Creating content for your SaaS business is a total waste of time.
Yes, that’s right.
Unless
You back it with regular content audits to improve the results! I mean, let’s be real; you might love creating content to build awareness and drive engagement with the audience. But all your time and energy would be a waste if you don’t take the time to evaluate your content quality, analyze the results, and take the necessary steps to enhance it.
A SaaS content audit is a critical aspect of improving your content strategy. Think of it as a seasonal “decluttering” of your closet – where you evaluate what’s in, what’s out of date, and what can be reused or recycled to stay in fashion.
It is a sure-shot way of staying relevant and creating quality content that converts. After all, one excellent content piece is worth more than a thousand average posts!
Take a moment with me as I explore why a SaaS content audit is critical for your content efforts and how you can conduct it for enhanced results.
What is a SaaS Content Audit?
A content audit is a systematic evaluation of your content inventory, from web pages and landing pages to blog posts and video content, to determine if your content is reaching the right audience and meeting its goals.
Content audit provides a future roadmap so you can figure out what content to create, update, improve, or delete from your inventory.
Now, when it comes to your SaaS brand, content audits need to do more than just a review of your strategy. A SaaS content audit should aim to tailor the content to the buyer funnels of a SaaS purchase cycle. The idea is to create content that not only engages at every touchpoint but converts the audience with higher personalization and helps you meet your intended objectives.
Content Audit for SaaS Businesses – Why Do You Need It?
According to The State of Content Marketing Report 2023 by Semrush, 61% of the most successful content marketers all have one thing in common. They run a content audit 2+ times a year to measure and evaluate their content inventory.
And it’s time for you to jump on the bandwagon, too. A successful content audit can help you
- Identify areas of improvement in terms of engagement, quality, SEO optimization, relevance to the audience, and so on.
- Determine how various types of content are performing on various channels
- Pinpoint any issues with technical SEO, such as missing keywords, slow website speed, or broken links, for a successful SEO content audit
- Conduct data-backed analysis for future optimization and improvement
What follows a content audit is the optimization process to remove or update outdated content to boost website authority and SEO performance. And if 53% of marketers are to be believed, updating your content can result in higher engagement, followed by an increase in traffic and website rankings.
Your Top SaaS Content Audit Goals
Knowing why you need to run a content audit for your SaaS business is one thing. But the actual process can be overwhelming and time-consuming, to say the least. Could be a few of the reasons why 16% of content marketers have never performed a content audit.
However, this seemingly huge task can become a little easy once you pin down the specific business goals and actions.
So, before you begin, think about the goals you want to achieve with this content audit. It could be evaluating content performance, boosting website authority, increasing audience engagement, encouraging higher conversion rates, or perhaps improving content SEO.
Based on your goals, a SaaS website content audit typically involves optimizing content for-
- Technical SEO and keyword optimization
- Search intent
- Originality, relevance, and value proposition for the reader
- Engagement and delivery
- Grammar mistakes
- Missing images or broken/outdated links
- Outdated or duplicate information
Once you have your goals set, it’s time to bring the plan to action.
How to Conduct a Content Audit for Your SaaS Business?
1. Define Your ICPs
As with your content marketing strategy, a content audit should also begin with a thorough understanding of your ideal customer profiles. Since your target audience and their expectations might change by the time you get to conducting your first content audit, defining ICPs will help you reassess the effectiveness of your content and identify any gaps.
To define your ICPs, go back to the audience data you may have collected when developing your content strategy, plus gather information about your new customers. This should include-
- Demographic data, such as age, location, industry
- Behavioral data, such as purchase preferences and history
- Psychographic data, such as their interests and values
- Preferred communication channels
- Their pain points
With the ICPs defined, you’ll be able to target your content approach to a specific audience, maintain a consistent tone, and ensure relevance. Besides, you can map out your audience’s customer journey and revise your website content to cater to the different stages of the marketing funnel.
2. Take Note of Your Existing Content
To effectively audit SEO content, you must take inventory of your existing content and the website URLs to know what assets you already have at your disposal. This will include analyzing your-
- Blog posts
- Landing pages
- Product descriptions
- Video content
- PDFs
- Publications
- E-Books and Webinars
- Other interactive content
Here, you’ll also need to collect the URLs of all the different web pages that you want to analyze. You can do this manually or by using a content audit tool like DeepCrawl or Screaming Frog. A tool will help you scan a large volume of content within seconds and generate a sitemap to offer you an overview of the pages, posts, and videos on your website.
Once you have all this data, dump it in one place and use a spreadsheet to categorize the URLs and content assets based on different criteria, including URL, page title, purpose, ranking position, content type, keywords, funnel stage, and metadata.
This will make it super easy for you to keep track of and audit each URL thoroughly to decide what to keep, what to delete, and what to update.
3. Gather and Analyze Key Data
The next step is to take a deep dive into your content performance and analyze the key metrics. This is important to understand if your content is offering value and engagement to the ones reading it. The easiest way to do this is using Google Analytics or a site edit tool like the one from Semrush.
Here are some of the key metrics you can collect-
- Organic traffic
- Time on page
- Backlinks
- Engagement
- Unique visitors
- Bounce rate
- Conversions
- Keyword ranking
- SEO metrics
Analyze this data to identify patterns – Is there any content/page getting higher traffic than others? Or do you see a particular content type getting high traffic volume but low conversion? In these cases, you’d want to create more of the same content that’s getting high traffic and optimize the high-traffic pages with proper CTAs to drive up the conversions.
4. Identify Gaps and Develop an Action Plan
Using your content assets and performance metrics, audit each URL and assess each content piece to identify gaps.
Check each content piece for relevance, clarity, engagement, and consistency. Search for missing images, SEO issues, broken links, and so on. Based on this, categorize your content into Keep, Update, or Delete.
- The Keep pile includes all the content that has been performing well and delivering the desired results.
- The Update pile will include content that might not be performing well but has scope for improvement. Perhaps fixing a broken link can improve the traffic, or adding a fresh perspective can make it more engaging and relevant for the audience.
- The Delete pile will have any low-traffic or low-quality content that you cannot improve. For instance, a news article related to a particular event or promotional content for an old product. If you cannot find any use for this specific page, it is better to delete it.
Moreover, you can also find content pieces to Repurpose to breathe new life into them and generate more traffic and engagement.
Finally, it’s time to develop an action plan. By keeping your long-term strategy in mind, prioritize actions for each URL and content piece. Write down the identified issues and specific action items in a spreadsheet and implement the changes accordingly.
5. Monitor the Results
Content audits can be tedious to perform, and when you forget to monitor the results of your audit, you’re essentially letting your efforts go down the drain. Regularly monitor and analyze the updated content to see if it’s working to meet your goals.
If not, you might need to make more changes or even revise your content marketing plan to improve the results.
The Way Forward
Running a content audit is essential for a healthy content marketing strategy. It is something every SaaS business must prioritize at least every six months, to reap the benefits of their hard work.
By auditing your content, you are not only aligning it with the needs of your target audience but taking a step towards consistent business growth, higher brand awareness, and, of course, a stronger connection with your customers.