A SaaS content audit is the practice of reviewing a SaaS website's content marketing for its performance in both search (SEO) and for other marketing channels like social media, email marketing, and more. The SaaS content audit is a way of reviewing content through the lens of a checklist to determine what may need to be updated with the content itself.
Key Takeaways
- A SaaS content audit is the practice of evaluating and reviewing content for its comprehensiveness, uniqueness, and alignment to CTAs that drive trial sign ups, MQLs, and SQLs.
- The best way to ensure that your content won’t lose rank in Google is to address questions quickly, avoid fluff or “long content” that’s not necessary, and to ensure your content is structured in a highly readable fashion.
- Content audits should take place every 3-4 months. And should use the discretion of analysis of your editorial staff, SEO team, and internal experts to review for degradation or over saturation of the core message when compared to competitors.
When to Perform a SaaS Content Audit
There are a few key indicators that would suggest it’s time to perform a SaaS content audit:
- Organic search traffic is dropping: When organic search traffic starts dropping, this might be an indicator that it’s time to review your content.
- The average date your content was published is old: If you have content that’s more than a year old, it’s more than likely that it’s time to perform an audit and create a comprehensive content updating initiative.
- Conversion rates are dropping: If you’re seeing MQL or SQL decreases that previously came from content engagement, it may be time to start reviewing your content.
In the SaaS space, regardless of what industry that you’re selling into, there’s a strong likelihood that if you’re experiencing traffic drops or conversion rate drops, that your content is simply out of date or not saying anything impactful to the end User.
Here are some metrics that you should track with your content every month:
- Impressions
- CTR (click-through rate)
- Signup rate (MQL and SQL velocity)
- Average position in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)
- Keyword growth
- Keyword decline
Organic search traffic drops
Organic search traffic drops are going to be a strong indicator that your content is simply not aligning with Google’s recent core updates. In general, it’s important to know what Google is looking for (and why they’re ranking content). Based on Google’s quality rater guidelines, here’s a simplification of what Google and other search engines are looking for:
- Helpful content: Your content should address User questions in a quick, easy, and digestible way. Without having to “over optimize” for search engine optimization. And to directly align with helping your Users with the questions that they have as early as possible (answer questions toward the top of articles rather than the bottom).
- Unique insights: Google wants to reward websites that bring unique and new insights to the internet. Historically, that’s always been the case. However, in the age of AI, it’s even more important than ever. Google doesn’t want you to “replicate” others, rather, have a unique perspective that’s well-researched and cited with clear and authoritative sources.
What I like to say is that often, Google is looking for exactly what your end Users are probably looking for. A resource that helps them solve a problem, in a clear way, and in a way that’s completely up to date with technology, tools, and industry standards.
MQL and SQL drops
Funny enough, if your SaaS content is getting distributed outside of Google, like on LinkedIn or through email newsletters, and it’s dropping in performance—it may be the same reasons as to why Google dropped the content (in rankings).
That reason: lack of unique insights and up-to-date insights.
MQL and SQL drops with content could mean that your messaging is simply over saturated. What once was unique may become commonplace. That’s truly always the case when it comes to the internet and technology. Which means it may be time for you to take the initiative to update your content for a fresh perspective.
Related: SaaS SEO Guide
4 Ways to Perform the SaaS Content Audit
Here are five simple ways to perform a SaaS content audit:
1. Look at the contents published date
If you’re using WordPress or another CMS, it’s easy to organize content by its published date. It’s not uncommon for us to see SaaS companies have 2-3 year old content in their resource hubs. By simply reviewing the oldest content first and determining whether it needs to be updated, deleted, or rewritten, it can be a great starting point.
Always look at the message of the content and determine if it “feels old” or “feels new still.” From there, determine what bucket it should go into.
For us, we usually review every article for a number of factors and then place tasks that need to be done into a spreadsheet and roadmap.
2. Look at the content that’s dropped in rankings
Using tools like Ahrefs or SEMRush, we can easily see when certain pages start to lose visibility in SERPs (search engine results pages). The only nice part of how Google works now (really this began around 2022 with the Helpful Content Processor) is that losing ranking often tells us that our content needs to be updated.
Most commonly, what we see is that there’s more than one example in the top 5 position spaces that speak to certain parts of a subject matter. And then after comparing our content that’s dropped in ranking, we can see we’ve missed that topic.
In general, this would be considered a “content gap” that we have on the page itself. However, larger rank position movements, like dropping entirely out of the SERPs, may indicate that something else is going wrong. For example, that our content is getting us penalized in Google’s systems as being extremely unhelpful.
In both cases, reviewing the content for its helpfulness to the core question that User has (the alignment of the content and the keyword) would be beneficial.
3. Look for a lack of comprehensiveness
If you can audit your content for comprehensiveness, this can give you some insights into what needs to be adjusted. Comprehensiveness should include things like how well the article reads. How easy it is to fully understand from Users. Whether you’re using internal and external links to cite and help Users. And whether you’re helping the User by answering all related questions that they might have.
Key things to look for:
- Related internal links
- External links that save Users time
- Related questions that are semantically relevant
- Citations and additional resources from reputable sources
- Complete bibliography of your findings
- Unique insights that display your unique ability to answer the question
Funny enough, once more, Google has accidentally created the best framework for evaluating content through their EEAT (expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) factors.
4. Audit clusters of content subject matters
SaaS companies know the idea of building out resource hubs to be the most helpful to Users. A resource hub around starting a business, as an example, will have a fairly vast ocean of opportunities to speak to. From starting an LLC to selling the business and everything in between.
It may be useful to perform a content hub evaluation to determine if you’re both answering the individual question (the page or individual piece of content) in a helpful way. And also doing that across the entire content hub for that individual subject.
Subsequently, this task or initiative may need to be performed before you can truly create an internal link audit and connect semantically related pieces together.
To perform this, use tools like Ahrefs or SEMRush to build out a topical authority map and analyze your own content hub against that.
Determine if the articles need to be refreshed, slightly updated, or completely rewritten.
Related: What is Topical Authority?
What to Look for in Your SaaS Content Audit
Using some deep discretion and time, you’ll want to review your content for some of the following things (consider this a checklist):
Your contents unique ability to answer questions
- In the first 500 words, does it address and answer the Users core question?
- Does your content contain a “hook” to get the reader to continue reading?
- Does your content uniquely address a question that the top 10 results in SERPs do not?
- Does your content use an interesting anecdote or story to illustrate a point?
- Does it efficiently say the main point of the piece? Or is it “fluffy?”
- Does your content have a main keyword that it’s clearly targeting?
- Does the body answer the keywords search intent?
- Does the first paragraph of each section clearly explain what the reader will learn?
- Does the content offer a unique perspective using mental models, frameworks, expert quotes, or interviews?
- Does the content use screenshots and illustrations to hit a point home? Does each section transition seamlessly into each other?
- Does the writing speak to the reader at their expertise level?
- Does the content clarify why the reader should trust the writer's opinion? (E.g., anecdotes, expert opinion, sources)
Your contents unique ability to be valuable for SEO
- Does your article have internal links that use semantic relationships?
- Are there other interlinking opportunities that you should include?
- Does the body contain any spammy or irrelevant external links to remove?
- Are your internal links overly keyword-optimized?
- Are there any questions that Users put into Google that you can answer?
- Does Google Search Console show new questions that your content can be updated to answer?
- Is any keyword cannibalization happening with other content that’s on the website?
- Does the content make it clear why the reader should trust the writer's opinion? (E.g., anecdotes, expert opinion, sources)
- Is the content using the most recent insights and perspectives that are the most up to date in terms of tools, industry metrics, best practices, standards, and more?
Your contents unique ability to convert a user (free trials/MQL/SQL)
- Does the article contain a unique asset, like a free template, download, or tool that the User would want to sign up to receive?
- Does the article directly align with a clear reason to use your SaaS product?
- Does the article contain a logical next step for the reader?
- Does the article show off the value of your product throughout the article or at the bottom of it?
Other SaaS Content Audit Questions
Other common questions about SaaS content audits:
How often should SaaS content be audited?
In reality, if you’re marketing into any industry or space with a SaaS product, there’s going to be steep competition that’s coming in against you. As a result, you’re going to want to review your content very frequently for drops in performance or for loss of unique insights.
In general, this would be every 3-6 months that a complete report would get generated to determine what needs to be updated based on outdated insights or loss of authoritativeness from a number of on-page factors.
How long does a SaaS content audit take?
The initial report that gets generated may only take a few hours. However, once you’ve bucketed your content into a number of cohorts, for example, content that needs to be either updated or completely rewritten—you may find yourself spending a good amount of time on the audit itself.
Unfortunately, there is no great tool to know when your content has degraded in terms of authoritativeness. You’ll need to search every individual keyword or analyze what your competitors are saying against every article you have. This process will help you determine where the “true” gaps are with the content.
Is it worthwhile to hire copywriters to help with the updating process?
Yes. SEO teams can be great resources to help identify content gaps and optimization needs that help to increase overall information gain and similarity scoring against existing content pieces and “the market” (or SERPs). From there, it’s easier for copywriters to know exactly what to do and add value in a highly efficient way.
Should I perform a SaaS content audit for AI-written content?
While Google surely says it in a different way, AI-content does not work. The reason? It unfortunately doesn’t bring new insights to the table. The way that the current LLM models work is that they utilize historical insights to gather and rewrite insights. As a result, for Google, this looks like “you saying the same thing as others.” Which simply doesn’t work any longer for SEO.
As a result, we recommend that you either rewrite, delete, or edit the AI-written content. Audit the content for the same things that we’ve discussed above: unique insights, clearly cited sources from reputable research, and ensuring that the content isn’t missing basic points to be fully comprehensive and clear.
Other SaaS SEO Resources
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November 16, 2024
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