Technical SEO Audit vs. Content Audit: Which Does Your Website Need?
If your website is not ranking on Google, it is not necessarily the case that your content is of poor quality
In some instances, search engines are unable to crawl and index your website correctly. In other instances, your website does have the right content, but it is not what your target customers are looking for. Both situations require a different approach to improving your website’s visibility in the search engine results pages (SERPs). To put it another way, a technical SEO audit is not the same as a content audit.
A technical SEO audit focuses on the technical aspects of your website, while a content audit involves analysing the written material on your website to see if it is relevant, informative and fits the purpose of your website.
In this article, we will look at which audit your website may need. Bloom Agency can help you to identify the issues with your website through our SEO audit servicesand technical SEO services.
What Is a Technical SEO Audit?
A technical SEO audit is used to identify the issues that are preventing your website from being crawled and indexed by search engines correctly.
A technical SEO audit usually includes a review of crawlability and indexing, broken links, redirects, website speed, mobile-friendliness, XML sitemaps, canonical tags, structured data and website architecture.
Website architecture is especially important if your website has undergone a redesign or rebuild, or if you are migrating your website to a new system. It is also important if you have launched a new website with a significant number of new pages.
When Do You Need a Technical SEO Audit?
You may need to think about conducting a technical SEO audit if certain pages are not appearing in Google search results, if you have recently migrated or redesigned your website and there are drops in organic search traffic.
If you see that certain pages are not appearing in search results, a technical SEO audit can help to identify why this might be happening. Broken links and redirects can also affect the way that Google views your website, as can poor website performance.
For example, if you run an e-commerce website or a large business-to-consumer (B2C) or business-to-business (B2B) website with multiple landing pages, there may be multiple pages affected by one issue. As such, it is important to take a holistic approach when looking at the technical SEO of your website.
A specialist [Technical SEO service]can help to identify any technical issues that might be affecting the performance of your website in search engines and to decide which technical issues to address first.
What Is a Content Audit?
A content audit is used to look at the written content on your website. It is performed to establish whether the content is relevant, informative, appropriate and fits the purpose of your website. It is common for businesses to end up with irrelevant blog posts, duplicate service pages, poor-quality landing pages and articles that no longer reflect what the business does. It can be easy to continue to publish new content without thinking about whether you still need the old content.
A content audit can help to identify which blog posts to update or replace, which service pages to consolidate and which pieces of content should no longer be published. This enables you to make the most of the content on your website so that it supports your marketing activities and achieves your marketing objectives.
When Do You Need a Content Audit?
You may need to think about conducting a content audit if your website is getting impressions but few clicks, if your blog posts are no longer getting views or if you have multiple pages optimised for similar keywords. You may need a content audit if your content is getting views but failing to get enquiries or sales.
For example, if you run a digital marketing agency and have multiple articles about the same subject without explaining how your services can help your customers, a content audit could help you to see where you could improve the content on your website in order to support your customers’ journeys from blog posts about digital marketing to your service pages.
The aim of a content audit is not to create more blog posts. Instead, it is to make the content that you already have more relevant, informative and focused on the needs of your customers in order to improve your search engine performance.
Technical SEO Audit vs. Content Audit: The Key Differences
As you can see, a technical SEO audit and a content audit are very different.
Technical SEO Audit: Focuses on your website’s technical health, including indexing, crawlability, broken links, and page speed. It helps search engines access and understand your website.
Content Audit: Focuses on content quality, relevance, and search intent. It helps ensure your pages provide useful information and attract the right audience.
Key Difference: A technical SEO audit checks whether your website works well for search engines, while a content audit checks whether your content works well for your audience.
Which Audit Should You Choose First?
If you are unsure which audit your website needs, it is usually best to base your decision on the symptoms that you are seeing on your website.
You may want to choose a technical SEO audit if:
- You are not seeing the web pages that you want to appear in search results
- You have recently redesigned your website
- You have seen drops in your organic search traffic that might be caused by technical issues
- You may want to choose a content audit if:
- Your website is technically sound but your articles and landing pages are not getting views and clicks
- You have seen drops in your organic search traffic that might be caused by issues with your content
- You want to improve the relevance of your content to your audience and to search engines
- You might want to choose both if there are technical issues with your website and if some of your content is not relevant or is poorly optimised.
For example, a service page might simultaneously have poor content and technical issues such as indexing problems or poor internal linking.
In this case, a technical SEO audit and a content audit would both be beneficial. The technical SEO audit would establish whether Google could see the service page, while the content audit would establish whether the service page should even be there. The two audits could then be used to create a list of recommendations for improving your website, based on the impact of the issues and the effort required to fix them.
Why Do You Need Professional SEO Audit Services?
Automated tools can highlight potential problems, but they do not always take into account the issues that are actually affecting your business. A good SEO audit service will interpret the data from crawlability and indexing reports and combine it with information about your organic search performance, the keywords that you are targeting and your content and landing page performance in order to give you recommendations that are relevant to your business. Bloom Agency can help you to see what the issues with your SEO are and what changes you should make based on the current state of your website. Whether you need a technical SEO audit, a content audit or something else, our expert team will give you the information that you need in order to make the right changes to your website.
How Often Should You Audit Your Website?
How often you should audit your website depends on your circumstances. Some businesses have larger websites or publish more content than others. Some businesses also change more frequently – for example, businesses that operate e-commerce sites or that publish a lot of landing pages for different services may need to review their SEO more frequently than businesses that have smaller websites or that do not update their websites as often. In general, it is a good idea to take a broader look at your SEO every few months in order to see if there are any new issues that need to be addressed. It can also be worth taking a closer look at your technical SEO if you have recently migrated or redesigned your website. It is also worth conducting a content audit if you start to see drops in the performance of your website or if your circumstances change – for example, if you start to offer different services or if you target a different audience. As such, rather than following a fixed schedule, it is a good idea to keep an eye out for changes in your website and in your performance.
Conclusion:
Find the Right Audit for Better SEO Performance
A technical SEO audit helps to ensure that Google can crawl and index your website correctly, while a content audit helps to ensure that your content is relevant and informative. A technical SEO audit should be conducted if your web pages are not appearing in SERPs, while a content audit should be conducted if your web pages are not getting views and clicks once they appear in SERPs. If both issues are affecting your website, you should conduct both types of audit. Bloom Agency can help you to understand what issues are affecting your website through our [SEO audit services] and [technical SEO services]
Not sure which areas of your SEO need attention?
Contact Bloom Agency to discuss your website and our [Technical SEO services]. We can help you to understand what is holding your website back and what you should do next.
Frequently Asked Questions
1.Is a technical SEO audit the same as a content audit?
No – a technical SEO audit looks at the technical issues affecting your website, while a content audit looks at the written content on your website.
2. Can a content audit improve Google rankings?
A content audit can help to identify issues with your content that can then be resolved in order to improve your performance in the SERPs, although it should not be thought of as a method for improving Google rankings.
3. Should I conduct a technical SEO audit before publishing more content?
If your website has issues with crawling or indexing, or if it has recently been migrated or redesigned, it might be best to start with a technical SEO audit. If your website is technically sound, a content audit can help to identify the topics that you should write about.
4. What does a complete SEO audit include?
A complete SEO audit will depend on your website, but it may involve a technical audit, on-page SEO, a content audit, a linking audit, a review of your organic search performance and a number of other considerations.
Neetu Wadhwa is the Director of Bloom Agency, a Mumbai-based full-service digital marketing and web development company. With a strong focus on performance, innovation, and strategy, she leads the agency in delivering SEO, web design, and growth marketing solutions that drive measurable business outcomes.
Rahul M.
B2B Service Provider