Quick guide to website content audits for SEO

SEO for websites and blogs can become a full-time job if you want your organization to be truly competitive. Search engine optimization is more than building links from external websites and pointing them to your brand's homepage. SEO is part science and another part art, and within this mix of data-driven decision-making and experienced-based craft is the inherent need to listen to both your audience and the market.

As a business owner or marketing team begins to perform a content assessment of their brand website, it is vital to make an initial list of what is available on the site and network and what is not in inventory.

This initial effort could take the form of a simple checklist. One idea is to put together a check-list using Excel or Google Docs Spreadsheets and share the doc with your planning team. Certainly, there are a number of other great tools to help organize your planning process, but ultimately this inventory list will be the first, giant step towards a website marketing or SEO audit.

What to consider in a website audit

• Total number of pages within your domain or within all brand websites that are linked
• Primary keyphrases associated with your website (from homepage to inside, primary site sections)
• Do you have a lot of duplicated content within your site? Do you have a lot of content that is duplicated on other, external websites?
• Does your site have a strong semantic coding structure? Are you using elements like H1, bold, bullets, links, relative links, etc appropriately?
• Are you avoiding common SEO problems?
• How closely matched is your content to the keyword strategy that your marketing team or SEO team has defined?
• Are you using keywords that are appropriate to your strategy in page titles, headers, and appropriately in body content? Remember, don't stuff or dump a bunch of keywords into your copy if they don't read well. Design your content for humans and your business will perform better.
• Content freshness? Are you creating new content and can the new content be found within the site?
• Understand and study your backlinks. What outside site have created links pointing to your website or specific pages? What are they pointing to and why?
• Study your website analytics and look for trends, traffic drivers, issues and opportunities. This data-driven planning is essential for online marketing strategy. Simply spending time with site analytics can improve decision-making within an organization or business.
• Consider sharing elements, RSS, XML feeds or other tools to help promote your website and content--note where these tools will have the most effect.
• Study your page and crawl errors and plan for any appropriate fixes.
• Are there areas of participation within your site that have opportunities for extending involvement?

As your audit your website content, consider opportunities for growth. The act of a site audit can help your marketing team find many new opportunities and address problems that had been previously overlooked. Web agencies and marketing companies will most-likely have a more exhaustive list guided by their own experience and individual strategy. This list is not intended to be universal, but it is a decent starting point for content planning and SEO audits for websites.