Any digital marketing expert will tell you that in SEO, the most important part of your strategy is going to be your content. There may be many other factors influencing your overall but your content is by far the most influential, controlling the other factors with its optimization and strong writing.

Content quality is important for several reasons. It helps search engines understand what it is you’re writing about and where to rank it on SERPs, encourages engagement, which boosts your rankings even further, and attracts backlinks, which can help establish the authority of your site.

So how do you evaluate your rankings? How do you analyze and optimize your content’s quality to drive more traffic and revenue?

Common SEO Content Problems

Well-written content is one of the most profitable drivers for businesses in the digital age. You have to make sure that it is well-written in the first place. If your content is missing the mark for relevant phrase ranking, you’re going to suffer from poor search performance.

Here are some of the most common SEO content issues.

• Improper Keyword Targeting. Many companies start out on the wrong foot by targeting the wrong word or phrase. These phrases either don’t match the search intent of their customers or are irrelevant to the main point of the content.
• Poor Understanding of Search Intent. If your content covers too wide of a range of information or too many disparate topics, it won’t rank as well for particular SERPs and may affect your ranking.
• Not Enough Information. On the other side of this issue, not providing enough information can mean searchers with specific intent won’t click, which can drop your ranks as well. Your content needs to be long enough to fully address the issues covered.
• Insufficient Structural Quality. No one likes to read bad writing. If your content is riddled with spelling and grammatical mistakes, your readers aren’t going to stay on the page very long.

Beginning Your SEO Content Analysis

So, you’ve identified some of the issues with your content, or at least that your content has issues. What now? Now, you start a comprehensive SEO content analysis. This means working in two distinct steps.

1. Evaluate your existing content for issues.
2. Evaluate upcoming content and ideas for issues.

Here’s how to do that.

Evaluate Your Existing Content

In this part of the analysis, you’re going to go through your content to look for issues:

• Duplicate content includes template content and duplicated copy from other pages.
• Keyword cannibalization, or overuse of a particular keyword or keyword phrase, can lead to confusion about page content.
• Decaying content may have out-of-date information or are experiencing technical issues that are reducing traffic.

You’ll also want to look for pages that have issues with their organic click-through rate (CTR), which can point you toward issues or let you know that your audience simply isn’t interested in some of the content.

Evaluate Upcoming Content and Ideas

Once you’ve assessed and addressed the issues in your existing content, you need to create a content strategy for future pieces that implement good SEO practices. Look at the current high-ranking pieces on your target SERPs and identify the patterns leading to their success:

• Heading patterns. Most top-ranking pages will have similar headings that share phrasing or language usage. Identify why these headings are succeeding for that particular query and implement that into your own headings.
• “People also ask.” This section, which pops up in Google’s SERPs to help querents find their next piece of content, can point you toward the information you need to give in order to exceed your competition for the top spots.
• “Searches related to.” Like the “People also ask” section, “Searches related to” can help you identify information gaps you can fill.

Using Content Analysis Tools

Content analysis tools are specifically built to address SEO issues. A good program will show you accurate, up-to-date information about your site’s ranking and offer suggestions for future content creation strategies. Many rely on AI and algorithmic analysis to offer you as much information as possible to drive your content’s success.

If you are creating content that’s well-written, properly targeted, and attractive to readers, you’ll see your pages’ rankings soar.