There's no excuse for poorly optimized content and when you're unsure how well your website has been following SEO standards, auditing your content is the best way to find out. A content audit provides an opportunity to find and recognize where your content has missed the mark. If you aren't ranking well organically in search engines, an SEO audit might be just what you needed. If the audit reveals blog posts, product descriptions, category pages or other forms of content that haven't been properly optimized, you can edit those pages and correct the issues while enforcing better content standards going forward.

What does auditing your website's content mean?

Search engine optimization can start to seem complicated when you realize just how many aspects of a page can influence rankings. There's a lot to it but most of what makes a page considered "well optimized" are simple and easy to implement. The basics are often overlooked and things as simple as writing a unique title and description for every page are skipped by millions of websites.

Here's what a content audit checks for:

1. Errors on the page or redirects.
2. External links.
3. Duplicate content issues such as duplicate pages/titles/descriptions.
4. Title and meta description optimization.
5. The word count of the page.
6. The keyword density of the page.
7. H1 and H2 tag optimization.
8. Internal linking structure.
9. Image ALT text usage.
10. The presence of a video.

These are all things that can affect your website's ability to rank in search engines. The more of these things that you get right with your content, the better your chances of ranking at the top of the results.

When should you audit your content?

The best time for an audit of your website content is after you have hire a writer or self-published articles on your website. Perhaps the writer reassured you that the content would be properly optimized and you just want to double check. Whatever the reason may be, if you're not 100% certain that every aspect of your on-page optimization has been handled correctly then you should consider an audit.

How you can audit your own website content:

Keyword density is the most important aspect of on-page optimization. Once you know your target keywords for a given page, you can use a free keyword density checker to discover how often those keywords were mentioned/used on the page. Keyword density for target keywords should range somewhere between 3% and 7%.

The title and meta description is the most important place for your keywords to be present. This is what search engines use to display your listing and it has a major impact on rankings. Make sure your target keywords were used in the title and meta description of the page. These are the primary components of a well optimized page. If you need help viewing the title and meta description of a given page, just use this extraction tool.

Lastly, using your target keywords within the H1 tag and as image ALT text is very important. Search engines expect your website's pages to feature a strong headline and using your target keywords within this headline shows that the page is highly relevant. Images are equally important and every page on your website can feature an image with image ALT text that has been optimized for your target keywords.

This article has hopefully helped you learn how to audit your website content. Remember that you can always go back and edit old posts and while you may run the risk of temporarily lowering traffic as search engines adjust to the changes, it should benefit your rankings enough long-term. If you have any questions on achieving better SEO results through auditing your website content, please contact us.