Streamline Your Content Audit Process With These 9 Must-have Tools

Intro

Imagine you began working for a startup as a content marketer, and your first task’s to revamp the content strategy. The challenge? There’s already a ton of existing content, therefore it's quite difficult to determine what's been effective – and what’s not.

Thus, you have to run a content audit.

But with so many tools out there, how do you choose the right one for the job?

Here’s the good news, you'll find it here.

I’d be upset if you don’t.

Jokes aside, let's dive into a list of the best content audit tools to see how they can help you save the day (or at least your content strategy).

The 9 Best Content Audit Tools

• Ranktracker
• Screaming Frog
• Google Analytics
• Semrush
• Ahrefs
• ContentLook
• BuzzSumo
• Google Search Console
• ContentKing

1. Ranktracker

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Ranktracker is a cool SEO platform that’s designed to track your website’s ranking on the search engine results page.

“The feature that's best in my opinion is the site audit that provides steps you can actually put into action yourself. Rank tracker has a lot of useful features with sufficient information, so anyone is able to change and improve their site to get better ranking results. You don't need a vast amount of technical knowledge – this is where the product excels.” – Moira Stewart (Director at ISFX)

While it isn’t a traditional content audit tool, its SEO audit tool includes a variety of solutions that will help you when running content audits.

I recently used it to audit a client’s website, and I was….. impressed!

I’ve tried other tools on this list, but what set it apart was how intuitive and easy to use it was – there were no confusing features and steep learning curves.

I always go for simple-to-use tools because they save a ton of time.

My job required me to use the results I got from the content audit to develop a content strategy – so I needed a tool that’ll show keywords the company’s website was already ranking for and demographics I needed to target.

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Once I typed in the website URL, keywords the website was ranking for, their locations, and monthly search volume were shown.

I easily used the data to build topic clusters for the content strategy.

2. Screaming Frog

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Screaming Frog is another helpful tool that allows you to analyze your content and technical SEO, including on-page elements like page titles, meta descriptions, and header tags.

“We use it bi-monthly to spot duplicate content, missing page titles, meta descriptions, or broken links. The content analysis aspect helps us to cut down on any repetitive content and consolidate it into more concise information that is valuable to the consumer.” – Adam Wright (CEO of Human Tonik)

When running content audits, Screaming Frog helps you:

• Analyze page speed
• Identify technical issues affecting your website’s performance

“I can’t imagine doing a proper content audit without Screaming Frog or another crawler that not only generates detailed inventories of all the content on the site and pulls necessary data from APIs (Google Analytics, Search Console, backlink data providers, PageSpeed), but also assesses the internal linking structure of the site.

Because you can’t assess each piece of content in isolation — you have to understand how the architecture of the site might be sub-optimized to support each piece of content (particularly regarding organic search). Only by seeing the big picture can you make informed decisions to remove, update, redirect, consolidate, or keep.” Mike Sonders – Head of Marketing @ Rainforest.

3. Google Analytics

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Google Analytics is a comprehensive tool that gives detailed information about the behavior of visitors on your site. Matt Laybourn, the founder of Rockee, stated:

I use Google Analytics for checking mainly:

• The number of readers
• Engagement time/rate
• The influence on form fills (events/goals)

This helps give me a proxy on performance, for example, high engagement times tell me the content was more engaging. Lower times indicate maybe the content didn't quite hit the mark.

You also get to monitor metrics like backlinks, social shares, conversion rates, and total revenue generated. The new version, Google Analytics 4, uses enhanced features and predictive insights to give a clearer picture of a buyer’s journey.

The behavior flow report analyzes how users interact with your website's content, while the tracking feature measures the success of your content marketing campaigns on the SERPs.

PS: Google Analytics can be connected with Google Search Console for even deeper insights.

4. Semrush

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Semrush is an all-in-one tool suite that gives a detailed breakdown of your website’s content performance by analyzing the number of pages, word count, backlinks, and a bunch of other metrics. It evaluates your content and SEO strategies, as well as those of your competitors to identify gaps and areas for improvement.

“For us at Redfox Visual it helps us identify what content needs to be updated. For example, a blog post about “The 10 Best Free Marketing Courses” may need to be updated every once in a while to keep getting traffic or to get more traffic. Adding a year, adding internal links, or updating the content is something we can do to increase traffic.

I also personally like its user-friendly interface.” – Rachel Marcfalane (Content Marketing Strategist at Redfox Visual)

Keyword gaps show keywords your competitors rank for – but you don’t, and backlink gaps compare your backlink profile with those of competitors.

SEMrush further identifies duplicate content, broken links, and crawl errors to improve the performance of your website’s content.

5. Ahrefs

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Ahrefs is another tool that allows you to run comprehensive SEO audits. It contains reports that show the pages on your site that bring in the most value, in terms of traffic and CPC costs, and also allows you to view those of your competitors.

Depending on what you want to audit, the Content Gap Report shows the keywords your competitors are already ranking for – and those you aren’t.

“A performance-enhancing feature that’s been beneficial for us is keyword analysis. It gives us information about the most relevant and profitable keywords to attract interested customers. We can either weave these keywords into the content itself or craft blogs that integrate them.” – Guy Sharps (Relocation Manager at Andorra Guides).

Ahrefs gives an overview of your website's content, including the number of pages, word count, and backlink profile to identify ways to improve your website's authority and credibility in search engine rankings.

6. ContentLook

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ContentLook is another powerful tool that deeply analyzes your website to discover content that actually brings in results.

For example, pages that performed above average fall under opportunities. You can decide to republish them or ask members of your team to share them on other channels to get more eyes on them – since they’ve proven to resonate.

Pages that performed poorly by producing low engagements, SEO scores, and traffic can be monitored, optimized, or deleted.

“ContentLook is one of our favorite tools for running content audits here at Belkins, and there are plenty of reasons to celebrate this great tool. ContentLook is built with content auditing in mind, and it offers pretty much all features that enable us to analyze the site, track metrics, seize opportunities, and eliminate issues before they grow too large. It is a simple, powerful, and cost-effective tool that makes for easy content auditing, even for a large B2B company like ours that handles a lot of work every week.” - Michael Maximoff (Co-Founder of Belkins)

7. Buzzsumo

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Buzzsumo is another tool that analyzes the performance of content. Unlike other tools that primarily track written content, Buzzsumo analyzes videos, podcasts, and also newsletters.

“I once used Buzzsumo to help revamp an older blog post that wasn't gaining much traction. After identifying trending topics and incorporating them into the post, we saw a 300% increase in social shares and a significant boost in organic traffic.” - Michael Donovan (Co-Founder of Niche Twins)

If you wish to audit the content of competitors, you can decide to focus on the content types and mediums that are shared frequently. Buzzsumo’s content analyzer filters content based on publishing date, content type, location, content formats, styles, etc

8. Google Search Console

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Google Search Console evaluates the effectiveness of your content marketing strategies by analyzing your website's search performance. Content marketers can identify trends, measure the impact of content changes, and optimize for better results with this awesome tool.

“When running a content audit, I crawl the website, and get all the data together in a spreadsheet:

• Clicks
• Organic Sessions
• SEO data

Then I go in – URL by URL to assess organic performance, eventual SEO issues, etc. After which I look at SERPs, the number of inlinks, and traffic data (among other things) to help me decide which content action to assign to each page.” – Vince Moreau (Founder of ScaleCrush)

GSC’s filters and sorting options analyze individual pages by queries, countries, and devices – while identifying potential issues related to content and SEO like broken links, crawl errors, and duplicate content.

9. ContentKing

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ContentKing analyzes your website's content and technical performance by tracking changes and identifying issues as they occur.

“Using ContentKing, we have eliminated duplicate content, optimized meta descriptions and titles, and found broken links. We have also used the tool to identify pages that need improvement, thus helping us prioritize our content strategy and increase website traffic.

For example, after running a content audit with the tool, we increased our organic traffic by 23% within three months. We also improved our bounce rate by 17% and increased our average time on page by 32%.” – Milo Cruz (Chief Marketing Officer at Freelance Writing Jobs)

It analyzes individual pages on a website and identifies issues related to content quality, structure, and SEO (like broken links and crawl errors) to improve the quality of your content.

“We primarily use ContentKing for website monitoring and content tracking. It continuously monitors our website content to detect any errors that may affect SEO rankings and provide actionable insights accordingly. It also tracks our website content, blog posts, and social media posts to ensure they are relevant and up-to-date.

Apart from this, It gives us real-time alerts and notifications so we can stay on top of our content performance.” – Harry Morton (Founder at Lower Street)

The tool also integrates with Google Analytics and Google Search Console to give even better insights into your website's content performance.

Wrapping Up

Without the help of content audit tools, it would be nearly impossible to track and optimize content for maximum engagement and conversions.

If you are still indecisive, there are more alternative options out there. However, I’ll advise you to sign up for a free trial (most tools on this list have one) to experience how they operate firsthand; this approach will help you determine if these tools are suitable.