How to Do a Site Content Audit for Your Blog [LNIM102]

by | Jun 6, 2016 | Podcast | 0 comments

How to Do a Site Content Audit for Your Blog [LNIM102]

Once you have been blogging for a while, content accumulates — and some of it goes stale or breaks. A site content audit can benefit your readers and improve how Google sees your site. In this episode, Mark responds to listener Chris's question about site audits and also reveals his secret project: a beginner affiliate marketing course at LateNightAffiliate.com.

What You'll Learn in This Episode

  • How to find and fix broken links using external crawlers
  • Why WordPress creates duplicate content and how to suppress it
  • How to optimize on-page SEO for every piece of essential content
  • Why pages under 1,000 words may be hurting your site authority
  • How to use Google Search Console and Ahrefs for off-page auditing
  • Why site speed matters for rankings and which tools help

Episode Summary

Mark has been helping friends launch websites — Brady's HelpfulPharmacist.com and his wife Paula's BallCapMom.com — and those experiences are feeding into a new project: Late Night Affiliate, a step-by-step affiliate marketing course for beginners.

Listener Chris reached out asking about site content audits, and Mark delivers a comprehensive checklist.

Mark's Site Content Audit Checklist

  1. Audit broken links. Use an external broken link checker like Integrity (Mac) or Link Sleuth (PC) and also install a broken link plugin for WordPress. Fix or remove every dead link.
  2. Check for duplicate content. WordPress category pages, archive pages, and tag pages create duplicate content. Use the Yoast SEO plugin to no-index these so Google does not see competing versions of the same content.
  3. Optimize on-page SEO. Go back through every essential piece of content and make sure it gets a green light from Yoast SEO with properly targeted keywords.
  4. Ensure content length. All essential pages should be at least 1,000 words. Consider no-indexing anything under 500 words that is not bringing in traffic.
  5. Use Google Search Console. Register your site and check for thin content warnings, spam issues, and other site health problems Google identifies.
  6. Audit backlinks with Ahrefs. Generate a list of untrustworthy links pointing to your site and submit them to Google's disavow tool.
  7. Improve site speed. Slow sites drive visitors away. Use caching plugins like WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache, and consider a CDN like Cloudflare.

What's Changed Since This Episode

Mark recorded this in 2016. The fundamentals of a site content audit — broken links, duplicate content, on-page SEO, backlink health, site speed — remain essential, but the standards and tools have evolved.

Google's Core Web Vitals have replaced older speed metrics. Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint, and Cumulative Layout Shift are now the primary performance signals. Check them in Google Search Console and PageSpeed Insights.

E-E-A-T signals matter more. A modern content audit should assess whether your pages demonstrate real-world experience, display author credentials, and meet Google's Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness criteria — especially in YMYL niches.

Screaming Frog has become the industry standard for technical site crawls, identifying broken links, redirect chains, missing metadata, and thin content in a single pass. It is more comprehensive than the tools Mark mentions in this episode.

AI visibility is a new audit dimension. With Google's AI Overviews and tools like ChatGPT pulling from web content, structured data, clear answers, and proper schema markup now factor into content audit best practices.

Resources Mentioned

Listen and Subscribe

Listen to Late Night Internet Marketing on Apple Podcasts or subscribe at latenightim.com/internet-marketing-podcast/. Have a question for Mark? Call the digital recorder at 214-444-8655 or drop a comment below.

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