEO AI agent to simplify tracking

You don’t need a full SEO stack or hours of data analysis to track results effectively. With Writesonic’s SEO AI agent, you can get full performance reports with a single query — no deep SEO knowledge required.

Here’s how it helps:

• Track how specific pages are performing after updates.
• Monitor keyword ranking improvements across batches of content.
• Flag pages that still need optimization.
• Get instant summaries of CTR, impressions, and engagement trends.
• Generate simple, visual SEO reports you can share with your team.
• Pull data directly from your Google Search Console for quick SEO metrics.

Whether you’re measuring changes across 10 pages or 200, the SEO AI agent removes the manual effort—no need to bounce between multiple dashboards or spreadsheets.

For example, here’s how you can generate a quick SEO performance report using the tool:

3. Make performance review part of your workflow

After your audit is complete, build a routine for checking results. A good cadence is:

• 30 days after changes: Check for early impact (especially rankings and traffic)
• 90 days after: Deeper insights into engagement, conversions, and SEO movement
• Quarterly: Review all updated pages and compare performance to baseline

This ensures you’re not only fixing content, but actually learning from your analysis and improving the page.

Ultimately, a content audit isn’t over until the data says it’s done. When you measure results the right way (and with the right content audit tools), your team isn’t just reacting–instead, you’re able to make smarter, faster content decisions. 

Download our FREE content audit template!

If you haven’t already, download our content audit template for quick and easy tracking.  It’s pre-filled with all the key fields we covered above, so you don’t have to start from scratch.

Just make a copy, plug in your URLs, and start tracking updates, SEO wins, and action items all in one place.

Feel free to tweak the columns based on your goals or add more if needed.

FAQs

1. How often should I perform a content audit on my website?

A content audit should ideally be performed at least once a year. 

But if your website has a high volume of content updates or you’re in a rapidly changing industry, consider doing it every six months. 

Regular audits help keep your content relevant, up-to-date, and aligned with your SEO and content marketing goals.

2. What tools can assist me in conducting a comprehensive content audit?

Several tools can streamline the content audit process, including Google Analytics for performance metrics, Writesonic’s site audit tool, Screaming Frog for crawling and indexing issues, SEMrush for SEO analysis, and Ahrefs for backlink data. 

These tools help gather data, identify content gaps, and provide insights for optimizing your content strategy.

3. Can a content audit help improve my website’s user experience (UX)?

A content audit can significantly enhance your website’s user experience by identifying outdated, irrelevant, or underperforming content. 

Updating or removing such content and ensuring that your site’s structure and navigation are user-friendly can improve the overall user experience, leading to increased engagement and satisfaction.