Churning content is probably hurting, not helping.
One good blog is worth 1,000 low-quality posts.
Auditing your company’s content helps you keep a consistent level of quality that actually converts.
And that’s the point, isn’t it?
What is a SaaS content audit?
Your SaaS company’s website is valuable real estate—its content reflects your brand, draws in potential buyers, and leads them through the conversion funnel.
A SaaS content audit is a qualitative process that evaluates the quality of that material and makes sure it’s optimized for SEO, highlights your unique selling points, and pushes toward conversions.
A website content audit typically involves checking for:
- Content originality, uniqueness, and value in terms of perspective
- SEO keyword optimization
- Grammar and spelling mistakes
- Broken links, images, and other elements
- Audience engagement
- Relevance to current movements in your industry
85% of the world’s largest SaaS companies have a blog. And Google found that 89% of B2B buyers use search at some point in their research and purchase process.
Auditing the content on your SaaS site for the above criteria ensures that your content is doing its job and helping you reach your goals.
Why do you need to audit your content?
Having worked with so many different software companies, we know a thing or two about SaaS SEO.
One of the biggest issues we see with these companies is a misunderstanding of what their content is actually there for.
Misconceptions about SEO, Google algorithms, and the way content fits into the picture causes many SaaS companies to believe that more content, traffic, and organic search rankings are the answer.
But churning out blog posts without taking quality into consideration will get you nowhere fast.
More content does lead to more results, especially for topics with high search volumes. But your readers can tell the difference between something you wrote in 30 minutes with ChatGPT and something that took time, thought, and expertise to create.
Audits help you determine where your content stands in terms of content quality and SEO optimization, so you can make the necessary changes to keep it up-to-date.
What should a content audit include?
When conducting a content audit for a SaaS website, it’s important to evaluate each URL and determine its best course of action. The goal is to improve the overall quality and relevancy of each blog post, boosting your site’s search engine optimization (SEO) performance.
To effectively perform a content audit, the following steps must be taken:
- Thoroughly audit the technical aspect of your content performance, including user experience, page speed, and metadata.
- Analyze your site’s content to see which topics have the highest search volume, what users are looking for, and how you can improve upon it.
- Evaluate each piece of content and determine whether or not it is still relevant and up-to-date.
- Identify gaps in your content strategy (e.g., topics you don’t have any content for, or content that could be improved).
- Use the insights from your audit to plan out new content ideas and create an editorial calendar with company stakeholders.
How to Perform a SaaS Content Audit
A content audit requires SEO tools, but it goes far beyond dashboards and line graphs—stakeholder involvement is critical when assessing the quality of content and creating a holistic approach for the future.
It requires both quantitative analysis (i.e., analyzing data to understand performance) and qualitative evaluation (i.e., assessing the quality of the content itself).
Define Your ICPs
Before conducting a content audit, it’s important to have a solid understanding of your target audience and their needs. This will help you evaluate the effectiveness of your current content and identify gaps that need to be filled.
To define your ICPs, gather as much data and information as possible about your current customers. This could include:
- Demographic data, such as age, gender, and location
- Psychographic data, such as interests, values, and beliefs
- Behavioral data, such as product preferences and purchase history
- Pain points and challenges your ideal customer faces and how your products or services can help them solve these issues.
- The communication channels they prefer, such as email, social media, or phone, and tailor your content strategy accordingly.
Once you understand your customer base, you can narrow your focus to specific ICPs and use this information to inform content creation.
If you sell a technical product to CTOs, data engineers, DevOps professionals, and other technical decision-makers, for example, your content should reflect how your product relates to specific technical problems and solutions within an organization or its industry.
Crawl Your Website
A SaaS technical SEO must, crawling your website for a comprehensive inventory of the pages and URLs can be done manually or using a content audit tool like Screaming Frog, DeepCrawl, or Sitebulb.
Analytics tools will provide you with a list of all the URLs on your site, including blog content, that is indexable with a 200 status code, meaning they are accessible and viewable by search engines.
Once you have a list of your site’s existing content assets, you should clean it up by removing any irrelevant or duplicate pages. This will help you focus your analysis on the most important pages and ensure that your audit is as thorough and effective as possible.
A few critical elements to look for in a website crawl:
- Broken links: Links leading to pages that no longer exist or are inaccessible can negatively impact user experience and harm your website’s SEO performance.
- Internal links: Internal linking helps users find more content they’re looking for and improves your site’s structure.
- Duplicate content: Duplicate content can harm your website’s SEO performance by confusing search engines and lowering the quality of your content.
- Missing metadata: If metadata is missing or incomplete, it might harm your website’s SEO performance and make it more difficult for users to find your content.
- Page load speed: Slow page load times can harm your website’s user experience and negatively impact your SEO performance. If your website has this issue, you should optimize your website’s code, compress images, and use a content delivery network (CDN) to improve speed.
- Mobile-friendliness: A mobile-friendly website is one that’s designed to display and function well on smaller screens. If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, you should consider updating its design and code to make it more responsive.
Continue your audit on Ahrefs—or the keyword research tool of your choice—by analyzing the organic performance of each page.
Using the Ahrefs Site Explorer, look at organic traffic, keyword rankings, and referring domains to see how each page is doing in terms of search engine visibility and popularity.
Using Ahrefs, you can also take a deeper dive into the keywords each page is ranking for and compare their rankings to your competitors to get an idea of where you stand in terms of SEO performance.
Audit Each URL
Once you have completed your website crawl and identified any issues with your content, the next step is to audit each URL to determine whether it should be deleted, updated, or redirected. Using Screaming Frog, you can analyze each page of your website and evaluate its effectiveness in targeting your ICPs and driving traffic.
As you audit each URL, consider the following factors:
- Relevance: Does the page address the needs and interests of your target audience? Is it still relevant to your business objectives and marketing goals?
- Quality: Is the content accurate, informative, and engaging? Is it well-written and well-structured? Is it up-to-date and relevant to current trends or industry standards
- Performance: Is the page ranking well for important keywords and driving traffic to your website? Are users engaging with the content and staying on the page for a reasonable amount of time?
Based on your evaluation, you can decide on one of three actions for each URL:
- Delete: Pages that are no longer relevant, useful, or effective should be removed from your website to avoid confusing users and search engines.
- Update: For existing content that has valuable but outdated or poorly-written elements, consider updating the content to make it more current and relevant. This could include updating statistics, adding new information, or improving the readability and structure of the content.
- Redirect: For pages that are no longer relevant or useful, but have valuable backlinks, consider redirecting the page to a more relevant or useful page on your website. This will help to preserve the link equity and ensure that users and search engines can find the most relevant information on your website.
Sometimes, a page may have potential that’s not immediately apparent. For example, a page that’s not performing well for its target keywords may have the potential for a different keyword or topic. It may be better to repurpose that page for a different keyword or topic rather than deleting it.
Work With Sales and Marketing
Ahrefs and other content audit tools are invaluable to the content audit process, but their value pales in comparison to that of your actual customer data.
Creating content that speaks to customers, fully captures their search intent, and drives conversions requires a deep understanding of their needs, interests, and motivations.
Think about it this way: When you Google something, do you type one or two keywords, or do you write a phrase that describes what you’re looking for?
To capture this intent, you need to talk to sales and marketing teams to get an understanding of the information prospects are actually looking for.
SaaS Content Audit Checklist
Now that we’ve given you a quick overview of the technical aspect of your content audit, here’s a checklist with the step-by-step process for conducting SaaS content audits:
- Define your ICPs: Gather data on your current customers and create detailed ICPs that represent your target audience. This may require collaboration with your organization’s sales, marketing, and customer success arms.
- Map out your customer journey: Create a map of the different stages of your buyer’s journey, from awareness to conversion and retention. Use existing customer data from sources like your CRM to identify common touchpoints across customers.
- Analyze your content: Inventory all your web pages, including blog posts, articles, videos, whitepapers, and other resources.
- Crawl your website and audit each URL: Use a tool like Google Search Console or Screaming Frog to gather a list of all your website’s URLs. Then, audit each one to determine whether it should be deleted, updated, or redirected.
- Determine action for each URL: Based on your evaluation, determine whether each URL should be deleted, updated, or redirected.
- Evaluate your content: Use your ICPs and customer journey as a framework for evaluating the effectiveness of your content. Consider factors like relevance, accuracy, usefulness, and engagement.
- Identify gaps: Based on your evaluation, identify any gaps in your content that need to be filled. Talk to sales and marketing team members to collect data on key pain points and search potential that Ahrefs might have missed.
- Develop a content strategy: Use the insights from your content audit to develop a content strategy that addresses the gaps you’ve identified. This could include creating a content calendar, setting goals for your content, and establishing performance metrics.
- Repurpose content: For content that has potential but isn’t performing well, consider repurposing it for a different keyword or topic.
- Implement changes: Take action on each URL based on your evaluation to improve your website’s content’s overall quality and relevance.
- Monitor and measure results: Track your website’s SEO performance, traffic, and engagement metrics to measure the effectiveness of your content strategy and make adjustments as needed.
Post Audit: Writing Content for Your SaaS Business
Product-led content is best for your site, especially if you’re unsure where to begin with content marketing. Bottom-of-the-funnel content such as use cases, case studies and success stories should be written to showcase how your product can help customers solve their problems.
Benefits of product-led content:
- Your site visitors can use it to pre-qualify themselves (they don’t want a cold call!)
- It helps with SEO as you can target long-tail and semantic keywords related to your industry.
- You can use it to showcase customer success stories, which builds trust in potential customers.
- Your sales reps can use it as a sales enablement tool.
Creating product-led content entails focusing on its benefits rather than just its features. This means highlighting how your product solves your customer’s pain points, saves them time and money, and improves their overall experience.
A few ideas:
- Product demos: Highlight how certain elements of your product can solve specific business use cases, and include videos, animations, and screenshots to back them up.
- FAQs: Answer frequently asked questions from customers and prospects to help them understand the value of your product better.
- Product guides: Create detailed guides that explain how to use certain features of your product, step-by-step instructions on a given task, or tutorials for beginners.
- Case studies: In-depth research and case studies can help prospects understand how your product can help them reach their goals.
- Comparison pages: By highlighting the benefits of your product compared to others, you can ensure each new customer makes an educated decision about whether yours is the best for their needs.
Develop Your Content Marketing Strategy With Linkflow
Whether you’re starting from zero with content marketing or you just need a few changes to your existing website, working with us can help you make sense of yoru content audit data.
From landing pages to blog posts, working with our consulting team will help you generate leads and book meetings with high-quality content.
Talk to an expert here or check out our SaaS SEO guide to ensure you get the most out of your content marketing funnel.
