Content Audit for SaaS: 11 Ways to Audit Your Content

I can’t tell you how many SaaS teams are currently creating content without ever reviewing the existing content assets they already have.

Most of their current content marketing strategy involves pumping out loads of content without ever updating it, which leads to content that sits in organic limbo and underperforms until it starts to decay away from the SERPs.

Content audits are impactful strategies that every SaaS marketer should leverage.

In this article, I’ll show you how to do a content audit to get rid of unnecessary content and increase opportunities for better traffic.

What is the Purpose of a SaaS Content Audit?

When we do a SaaS content audit, we want to find pages that should be optimized for SEO but aren’t performing right now.

Even aside from just SEO, we want to see if there’s more juice we can get out of our content.

So can we:

• Get more leads
• Get more backlinks
• Get more traffic
• Turn this into an email campaign

Whatever it is, a content audit isn’t just limited to SEO, but it will have the biggest impact on your organic traffic.

When should you conduct a content audit for SaaS?

While there is no perfect cadence to audits, you should aim to audit your existing content once a month.

Existing content has the potential to deliver even faster results than creating new content.

The reason for this is that your existing content doesn’t need a full overhaul to see movement. Even just a small paragraph update could be enough to see major movement.

What to know before you do a full content audit

1. Research your ICP

A content audit won’t work if you don’t understand who your target audience is.

Having your audience in mind will help you keep content consistent and ensure your efforts will be effective across the board.

2. Set Goals For The Audit

After you have your audience identified, set goals for this audit too.

Do you want to increase traffic? Leads? Backlinks?

Having your goals set will allow you to stay on track with your content audit.

3. Figure Out What You Need to Do With Each Page

Each page should be marked down in terms of how heavy each update will be.

Start with the pages that won’t take up as much time for you.

How to Conduct a SaaS Content Audit

Alright, now we’ll get into the nitty-gritty of how to actually perform a content audit.

Look for Zombie/Dead Pages

First, you should always start your content audits by trimming fat off your website.

Zombie pages on your website have almost 0 potential and are practically a waste of space for search engines.

In this stage of your content audit, you should look at content quality and see which pages can be considered low quality.

If you have been creating content for a while now, you likely have plenty of content that falls into this category.

You’ll likely want to either:

• Delete these pages
• Merge them with another page
• Update them if the potential is there
• Noindex them
• Leave them as is

Whatever it is, you still need to find and categorize these pages, as they are likely dragging down your overall site performance.

Since these pages aren’t performing at all, they’re likely low in quality, duplicate content, or outdated content, so getting rid of them will help with site-wide signals for search engines like the helpful content system.

How to Find Zombie/Dead Pages

To find these pages, all you need to do is:

• Load up GSC
• Head over to the page tab
• Set the date range to the last 16 months
• Set an impression filter for less than 100
• Set a click filter for less than 1

And there you have it; these are all of the pages that are practically dead on your website. 

If any of these articles are less than 3 months old, you should ignore them, but anything older than that is on the chopping block.

Just a note to also use historical backlink and conversion data for this tactic. You don’t want to delete anything that previously brought you business (it could be from other marketing channels).

Look for Low-Hanging Fruit Potential

This type of content will give you the most bang for your buck. 

Content with low-hanging fruit potential is content ranking in positions 4-20, which needs a little work to see improvements.

 Since this content already exists and is indexed, seeing improvements won’t take as long compared to creating an entirely new article.

And in some cases, you can see movement just by adding a few internal links or a title tag change.

Source: Backlinko

So why spend hours creating new content when you can get similar results with a 15-minute tweak?

Most times, all you need to do with this content is: 

• Add new content
• Update content
• Realign content for intent
• Add internal links
• Update HTML tags
• Update metadata
• Optimize for keywords and entities
• Build links

You don’t have to do all these in order, but at least doing a few should be enough to move the needle.

Again, I’ve seen plenty of positive movement from updating content that took me less than 5 hours.

It’s always worth it to go after these queries once a quarter.

You don’t need to pause your content efforts for these keywords either; you need to allocate some budget toward optimizing them. Here’s a quick article if you need to know how much your SaaS should spend on SEO. 

And in most cases, they take significantly less time. 

Just spend some time optimizing your existing article for that target keyword.

Make these types of queries a consistent part of your current marketing strategy.

How to Find Low-Hanging Fruit Keywords

You can use either Google Search Console or Ahrefs for these.

I prefer Google Search Console.

To do this, you should:

• Head over to Google Search Console
• Head over to the query report in the performance tab
• Filter the last 28 days
• Set a position filter for 4-20
• Now, sort by impressions

With Ahrefs, all you need to do is:

• Load up site explorer
• Plug in your URL
• Load up the organic keywords tab
• Set a position filter for 4 and 20

Look for Content With Potential

Underperforming content will likely be a good data source when you’re looking for additional topic clusters.

These queries rank in positions 30-100 on the SERPs. 

You’ll likely need a new piece of content to rank for these queries.

Since these queries are coming from articles that aren’t directly related, you likely won’t be able to optimize your existing article to rank for it.

You can try (cause each keyword requires a different approach), but in most cases, you’re better off creating new content around it.  

Google likes to attribute keywords relevant to certain pages, but since the intent differs for the page and keyword, these queries typically rank position 30 and above.   

So they’re similar (topically relevant) to your original page but different since they have a different search intent attached to them. 

However, these queries can be a good source of content ideas for your website.

These queries come straight from your target audience and can help build topical authority. You should preferably start with long tail keywords.

Just be careful to avoid duplicate content when creating these new pages.

How to Find Content With Potential

To find these types of queries, you can follow a similar format as the low-hanging fruit tactic, but instead of setting position filters for 4-20, it will now be queried ranking above position 30. 

And again, sort by impressions once you have your position filter set.

These content topics will be great to add to your editorial calendar.

Look for No Click Pages

Like zombie pages, you want to find pages that aren’t receiving any clicks. 

Something needs to be done about these pages, whether they have low or high impressions. Either way, they’re underperforming.

Whether they need new content added or just to be merged into another page. 

It all depends on the content data.

If they’re high impressions and no clicks, it’s likely underperforming content.

If it’s low impression, no clicks, it’s likely a zombie page that must be reviewed.

How to Find No-Click Pages

 To find these pages:

• Head to Google Search Console
• Load up the page report
• Set a date range to the last 16 months
• Now set a click filter for less than 1

 Now, you’ll have all of your website pages with 0 clicks. 

As mentioned, you’ll likely want to bucket them into underperforming and zombie pages.

Look for Content That’s Been Losing Clicks Consistently

You’ll also want to perform a traffic drop analysis on your content.

You want to find pages that have been consistently losing organic traffic over a specific period of time. 

Likely 6 months over 6 months. 

You want to see the pages that previously brought in traffic for you but aren’t anymore, or at least not bringing in as much organic traffic.

It’s likely a competitor overtook you, or your content started to decay. 

Whatever the reason, you want to audit your content to determine the cause of the traffic drop and get that page back to where it needs to be.

In most cases, this will be caused by content decay, so updating that page with fresh information will likely be necessary.

Giving your content a makeover with new content, data, videos, and images could be worth it.

Anything new (and helpful) you add to that content will help with visibility and rankings.

How to Perform a Traffic Drop Analysis

We’ll also use Google Search Console to find pages that dropped in traffic.

Just:

• Head over to the page tab
• Set a date filter to compare the last 6 months over the previous 6 months
• Click on a URL that saw a significant drop
• Then, review the queries specifically that saw a drop

Now, you need to determine whether these keywords dropped due to content decay or lost positioning due to a competitor.

If the positioning drops, it’s likely to decay and competitors. 

If it’s a loss of impressions, it was likely a search intent change, which means you need to reoptimize the page for the new intent.

Look for Pages with High Impressions/Low Clicks

This can also be classified as underperforming content. 

These pages have high impressions but very low clicks. These pages should have a higher CTR but struggle to get proper visibility. 

This type of content has a lot of potential. 

And especially if you’re receiving some clicks for them, your content already has visibility on the SERPs.

Because of this, this is a prime page to update since you know there’s plenty of traffic potential to go along with it.

When you find these pages, depending on where it’s currently ranking, you’ll likely need to overhaul them.

With higher volume queries, there will likely be more competition, so if you want to beat that competition, you’ll probably need to create better content to outrank your competition.

Give your content a complete makeover. 

Add images, videos, and new content sections. 

Anything that will make it more fresh than it previously was.

How to Find High Impression/Low Click Pages

You probably guessed it. It’s our good friend Google Search Console again.

Now you’ll just:

• Load up the page tab
• Set a date range for the last 16 months
• And a click filter for less than 10
• Now, sort by impressions

Now, you’ll have all of the pages on your website that have some visibility (clicks) but aren’t maximizing their full potential for impressions. You can also sort by CTR to find pages with the most significant click/impression discrepancy.

Look for Pages Ranking High but with Zero Clicks

These will likely be the easiest fix on this list. 

These pages rank on the first page of the SERPs but aren’t receiving clicks for whatever reason.

Since these pages already rank on the first page, you likely don’t need to update the content to see ranking increases, although that can help.

In this case, you should Google your keyword and see how your URL is comparing against your competitor’s articles.

Is it because our title isn’t interesting enough? Does our meta description not summarize the page properly? Is there a featured snippet taking up most of the SERPs?

In most cases, you should update your title tag and meta description, add schema, and, even better, try to snag the featured snippet, giving you the most visibility out of all competitors.

Finding High Ranking Pages with Low Clicks

• Head to the Query tab
• Filter for the last 28 days
• Position filter for less than 10
• Click filter for less than 1
• Sort by impressions

Look for Keyword Cannibalization

As I mentioned during the zombie page section, many of these no-click/no-impression pages are likely causing cannibalization issues, which means it’s hurting how your content is performing.

Content marketing teams who neglect SEO typically fall into this category since they don’t know how to differentiate intent and end up creating content that matches intent as another piece of content they’ve created.

It’s happened with every SaaS company I’ve worked with. But hopefully not with yours.

When you come across keyword cannibalization, you want to delete that page (the underperforming one) or merge it into the slightly performing content.

My personal favorite is to merge. 

In this case, you’re turning garbage into gold by taking something that hasn’t been performing well and merging it with another article that helps it perform much better.

If you have a bucket load of content on your website, I’d recommend starting with zombie pages and cannibalization. It doesn’t take as long, and you’ll see some positive movement.

In most cases, you don’t even need new content. You need to remove the content that’s cannibalizing your performing pages. 

How to Find Cannibalization

To find cannibalization, plug your dead URL into Google Search Console and review the query report. 

Once you have your list of queries, cancel your URL filter and see which URLs are leftover.

You likely have cannibalization issues if multiple URLs exist for that specific query. You’ll probably want to take this further and review each query’s SERPs to see if that URL is being cannibalized. You can also use this checklist to guide your SaaS SEO efforts.

Look for Opportunities to add in CTAs

Your content won’t do much if there isn’t a purpose for it. 

You need actionable content on your website. If you want to improve content ROI, you must focus on content goals that help drive results.

Even for your highly trafficked pages, if there aren’t CTAs found within your content, you’re likely leaving leads and maybe even revenue on the table.

Ideally, all of your content should have an objective. Whether it’s to build awareness, capture leads, or help build topical authority.

Whatever it is, these articles still have the potential to capture leads. Even some TOFU articles can generate leads if you properly position your CTAs.

It can be a newsletter signup, a product demo request, or a lead magnet.

You’ll want to know how to write compelling copy for your content. 

However, with these CTAs, you’ll want to use your content audit data to find the pages with the best opportunities.

You can use Google Analytics for historical conversion data or Google Search Console to find highly trafficked pages.

Whatever it is, you want to identify the pages with the most potential and then use those to guide you along as you optimize your content with CTAs

Finding opportunities to add CTAs

My favorite way to find these opportunities is to use Google Search Console to see which pages get the most clicks.

Start from the top down and look for pages with the most clicks and impressions. 

Look for Internal Linking Opportunities

Last on this list, you’ll also want to look for opportunities to add internal links.

While this isn’t necessarily content-related, I can’t tell you how many content audits I’ve conducted where content teams completely neglect internal links.

Don’t be like those teams.

While auditing your content, look for opportunities to add internal links to help guide users to new pages and distribute link equity across your website, which can help improve keyword rankings.

Need Help With a SaaS Content Audit?

Need help auditing your SaaS blog content? Feel free to schedule a free SaaS SEO strategy call with me.

One of my main services is content auditing, so if you need help, feel free to reach out.

I’m a SaaS SEO consultant with over 4+ years in SEO. I can help you create content and reach your goals and objectives with SEO and content.