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A Complete Guide to SaaS Content Marketing
August 7, 2024
Every content piece has a lifespan; statistics become outdated, facts evolve into myths, and even the best articles lose their appeal over time.
The best way to prevent this outcome and ensure your marketing content consistently delivers results is by revisiting them. And that’s where SaaS content audit comes in.
In this article, we will explain how a SaaS content audit can elevate your content game and detailed steps to conduct one.
SaaS content audit is a step-wise approach to evaluating each piece of content on your marketing channels—website, social media, product documentation, email templates—for performance, relevance, and accuracy.
The process usually involves creating an inventory of all your marketing content, reviewing them to see if they align with your brand goals, updating outdated information, and removing content that no longer serves a purpose.
A SaaS content audit can be comprehensive—covering every piece of content regardless of the format, channel, or when it was published.
Or sectional—covering only some parts or types of content on your website. For instance:
Besides blog posts and whitepapers, other auditable SaaS content formats include:
One of the top lead generation strategies for every SaaS business is content marketing—whether blogs, videos, infographics, or even report PDFs. However, it is quite easy to find yourself stuck with content filled with debunked myths and out-of-date statistics.
A successful content audit helps prevent these issues by ensuring your content stays fresh, eliminating inconsistencies, and addressing your audience’s evolving needs. Let’s break these down.
Your content is fresh only if relevant and packs the same punch as a recently published one. The opposite of this is outdated content with facts that are already relics of the past. Take TheRankMachine as a case study.
According to a 2017 SEO article by TheRankMachine, “Domain Age is a ranking factor & Google cares about your indexed age.”
Fast-forward to 2019. Google’s John Mueller clarified that domain age does not really help anything. Leading SEO sites like SEJ also followed suit and concluded that domain age is not part of the 200 ranking signals Google uses.
In this case, a routine content audit allows the team to review articles like this, updating outdated information with fresh insights to keep the content current.
Content incoherence is a common problem, especially for SaaS brands that started without a robust content team—a content strategist, a SaaS SEO, an experienced writer, an editor, and other crucial workflow members.
It’s usually a “Let’s hire a writer and populate our website first; we’ll sort the content marketing strategy out later.” However, that’s not a great idea. Content population brings up your website on search engines, but that’s all. There’s no structured content interlinking, no appropriate content clustering strategy, nothing.
This leads to content disorganization—a situation where your content lacks coherence, making it difficult for users to navigate or understand the site's purpose.
An efficient SaaS content audit helps to prevent such an outcome by providing actionable insights to create a cohesive content structure and craft a successful content strategy.
First, you have to understand that the demand of every SaaS business is uniquely different. So, there’s no definite “when” to conduct a SaaS content audit. Instead, factors like the following are useful triggers to consider:
So, let’s say you’re entirely migrating your offerings from one SaaS niche to another after over a decade. You need to review all your content to reflect this change.
A perfect example of this is Slack. Originally, Slack began as an internal communication tool within a gaming company called Tiny Speck, which was developing an online game named Glitch.
However, when the Glitch failed commercially, the team pivoted, recognizing the potential of their communication tool. They rebranded everything—from content to placement—and launched Slack as a team collaboration and communication platform, revolutionizing workplace communication.
Another question is how often you should conduct a content audit. According to SEMrush’s state of marketing report, only about 33% of marketers conduct an audit twice a year, while 6% conduct theirs once every two to three years.
But you shouldn’t limit yourself to this. How often you should go in there and sniff out outdated content largely depends on the following:
Putting everything together, large businesses with a broad content inventory should conduct a twice-a-year audit every six months. Smaller companies or SaaS startups can do it once a year, depending on when you scale up or have much content to handle.
Lastly, you don’t necessarily have to wait for a designated time to conduct an audit. If there’s a problem with your performance metrics or you’re changing your offerings, as we previously discussed, then you know it’s time for an audit.
The main focus of every audit is to ensure your content meets your audience’s needs and aligns with your brand goals. But that’s only possible when you account for the following components:
Your content strategy guides how your brand creates, manages, and distributes content to meet business goals. Auditing helps reveal the intent and goals behind each piece. If the strategy is outdated or misaligned, update or replace it to match current objectives.
Review all content on your website, including page copies, blog posts, and CTAs. Ensure it conveys the intended message, engages your audience, and adheres to your strategy. Check for titles, formatting, font styles, and image usage consistency.
Sometimes, your content is good but not visible. Use tools like ScreamingFrog and SEMrush to audit SEO performance. ScreamingFrog identifies indexing issues and broken links, while SEMrush evaluates content performance, revealing underperforming areas and opportunities for optimization.
Let’s go through a few steps to conduct a successful SaaS content audit below:
A content inventory is a comprehensive list or catalog of all the content assets on your website, including details such as content types, location, and metadata. The essence of creating one is to centralize all your content and enable easy access.
To create an inventory, you can use tools like Microsoft Excel and create labels for the following:
Here’s an example of a comprehensive content inventory.
ScreamingFrog lets you export all your URLs at once. Run a crawl on your preferred page, export it as .xlsx, and import it to Excel on your spreadsheet. You can also extract details like search volume from SEMrush or Ahrefs.
To find the last modified date, check your content management system (CMS) blog page or use tools like Check Page Modified.
Alternatively, you can download pre-designed audit templates from sites like Clariantcreatives and modify them to align with your SaaS business.
Let’s say your audit focus is mainly on blog posts. This is where you start digging into article quality, relevance, and overall performance.
Ask performance questions like:
Besides performance questions, you should also look into each content’s quality.
From this assessment, you should separate those pieces that do not meet the bar and those that require no changes for now.
According to Google's content criteria, good content is enough to earn you visibility on SERPs. But that’s only if they are well-optimized.
Follow this checklist to assess the SEO component of your content:
Keyword Optimization
Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
Header Tags
Internal and External Links
Content Quality and Relevance
Page Load Speed
Mobile-friendliness
User Engagement Metrics
Technical SEO
Backlinks
You can use Google Analytics to check each piece's organic traffic generated, its ranking on SERPs, the top keywords and queries, and the referring domains.
Add the audit report—including strategy, content, and SEO—to your spreadsheet and benchmark it against the industry's top performers. This will help you identify gaps to fill and determine whether your content is underperforming.
Determine why their content ranks higher on search engines or retains more visitors. The reason could be as simple as an optimized blog title, meta description, or keyword placement within the article. And sometimes, your overall content quality might be the problem—abstract points, poor images, regurgitated facts, etc.
If you have content pieces that are doing better than your competitors, find out why as well. You can always capitalize on those strong points to improve your content quality and retain your position on SERPs.
At this stage, you pretty much have all the data you need, but you need to categorize your content based on their performance or availability. Do this by adding a status label for content that is:
Highlight each label with different colors on your spreadsheet for distinction. For easy monitoring, you can also extract each content category into a separate spreadsheet.
Based on your analysis, create an action plan for each content category. This includes deleting, rewriting, or updating a piece with graphics. Sometimes, your action plan might be as specific as updating statistics to the most recent.
Follow up with your content team to implement these action plans within a specific timeline. Once that’s done, measure performance over a given time, say a month or two, by using Ahref or SEMrush.
That's a wrap! You now understand what a SaaS content audit is, why it's essential for your business, and how to conduct one.
However, we know how complex the whole process can be, and that’s why we want to help you. At TripleDart, we’ve built a one-hit SaaS content audit strategy drawing on our decades of experience with various SaaS brands.
Our team analyzes your website, SaaS product, and customers’ needs to design an actionable, result-oriented template that does the job.
Ready to start? Secure a free consultation spot right now.
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