How does an seo audit assist and guide your blog and content marketing strategy?

A SEO audit can assist and guide your blog and content marketing strategy. The purpose of an SEO audit is to gather data from your project, analyse it, and help you make informed decisions about the direction of your current strategy, allowing you to make the necessary adjustments. An SEO audit is a process that can be carried out throughout the lifespan of a website, whether you’re just starting out or have had your site online for a few years.

If you already have a website but are struggling to reach your goals, you’re probably looking for someone to explain why your page isn’t attracting the hundreds of visitors per month that you expected.

Well, the first recommendation in these cases is to STOP publishing, and I’ll explain why in a moment. The second step is to carry out a proper SEO audit, understand why it’s beneficial for your website, and how it impacts your ranking performance.

SEO Benefits of Content Audits

We all want the SEO benefits of content audits, but few actually do them. And no, I’m not talking about finding an AI tool online that works on its own with just your website link. I mean having someone in charge of finding and organising the information properly. For that, we need at least basic knowledge of web analytics. After all, the goal of a content audit is to help us better understand our current strategy and determine what’s working and what isn’t.

As I mentioned earlier, your project could be suffering from issues you’re unaware of, but by the end of this blog, you’ll be able to identify and fix them. By optimising your website’s structure and content, you’ll enhance the user experience on your site.

Every time a user searches on Google, the search engine identifies websites stored in its system and displays those that best answer the query, which is exactly where we want to appear. But before that can happen, Google needs to crawl and index your site properly. Another major benefit of a content audit is that it allows you to reorganise and remove content that isn’t adding value to your site. This ensures that Google can find your pages effortlessly.

One of the most common mistakes found in SEO content audits is the lack of meta descriptions in blog posts and images. These help Google understand what your content is about and show it to the right audience, reducing bounce rates and increasing conversion rates.

By the end of an SEO Benefits of Content Audits, you should have a much clearer understanding of the type of content your audience is looking for. This will allow you to improve content quality, increasing your chances of turning your website into a reference point for other users and generating high-quality backlinks for your site.

By improving the visibility of your pages, you’ll attract more organic traffic and boost your SEO ranking without falling into the temptation of paying Google for ads to drive traffic. Additionally, by developing a sustainable strategy over time, you’ll gradually gain more page views and organic visits as time goes on.

Now that we know why a content audit is important, let’s look at the tools you can use to carry it out. I’ll also tell you whether tools like Ahrefs or HubSpot are really necessary.

Performance Data Collection

The amount and type of data to collect and organise will always depend on your business model and the size of your website, but generally, all websites have either a blog or an online shop, so that’s where we should start.

There are thousands of tools available on the market to track all the pages on your website, as well as key data such as impressions, clicks, ranking positions, keywords, and search intent for each page. Let’s go step by step. I’ll walk you through all the available options, from free tools to paid ones.

CMS Data Collection

The first resource, but probably the least efficient one for gathering and analysing data effectively is your CMS, such as WordPress or WooCommerce. You could manually count all your blog posts, service pages, and product pages (if you run an eCommerce store), but it would take you days just to organise them by keywords. So, I’ll show you the tools I use to save time and effort.

Google’s Free SEO Tools

The tools provided by Google are free and the most reliable. To use them, you need to install the Google Site Kit plugin on your CMS. This allows Google to process your data through its various tools and organise the information for you.

The tools that Google Site Kit integrates include:

• Google Analytics
• Google Search Console
• Google Merchant Center
• Google Ads

Google Analytics

Google Analytics provides detailed insights into where your traffic comes from and how users navigate your site, as well as the actions they take that could be considered conversions—such as subscribing to a newsletter, submitting a form, or making a phone call.

The Overview Report gives you a summary of key data collected by Google (if users accept privacy cookies). It answers essential questions like:

• Where do new users come from?
• Which pages and screens get the most views?
• What are the most common user interactions?
• Which key events perform best?
• Which products sell the most? (for eCommerce sites)

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is the best tool for analysing your website’s search performance. The most important data you can obtain from Search Console include:

• The ranking positions of your pages.
• The impressions your website receives every time someone searches for a related topic.
• The clicks generated when users find your site in search results.

You can also check the search terms that brought users to your site and the keywords that Google associates with your content. All this data can be exported into Excel sheets, allowing you to work with them freely.

Google Ads

If you’re running Google Ads campaigns, you must use Google Ads Manager, as there’s no other way to advertise on Google. Through this tool, you can track:

• Impressions, clicks, and costs of your ads.
• Performance by keyword, helping you decide which pages to promote through ads and which keywords are worth paying for.

This allows you to make informed decisions on where to invest your budget and which terms are too costly to target.

Google PageSpeed Insights

Although not part of the Google Site Kit package, Google PageSpeed Insights is an essential tool for improving loading times. This tool scores your website and provides recommendations to improve its performance if the results are not optimal.

It evaluates four key areas:

1. Performance
2. Accessibility
3. Best Practices
4. SEO

Each area is scored from 0 to 100.

For our SEO audit, we focus on the recommendations given for any aspect that isn’t at 100%, as these insights help us identify and resolve technical issues that may affect website performance.

Is a Blog URL Scan Worth It?

There are thousands of tools available online, but don’t waste your money on a company that claims AI will do everything for you. As we’ve seen, you can already work with a vast amount of data using free tools, but if you want to audit your content more deeply, you can use Ahrefs to:

• Identify search intent behind the keywords your pages rank for.
• Analyse the difficulty of reaching the top positions in search results.
• Explore the FAQ section, which helps connect ideas and answer what people are actively searching for.

This tool is particularly useful for understanding ranking competitiveness and optimising your content accordingly. Although Ahrefs has some very powerful tools, it also offers free versions where you can generate automated reports.

HubSpot

HubSpot, on the other hand, is a lead management system. If you use HubSpot forms, you can track:

• The monthly volume of forms submitted.
• The pages where this traffic is converting.

This allows you to refine your paid ad campaigns by identifying high-converting pages. For example, if 15% of visitors to a particular page submit a form, you might want to boost that page with a targeted ad campaign to maximise results.

Content Audit Process

Now that we have seen which tools we need to use to obtain the information we need, I will explain the process of organizing that information. This will allow us to make data-driven decisions and improve our SEO strategy in the end.

The first thing we need to decide is whether we will conduct an automatic audit using tools like Ahrefs or a custom, detailed audit covering various aspects of your project. Automatic SEO audits won’t provide enough information to reach conclusions that significantly impact our site.

To carry out a custom audit, we need to know what information we will collect:

• Project presentation
• Website architecture
• Web graphic design guidelines
• Selected CMS
• Plugins and extensions
• Website speed
• Content
• Analytics
• Local SEO
• Video SEO
• Off-page SEO
• Action list

Before starting, whether you’re doing it for your business or a third party, you must have access to the necessary tools. This is one of the biggest obstacles people face with their projects—access and control over the following tools:

• Google Search Console
• Google Analytics
• Google Ads
• CMS admin panel
• PageSpeed Insights
• Google Maps listing

And as of 2025, some review tasks still need to be done manually, such as web graphic design and conversion processes.

To see how we develop this entire web audit process, I recommend checking out our web audit class, where we go step by step, working with a template that is only available if you book a private lesson.

Content Optimization Decisions

Once we have reached the conclusions of the audits, it’s time for the moment of truth and to be professional. I know many have invested a lot of money or time into their projects and don’t want to make major changes, but here I’ll show you some practical cases where it’s necessary to detach from the project and change whatever is needed to make it work.

If your website lacks a proper information architecture, you need to assess the size of your site and the number of blog entries you have. However, one thing is certain, you’ll need to create an information architecture, which will involve creating, deleting, and redirecting web pages to improve the user experience.

If your project is very slow, you’ll probably need to check your CMS settings and review all the plugins you have. Clean up and keep only what’s necessary. Optimize images by converting them to lighter formats and fix any UX issues your website might have.

Evaluate which pages bring you traffic and which ones don’t. The ones with the best content performance should be kept, while those with little to no traffic should be considered for a revamp using insights from your top-performing pages or removed entirely.

I’ll explain why it’s the right decision to eliminate excessive pages that bring no benefits below.

Impact of Excessive Content on SEO

There’s no point in creating a website with hundreds of pages that Google can’t index or rank for various reasons. Even worse, if your own pages confuse search engines, it can harm your visibility by making Google unsure which page to show for a search intent. This can lead to lower rankings for your keywords.

This happens when the content is near duplicate and there is no proper work on the website’s architecture.