SaaS Content Audit + Powerful Checklist for 2024

In this article, I want to share the full content audit process we do for our clients.

My calls with potential clients start with a brief content audit – I tap into Ahrefs, Google, client’s blog (when I don’t have access to Google Analytics and Google Search Console) and review what they’ve been doing so far, what have they been doing right as well as wrong.

What I see most of the time is the lack of strategy. There’s a website, a blog, dozens of articles (written well I must say) but they are not bringing traffic let alone sign-ups. If this is the case for you, a good SaaS content audit is what you need.

Over the past few years at Quoleady, we’ve focused on creating content for SaaS businesses and helping them generate leads via their B2B blogs.

Our SaaS SEO agency worked with many well-known SaaS companies such as Monday.com, Pandadoc, GetVoip, Expandi and others.

Through working with dozens of clients, we came up with a custom SaaS content marketing strategy focused on high-intent content. I strongly recommend reading about it as it may change the course of your content marketing game.

Also, if you have a question about a B2B SaaS content marketing blog and its best practices feel free to book a free consultation and we’ll be happy to help you. No strings attached.

But now, let’s dig deep into website content audit.

What is a SaaS content audit?

A SaaS content audit is a systematic review of all the content you’ve created thus far. It consists of analyzing and assessing all of your web pages and articles you’ve published.

Of course, the content audit itself won’t help you a lot if you just gather data about your content and don’t do anything about it. The goal is to improve your content as well as your current content marketing strategy.

With insights you get this way, you can determine your content strategy strengths and weaknesses and see where you have room for improvement.

Here are some questions to ask yourself before a content audit:

• Who is our target audience? What are their pain points?
• What do you want to achieve with your blog content? What are your long-term and short-term goals?
• How do you want to position your brand?

Why do you need to audit your content?

If you haven’t done a content audit recently, chances are it’s high time to do it!

I know that it can be time-consuming and that it’s hard to focus on auditing your old content while at the same time creating new content. But here I am to offer five good reasons for conducting a content audit:

1. First, a content audit helps you to see if your content matches your current marketing strategy and positioning.
2. It helps you to spot any outdated information and update it with relevant info.
3. Older blog posts tend to lose their Google ranking with time. A content audit can help you discover blogs that need to be improved or updated so that you can refresh your older articles to get back to the top of search engines. A website content audit can help you discover any gaps in the buyer’s journey that you haven’t covered with your content or topics that you’ve forgotten to cover but your competitors have them on their websites.
4. Finally, a content audit can actually save you time in the long run. Rather than stressing about new content not performing that well, you can put effort into updating old content and see instant results. It can be a good idea to do a content inventory from time to time to see what can be repurposed.

SaaS content audit levels: 

Conducting a content audit might seem overwhelming especially if you have a lot of content and you’re not sure where to start.

That’s why I like to break it down into six levels. Here’s how we do it for our clients:

1. SaaS content strategy audit

I’d first look at the bigger picture to see if your current content strategy aligns with your goals.

It’s safe to assume that your goal is to get more clients and boost sales of your SaaS product. In that case, the best SEO strategy is focusing on high-intent keywords to get more sign-ups.

High-intent keywords are targeting people that are at the bottom of the funnel and ready to purchase.

If you want to learn how to write high-intent blog posts that convert check out our guide on B2B SaaS content marketing tips.

One of the common content mistakes I see for SaaS companies is that they are not covering BOFU topics on their blog or covering the wrong BOFU topics like case studies.

Case studies are great in case you already have a potential customer that you send this case study to.

If someone comes to your blog from Google, they don’t care about your clients or case studies.

So when we are talking about SEO content that drives leads, the BOFU content you want to focus on is alternatives, listicles, comparisons, pricing and how-to product-led content.

If you are unsure whether you are covering the right BOFU content or if your BOFU content is covered at its capacity, consider consulting a SaaS content strategist.

The next step is to check whether you have a clear goal for each of the articles. What action do you expect from a reader? Is it sign up right away, download your content upgrade, sign up for a newsletter, or something else?

To illustrate this, here are some of the results we created for our clients.

Let me tell you about how the right keyword choice helped our client FullSession get 500 leads with just 16 articles. FullSession is a behavioral analytics software and its biggest competitor is HotJar.

We took advantage of their competitor and ranked FullSession article #1 on Google for the keyword “HotJar alternatives”, where we reviewed 5 other software tools, positioning FullSession as the best option. This BOFU keyword brings them qualified leads that are ready to buy. You can read the full case study here.

For our other client, Ringblaze, we increased blog traffic from 0 to 50k in just a few months, bringing them 650 leads. How did we do it?

We researched their competitors, other virtual phone systems, and we wrote a series of articles where we covered competitors’ alternatives and comparisons. That way, we made sure that Ringblaze pops up on Google every time someone is not satisfied with their virtual phone system and goes to look for an alternative.

In this case study, we explain in detail how we managed to do it so quickly and which keywords we used.

2. SaaS blog topics audit

What do your most successful content pieces have in common? Are some topics performing better than others? You should find out what your target audience reacts to the most!

A well-chosen topic helps to drive more traffic to your website. Check out the best SaaS content marketing blogs to get inspired.

The more clicks you can get in the search results, the better because the click-through rate (CTR) is a Google ranking factor. The search result with a page title nobody clicks through will go down in ranking because Google assumes that other blog posts better match a search intent.

Are you not satisfied with the CTR of your articles? Don’t worry, you don’t have to rewrite the whole article just yet. I suggest you start experimenting with your titles and changing them to see if CTR increases.

The best way to do this is through A/B testing to see which title generates more clicks.

On the other hand, try to think if there are any topics that are missing and that you should cover in more detail.

You can do this by analyzing your competitors’ websites or use Content Gap, Matching Terms reports on Arefs as well as Google predictions to see the most popular topics in your industry. (See the slide below.) Just keep in mind that when you choose a topic, it should be well aligned with your strategy.

3. SaaS SEO audit

Even great content can’t rank if your SEO is off.

Apart from keyword research and focusing on high-intent keywords as I already mentioned, you should also check technical SEO.

Check if your page loading speed is good enough. Get off the table all the tech issues like duplicates, canonicals, redirects, 404s, etc.

Make sure that your content is SEO optimized (consider using tools like Outranking.io or Surfer). Check if all your articles have a target keyword in the title and headings, optimize your image alt tags, optimize for featured snippet and add schema markup to get more of your content displayed in the search results.

That’s exactly what we did for our client GA Connector. With just a few tweaks we got them to appear on Google featured snippet as you can see below:

Also, follow the best practices for internal linking to bring organic traffic to your blog posts.

4. SaaS content writing audit 

The most important thing here is to understand the search intent. Understand what exactly people are looking for, what they want to read when they type the keyword and create an extensive article around it.

Write in simple language that’s easy to understand. Use casual everyday language, keep your sentences and paragraphs short.

Always make sure you are bringing value and that your content is helpful and educational. Keep your articles to the point, no water, just “meat” and value.

Content should be logical, structured and unique. Check the content quality with tools like Grammarly and Copyscape.

Read through your existing content and look for all info that’s not up-to-date. You should update any inaccurate or outdated content, whether it’s about your old offers that no longer exist or old stats that need to be refreshed.

And finally, CTA. Do you have enough of them? Is it easy for people to sign up?

You could also run an A/B test to see which CTA has the highest conversion rate.

When did you update your content last? Do you still have 2021 in the title? Maybe you have articles that have been sitting on the blog that haven’t been updated for years?

We audit our clients’ content on a regular basis. If you don’t update your articles with relevant information, they tend to lose their Google ranking and your competition can outperform you.

But the good thing is that with regular maintenance, we manage to boost organic traffic to our clients’ old blog content and keep their ranking high on search engines. So can you.

 5. SaaS blog design audit

SaaS marketing agencies know that high-quality content is not enough. Your website content should also be visually appealing if you want to improve user experience and decrease bounce rate.

Do you have enough white space?

Is the blog visually appealing, is the font easy to read?

Is the design consistent with your branding?

Can you see the sign-up button always no matter where you are in the blog post?

Do you have visible CTAs throughout the blog posts?

Let me share our client Expandi as an example here. We placed colorful banners with their CTA throughout the article, so that site visitors simply can’t miss them.

If you want to find more tips like this check out our detailed guide on SaaS content writing.

6. SaaS link building audit

Have you been building links consistently?

Remember that it’s not just about the number of links you can get. Quality always comes first.

Do you build links on quality platforms? Do you prioritize your blog URLs when building links?

Here are three things to consider when choosing a website for link building:

1. Domain authority – Websites with high domain authority are considered  more trustworthy. You can check DA using an SEO tool like Ahrefs or Moz.
2. Website traffic – You should make sure that the website has consistent organic traffic without sudden drops.
3. Niche – Choose a website that’s relevant to your product or service. It doesn’t have to be the exact same niche, but it should be somehow connected with your offer.

I’ve written a whole blog post on how to choose platforms for link building, so you can find more details there.

External backlinks are important but don’t forget about internal linking as well. Internal links can help you rank your new articles faster or boost the ranking of your existing content.

SaaS content checklist (for Google top results)

If you decide to audit content on your own, here’s a quick list to make sure you don’t forget anything.

1. Have you covered high-intent keywords on your blog?
2. Do the keywords you are covering help you build topical authority?
3. Are you answering user’s search intent in full with your article?
4. Are there content gaps you can cover?
5. Can you better organize your content adding clusters?
6. Do you have relevant updated stats, year features, tools’ pricing, etc.?
7. Is your blog post the same length as those ranking Google top-3 for the main keyword?
8. Do you have a main keyword in the URL slug, title, headings, throughout the article text?
9. Is your blog font easy to read, not too small/too big, enough white space between the lines?
10. Do you use short sentences, short paragraphs, easy to understand conversational language?
11. On a scale from 1 to 10 how valuable is your article compared to those that rank in the Google top-3? How can you make it more valuable?
12. Is the information you are sharing in your post based on experience and expertise?
13. Does the article sound trustworthy and authoritative?
14. Have you optimized for the featured snippet?
15. Have you added schema markup to your article?
16. Have you added an FAQ section (relevant “People also ask questions”) to your blog?
17. Do you have www.mysite.com/blog/main-keyword structure of your blog post URLs?
18. Is your website mobile friendly? Is the loading speed fast enough for mobile and desktop?
19. Is your tech SEO in place (duplicates, redirects, canonicals, robots.txt, etc.)?
20. Do you have internal backlinks within the blog? Can you link more of your blog posts and point to the articles that convert the best but need a ranking boost?
21. Do you put internal links to the articles that you published recently from older blog posts?
22. Do you have CTA in your article?
23. Do you have your tool #1 in the listicles/alternatives?
24. Are you building external links to support your blog articles from quality platforms?
25. Does your backlink profile have any low quality backlinks you should disavow?

How often should you audit your SaaS content?

It depends on many factors, but I’d say once every 6 months or at least once a year.

For critical articles (those driving the most sign-ups, the highest conversion) you should do it more often.

For example, the guys at Social Pilot update their “LinkedIn automation tools” article every couple of days or so.

They’ve published it years ago but every time I open it, it seems that is published just a couple of days ago (today is Dec 5th):

Summary

Before you start creating new content, I highly encourage you to analyze your current content assets and see what’s working and what’s not working.

Conducting a content audit was a game-changer for all the SaaS companies we’ve worked with. Updating their existing website brought them more traffic and leads, over a relatively short period of time.

If you need help with a content audit or your overall content marketing strategy, book a free consultation and let’s talk about your goals.

Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn if you have any questions.