How To Run A SaaS Content Audit [Step-by Step]

Performing a proper SaaS content audit for SEO consists of assessing each webpage and determining whether and what changes are needed to improve its performance in search

Performing a SaaS content audit is easy if your blog consists of a few dozen webpages, but if you have hundreds or even thousands of pages, you will need a dedicated plan and allocate resources for execution.

Hubspot has over 24K indexable pages, yet their historical optimization efforts increased the page visits to old blog posts by nearly 106%. ¹ For blogs that are practically content libraries, sometimes even less is more – FinancialMentor.com tripled their search traffic by deleting a third of their blog content. ²

In this article, we will demystify content performance benchmarks for SaaS companies and provide a detailed guide on reviewing data, developing a content plan, starting an audit, and monitoring the results.

When is the Right Time for an SEO Content Audit?

Review your content’s key performance indicators monthly to identify your best and worst performers, and every three months (or after a Google algorithm change), assess your content as a whole to see how you can improve  lower-performing articles.

If you have a lot of existing content (hundreds to thousands of pages), you should dedicate some time for content audits each month to avoid bulk changes and lost in translation errors.

Not time-bound indicators for a content audit are low traffic and low conversions. Those KPIs reveal either low visibility (people aren’t seeing your content) or low value (people aren’t convinced to make a purchase).

Here is an example of a webpage that isn’t ranking for any keywords (therefore doesn’t appear in search result pages on Google), indicating poor performance.

Even if your articles are performing well, if you have an adequate amount of them, you can pause the creation of new ones until you’ve maximized the results for the old ones.

For example, by interlinking them or building more backlinks — these actions signal to Google that a single webpage is logically connected to other webpages on your website – it signals that it is valuable to third-party websites as well.

How to check your SEO performance

• You can check your SEO performance with SEO tools (Ahrefs or Semrush, Google Search Console, and Google Analytics 4). In Ahrefs or Semrush, check the number of keywords that the page is ranking for and their positions, your backlink profile, and internal links. 

• In Google Search Console, check the total number of clicks and impressions, average CTR, and the top queries and pages.

• In GA4, you can set up specific Events to track conversions for each webpage, so you know which articles are bringing in leads. Events are web interactions such as clicks, scrolls, or purchases that indicate a visitor has completed a desired action.

We will go more in-depth on the data you need to analyze in the following section of the article.

It’s not easy defining “low performing” – for smaller SaaS companies, the “more the merrier” mantra is always present, while for larger companies, one qualified lead can make a difference in the monthly sales report.

However, First Pages’s reports ^{3 4} reveal valuable benchmarks:

B2B SaaS Engagement Rate	61%
% Change in Organic Traffic	41%
Number of Transactional Keywords on Page 1	41%
Conversion Rate (Visitor to Lead)	2.10%
Lead to MQL	41%
MQL to SQL	51%

Now that you have a North star to approximately guide you, here is your ultimate SaaS content audit checklist:

How to Conduct a Content Audit for Your SaaS Website in 4 Steps – A Checklist

Review and Record Important Page Data & Information

In this section, we will outline the most important content performance metrics, and how to sort and measure them:

A. SEO Metrics

Start with your oldest webpage if you don’t know where to begin. 

• Prepare a content audit sheet where you will keep track of all your URLs and performance metrics.

• Place the webpage link in Ahrefs and check the “Organic keywords” tab to find the number of keywords that the article ranks for. If there are few to no relevant keywords here, this webpage needs further investigation to see whether it needs a content or SEO boost, or you should say goodbye to it.

• Check the backlinks tab to see if you are getting relevant or spammy links. If there are no links or most are spammy, mark that in your sheet.

• Check the number of clicks and total impressions in your Google Search Console for the same page.

Clicks and impressions should rise steadily with time, but if you are seeing a significant drop or overall low performance, consider this page for a content audit.

If you’ve set up events in your GA4 and tracked conversions, make sure to include them in your sheet. If the article isn’t converting, you need to optimize it for conversions with strong clickable CTAs.

B. On-Page SEO

URL slugs, titles, and meta descriptions give the search engine and readers a clear idea of what the page is about. Missing, duplicate or poor ones can lead to issues with crawling and indexing. Vague ones will affect both ranking and clicks.

With tools such as Screaming Frog, you can perform a bulk check (500 URLs in the free version) to find common on-site SEO issues. 

• In Screaming Frog, find the “issues” tab, which will outline all the on-site SEO errors by type and priority. Alternatively, you can filter for specific issues on the left, such as missing or duplicate meta descriptions.

C. Technical SEO

• For a technical SEO audit, check for broken internal links, noindex tags, mobile friendliness, and page speed. In Screaming Frog, you can get more information about your inlinks and outlinks for each URL, noindex tags, and much more.

Since 2016 Google has started crawling and indexing websites using their Googlebot Smartphone crawl agent, accessing the page as a mobile device, so if content isn’t accessible via mobile, it will no longer be indexed.

• Go to  “Page Speed Insights,”  and paste the link of your website for a full overview of its page speed and mobile-friendliness, with specific issues flagged and recommendations highlighted.

Ensure your website works on mobile, keep sentences and paragraphs short to make it easier to read on a screen, and that buttons are easy to tap. Use clear photos and graphics to break the page up visually and demonstrate points.

D. Content Quality

When it comes to content quality, the main factors to consider and manually analyze are:

• Low-quality, AI-generated, or irrelevant content 
• Content gaps and refresh opportunities
• Content alignment with ICP (Ideal Customer Persona) and buyer stage
• Proper CTA (Call to Action) presence

• Replace or remove irrelevant, thin, or clearly AI-generated content that increases bounce rates. Avoid trite phrases such as “digital landscape,” “harness the power of,” and “rapidly changing market,” and focus on being precise and clear.

Analyzing competitors’ SaaS websites and determining what they rank for and what they don’t can help you find content gaps and refresh opportunities. 

• Use the “gap analysis” feature in Ahrefs or see if your competitors have explored a relevant topic you didn’t.  Also, check the top results for the topics/keywords they cover in the SERP (Search Engine Result Page) to see if there are any important sections your content might be missing.

For most accurate results refresh the SERP overview tab in Ahrefs.

• Remember to perform a SERP analysis or template comparison to see whether your webpage’s structure matches the top results in the SERP.

For example, you have an article targeting the keyword “internal link building tool” while the SERP shows all landing pages in the top results for that keyword. The format (in this case, an article vs. all landing pages) might be the reason you aren’t in the top results – the format didn’t match the search intent fully.

Besides being aligned with the search intent and results on the SERP, make sure you are in sync with the ICP and buyer stage. If someone is googling “Ahrefs alternatives” and your article is starting with “What is keyword research?” you are targeting the wrong audience.

Without proper CTAs, your content efforts are “water down the drain”, because people won’t be urged to sign up and use your product.  We recommend using a sidebar for desktop users and article body banners for mobile for your CTAs.

For blog posts, push soft conversions like “pricing” or “newsletter signup” instead of more direct CTAs such as “book a demo” since these aren’t sales-qualified leads but warm leads. Leave the stronger CTAs for your “money pages.”

E. Content Decisions

• Add a tab with “content decisions” to your sheet. Based on the data and analysis so far, you can easily decide whether the content should be deleted, optimized, or completely rewritten.

2. Make a Content Plan

Based on the data sheet, make a new content plan for your SaaS website. Your priority list should be:

1. Delete/unindex irrelevant or low-performing content
2. Optimize existing content that has a chance of ranking better
3. Add new content for topics and gaps you’ve found

3. Start the Content Audit

Unindexing Old Content:

Many websites have “zombie” pages like irrelevant archive pages, empty categories, or old press releases, apart from “thin content” pages (with little to no content). Removing lower-quality content will help increase the overall quality of the site 

To unindex old content, you can:

1. Request removal in the “Removals” section of your Google Search Console. If you own the page, you can completely unindex it from Google’s search results.
2. Edit your robots.txt file to disallow the crawling of specific outdated URLs.  This won’t remove them from the current index but will prevent future crawling.
3. Add a <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”> tag to the outdated page to directly tell a search engine not to index that page. However, this is just a suggestion for Google.
4. Set up a 301 redirect: If you’ve updated the content at a new URL, set up a 301 permanent redirect from the old URL to the new one. There are also 302 redirects, used in situations where there is a temporary removal — such as a maintenance period. However, 301 is better for permanent changes since it passes full link equity (ranking power) to the redirected page, and a stronger canonicalization signal to Google.

To prevent Google from indexing certain pages in the future without needing to remove them later, edit your robots.txt file to disallow the crawling of specific outdated URLs.  This won’t remove them from the current index but will prevent future crawling.

You can also add a <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”> tag to the outdated page to directly tell a search engine not to index that page.

If you’ve updated the content at a new URL, set up a 301 permanent redirect from the old URL to the new one. 302 redirects are used in situations where there is a temporary URL change — such as a maintenance period. A 301 redirect should be used for permanent changes since it passes full link equity (ranking power) to the redirected page, and a stronger canonicalization signal to Google.

1. Content Optimization:

For those pieces of content that need optimization, keep the following best practices in mind:

1. Optimize keywords and other on-page factors for underperforming content
2. Creating content pillars for internal linking
3. Replacing low-quality sections
4. Reorganizing content for better flow
5. Improving content design

If your webpage isn’t ranking for many relevant keywords, make sure to add content that uses your primary and secondary keywords based on competitor research, SERP results or tool suggestions. If you want to skip the manual work, you can use tools such as Surfer SEO to add keywords based on the top-performing results on the SERP, but manual editing will produce better content.

Make sure you include your keywords in the title tag, and the first 100 words.

Content pillars of a blog are the key topics around which your blog’s content is organized. Usually there is a main topic that can be segmented into clusters and articles, while internal links show Google how these topics are connected and in what order. 

 Pillars are a great way to organize your content, boost topical authority and rank higher in multiple SERPs. You can reduce the bounce rate, improve user-friendliness and maintain consistency by connecting and interlinking your topics.

• Reorganizing and removing certain sections of your content can positively impact your SEO – the end goal is for the reader and Googlebot to get to the “meat of the article” first. Avoid unnecessary or long sections on “What is X” especially when it is a “How to article” or the target audience is already very familiar with the topic.
• Replacing low-quality sections with examples, statistics, new points of view, or expert thoughts will make the article stand out from the competition in the SERP and align with EEAT (Google’s guidelines on Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness when evaluating web content) You can help further signal to Google that your webpage has EEAT through the design of your content.

2. Content Design

1. Looks good visually with proper headings and design elements
2. Is easy to read with loads of spaces and images
3. Has a table of contents
4. Has author pages and author bylines
5. Has a short and concise FAQs section
6. Has conversion elements
7. Has a “Read more” section with relevant webpages

Add new content templates/designs for new types of content, such as comparison articles, roundups, and feature articles. With pre-designed templates, your webpages will be easier to fill in, visually appealing and have unified strong CTAs.

Read more about the potential of blog redesign in our SEO redesign case study.

If you’ve updated a page, but the new version isn’t showing in the SERP, use Google’s “Refresh Outdated Content” tool. The tool does not actually remove the page from Google’s index—it just updates the snippet and cached version shown in the search.

4. Monitor and Compare Key Metrics

About a month after you’ve cleaned up your content by deleting old pages and improving existing ones, it’s time to recheck your performance metrics.

Check the following:

1. Performance Metrics – Impressions, clicks, keyword rankings, backlinks in Ahrefs, Google Search Console and GA4 to see how Google has viewed your changes
2. Additional Metrics –Time on page, bounce rate, etc, on GA4 to see how users are interacting with your changes
3. Top Funnel Conversions – If your articles are optimized for soft conversions, measure them as well in GA4.  Blog traffic usually brings visits that don’t want to convert yet — so it should be judged more on “soft conversions” like gated content downloads, or email signup, rather than direct sales or conversions.
4. Bottom Funnel Conversions – Track the number of people who have signed up for freemiums, demos or trials via GA4 events.

• Check out our full service SEO case study for more first-hand best practices.

References

1. https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/case-study-on-the-hubspot-content-marketing-strategy-by-narrato/251308543#8
2. https://www.financialmentor.com/about-us/press-room/audio-interviews
3. https://firstpagesage.com/reports/seo-benchmarks-by-industry-fc/
4. https://firstpagesage.com/seo-blog/average-saas-conversion-rates/