Content marketing is an effective acquisition channel. Obviously. Growing your blog means growing your business.

Whether you’re doing images, text, video, infographics — whatever — content is the fuel for your inbound marketing engine.

It’s one thing to worry about writing faster, publishing more, and getting more good content out the door. It’s rare that we ask, “what’s working?”

All of this can be figured out through an SEO content audit. It can help you take your content inventory and optimize it for a more complete content strategy.

Through content auditing, you can scan for duplicate content, lower bounce rate, and repurpose existing content for a better SEO score.

In this article, we will tell you about the content audit necessity and provide a list of the best site audit tools to help you perform this task independently. By the end of this article, you’ll become a better content strategist.

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What is a Content Audit?

A content audit is a systematic and periodic review of all the content on your website, looking at different aspects to infer the effectiveness of said content as it pertains to your content marketing strategy. By performing a content marketing audit, you’re able to determine how best to improve your website content and get a greater return on investment (ROI).

In other words, you want to see if what you’ve been writing and publishing is working – if all that time and resources you’ve been spending is actually paying off.

There are tons of different features of content ROI you could look at when you’re doing an audit. Some of these could be:

• Number of visitors from content (low is bad)
• Number of organic visitors
• Content decay and falling rankings
• Losing link velocity
• High and increasing bounce rates
• Lower attributable conversions from content

In some cases, you can even extend your content audit into a social media audit or analysis of promotion channels. Use social media analytics tools for that.

For instance, analyzing how many backlinks your content is bringing in is obviously related to the effectiveness of your program, though it’s a correlative indicator of success (whereas auditing conversions from content is a direct, first-order indicator).

Reports like this, and many others that we’ll talk about, can be analyzed via affordable SEO tools (like Ahrefs for example).

Similarly, how many social shares you’re getting (if that’s a goal of yours) could be a really good leading indicator of the overall interest in your content. Again, quite easy to get that information via tools like Buzzsumo or platform specific tools like facebook publishing tools.

Remember this: a content audit is used to try to answer important business questions in relation to content marketing. These questions are particular to you and to your business, though many of the tools we can all use are the same.

This post will cover those, but first, let’s briefly cover the benefits of a good content audit.

The Benefits of a Thorough Content Audit

Why do a content audit? Well, clearly, one benefit is that you understand the effectiveness of your overall approach.

That’s on a macro-level.

On a granular level, you can learn tons of cool stuff, like:

• The causes of search engine sanctions
• The pages on which you need to change the content.
• Evaluation of the overall effectiveness of the content.
• Identification of deficiencies in the general preparation of content. For example, the optimal size of your texts. According to an SEMRush study, it was revealed that relatively long content tends to rank first in Google search results. The average word count for the first pages of Google is 1890 words. Though you needn’t always focus on word count to this extent (it’s more important that you satisfy search intent), word count is a good proxy for ranking.
• The reasons your content may not be performing and ranking (new feature snippets? New competitors? A content audit can help you see this stuff).

It’s clear, then, that you can learn many different things from a content audit. Accordingly, there are many different tools for each question and purpose you may need.

The 12 Best Content Audits Tools in 2022

1. Yoast SEO Plugin
2. Ahrefs
3. Buzzsumo
4. SEO Audit Tool by Contentlook
5. Google Analytics
6. Grammarly
7. Hemingway
8. Screaming Frog
9. SEO Checker by SmallSEOTools
10. SEO Content Editor from SEO PowerSuite
11. Content Editing and Proofreading tools by Prepostseo
12. Keyword Research by SE Ranking

Let’s dive deeper into each auditing tool and cover its use cases and pros and cons.

1. Yoast SEO Plugin

Unquestionably, this plugin is a great content analysis tool for optimizing a WordPress site for search visibility.

If your blog is built on WordPress, definitely use this.

It’s got several features, some of which help with site structure and more technical fixes (URL updates and redirects) and then some of which help with content optimization.

Their writing audit is one of the most helpful features when writing a blog post, and makes it easier for you to optimize an article for a given keyword.

This plugin solves all the main problems of optimization, both in terms of articles and the general structure. With it, you can customize the blog headers, articles, categories, pages, media files, and use a lot of other settings.

This is also one of those tools that gives increasing value the higher scale your blog operates. In other words, if you’re publishing once a month, surely it will be helpful; but if you’re publishing multiple times a week or more, this will be indispensable for scaling out your blog while maintaining editorial quality.

2. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is one of my all time favorite blog tools (and really marketing tools in general).

It’s an SEO powerhouse, giving you access to domain analysis, page analysis, backlink reports, and rank tracking. Those are the core, “typical” SEO reports. They go beyond what’s expected and have all kinds of cool reports like ‘top pages,’ where you can see which pages on a site (yours or a competitor’s) are the most valuable (a combination metric using traffic and CPC).

Another cool report is “Content Gap,” which lets you see which keywords your competitors rank for, but you don’t.

Overall, if I had to just pick one SEO/content-related tool on this list, Ahrefs would be it. It’s great for content planning and research, monitoring, analysis, and auditing. A similar tool, Semrush, is even more popular. If you want to compare them and see which works for you, try reading this comparison.

3. Buzzsumo

Where Ahrefs is my favorite SEO-related content audit solution, Buzzsumo is my favorite for social media and virality.

It’s also great for finding out who the influencers are in a given niche.

For example, if you search “content marketing” in their content analyzer report, you can find which articles have been shared the most for that topic.

Or we can also find influencers that have “content marketing” in their bios or in the types of posts they share:

This is another product that is very feature-rich; I’m discovering cool new things I can do with it every week.

At its core, though, it’s an absolutely wonderful a) research tool to see what’s popular in your industry in terms of content and influencers and b) audit tool to see how well your content has done via social sharing. For example, a growing fitness blog called LGVTY uses BuzzSumo to reverse engineer the most popular content in other industries and figure out how to apply those lessons to the fitness blogging world.

I love seeing trends and especially surprises as to what content has been the most and least shared that I’ve published. I can then learn from that and try to publish pieces that resemble the highly shareable posts.

4. SEO Audit Tool by Contentlook

If you want to get a detailed analysis of the site, check out this tool. You’ll receive a technical SEO audit of the following elements:

• Site traffic
• Links
• Blog
• Social signals
• Authority status
• SEO activity.

Using this tool will get you data on what’s broken on your site and also will give you suggestions on how you can improve these things. I find this to be a good beginner tool but it’s quite powerful and extensive in its feature set as well.

5. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the absolute gold standard when it comes to web analytics, and I wouldn’t recommend anyone run a website without it (unless you’re using a comparable alternative, like Snowplow if you’re into open-source or Adobe if you’re working on enterprise-level SEO & content).

Google Analytics is a powerful tool, but it’s also simple (or at least the basic reports are). You can very quickly identify if your traffic is rising or declining, which channels are most prosperous, and which pages people are viewing the most.

If you set up goals, right from your initial product development strategy for instance, you can easily look at conversion rates and visualize your website funnel. This helps begin you on the path to improvement and optimization.

In fact, if you want to do any sort of conversion optimization or improve your actual business metrics in any way, this may be the only tool on the list that can help you with that. The others help with off-site metrics, backlinks, social shares, and the content analysis itself – but this one shows you if your efforts are making any money.

As Estelle Leotard, content writer at GrabMyEssay, explains, “It helps you know where your audience is coming from online! If you know where they come from, you can get double down on that channel with your content.”

6. Grammarly

Grammarly is a great tool to audit, in real time, the actual quality and grammar of your writing.

Most of the tool on this list will give you lagging indicators – in other words, data that rolls in after you’ve published the content. They show you things like links and shares and traffic.

This tool audits the text itself.

When you’re running through a piece of content, sometimes there are phrases that grammar check in Google Docs won’t catch. If you write elsewhere (social media, in WordPress editor, etc.), you have even less protection from grammar errors.

Grammarly is an easy and addictive plugin that can help you avoid typos regularly. Again, this tool is even better if you have a big team who publishes a lot using it, simply because at that scale, it’s harder to keep an eye on the small details.

7. Hemingway

Hemingway is a great complement to Grammarly.

Instead of analyzing the writing grammar and punctuation, this one analyzes it for readability.

It’ll give you suggestions on optimizing your “grade level” of your content (you don’t want it to be too advanced or complicated), how often you’re using passive versus active voice, how many times you’re using adverbs, etc.

Basically, the app helps you simplify your content.

Hemmingway analyzes each sentence, taking into account its length and word order from the point of view of the correct construction of sentences. The tool actively monitors for passive voice, complex structures, and unnecessary adverbs. The minimum readability of the text should be 9 (the smaller, the better).

I find that Grammarly and Hemingway are both useful, but they shouldn’t be the only crutch you rely on to improve your content. In fact, sometimes it’s nice to have a complicated sentence here and there. You never want to iron out your style to the extent that it disappears.

It’s really just nice as an extra editorial check. And anyway, it’s almost always the case that writing could be condensed and simplified.

8. Screaming Frog

Last but not least (actually, probably genuinely the most important content audit tool on the list), we have Screaming Frog.

This is a desktop app that lets you crawl your website. Benefits-wise, this thing has tons of purposes. You can find broken links, messed up title tags, missing meta descriptions, bad redirects, etc. It’s basically technical SEO heaven.

That’s just the start though. This tool is basically a data collection mechanism; you can analyze it and do other interesting things with the data once you have it, though.

For example, if you wanted to visualize your internal linking and automate a lot of the internal linking process, you could do that using your raw crawl data from Screaming Frog.

Alex Chapman, founder and SEO director of SEO Partners, says “Screaming Frog is a tool we have been using for years, it provides a quick overview of a site’s internal linking structure/hierarchy, and makes it easy to spot weaknesses and areas for improvement.”

9. SEO Checker by SmallSEOTools

Search Engine Optimization is the backbone of a website that plays the most critical role in the success of a website. If you want to outshine your competitors, then it is essential for you to have appropriate tools that can assist you in analyzing the performance of your SEO. The online platforms like Smallseotools provide you with an free seo checker that enables you to find the SEO score for your website with a few clicks on your device. You don’t need to pay a single coin to anyone for using this free and reliable SEO checker.

10. SEO Content Editor from SEO PowerSuite

SEO Content Editor is a superb writing assistant from SEO PowerSuite. It will help you find topic ideas, structure your writing, and optimize the text so that it will be easily discovered by search engines.

The Content Editor analyzes top-ranking websites and provides suggestions on the word usage, based on TF-IDF text analysis. It shows recommendations to use more or less words. Also, the tool analyzes the People Also Ask box on Google and collects the most popular questions. The suggested topics will allow optimizing texts for voice search and question features on Google, also they will help you cover the topic in-depth.

The Content Editor analyzes SEO-elements of your article, such as meta title, headings, meta description, alt text on images, and shows the general optimization rate. 

You can use the Content Editor in-app or export a PDF as a writing task for copywriters. It also allows editing content in plain-text format or in browser mode and exporting the ready content as an HTML file.

11. Content Editing and Proofreading tools by Prepostseo

Content auditing begins with a complete evaluation of content’s quality which requires a check for grammatical mistakes and uniqueness. The Prepostseo online tools provide complete solutions for these services on one platform. With the help of its plagiarism checker, you can ensure the originality of your content along with the plagiarized sentences. 

Moreover, the integrated paraphrasing tool can assist you in removing plagiarism in various writing styles. To perform the final check, you can run your content through the Prepostseo grammar checker to resolve all the grammatical mistakes with a single click. These content auditing services are available under paid and free access, based on your usage requirements.

12. SE Ranking

SE Ranking is another top-notch SEO platform that has a set of tools suitable for building an online marketing strategy at almost any stage: from keyword and backlink research to precise rank tracking on all main search engines. I especially like their content marketing platform, which allows for improving current texts and creating new, well-optimized texts from scratch.

Here, you can research your competitors’ content and add unique value to their best approaches to win the SERP. SE Ranking’s tool analyzes your rivals over multiple metrics, showing you how to optimize your content for a topic. At the same time, you are free to manually adjust any text requirements. 

Do research and analysis, create a brief, add your notes and share it with a copywriter via a guest link to the content editor – all in the same place. So convenient, isn’t it?

In addition to that, SE Ranking’s content tool audits your future content on the go, right as you or an AI-powered tool is writing it. It also keeps count of which keywords you have already included and how many times, gives hints about recommended text length, and checks readability, grammar mistakes, and spam to ensure the text is of high quality and relevancy, whether it’s something new or an update of an existing copy.

As you can see, it could take quite a while to name all the great features, so I recommend just giving it a try.

Final Thoughts

Content audits should definitely be done every once in a while; I like to do them quarterly for most of these metrics (like internal link audits and new content gap analysis), though some you should be doing more often (website analytics, for example).

To make your job easier, we recommend checking out Wordable. It will not only clean and properly format your HTML, but also compress images, open links in a new tab, automatically set featured images, or create a table of contents, and lots more within a single click from Google Docs.

In any case, just remember to stop and reflect every once in a while and figure out if what you’re doing is working and how you can improve on your efforts. The site audit tools on this list are largely affordable (many are free or have free versions), so there’s no excuse!

Kevin Kessler

Kevin J. Kessler is a published author of five fantasy novels, a professional wrestler, and a puppeteer (not all at the same time). Kevin is a content writer at Codeless.

https://getcodeless.com