Not all content ages well. Some pieces that once drove traffic and engagement can quickly become outdated, irrelevant, or buried beneath newer content. If you’ve invested heavily in your content strategy over the years, chances are your site is full of underperforming articles that could be working harder for you.
This is where AI content audits come in.
Machine learning also changes the way content optimization and analysis are done for writers. No longer do they have to manually sift through hundreds, if not thousands, of content pieces like articles, blog posts, or landing pages. AI programs now can read through performance data, identify content rot, and recommend optimization to make your content come alive.
Let’s talk about how AI content audits work, why they are necessary, and how to use them to keep your content in tip-top condition.
What is an AI Content Audit?
AI content audits mean applying machine learning and natural language processing to audit existing content assets. Whereas traditional content audits are done through manual check or light SEO tools, AI content audits are able to confirm huge amounts of content on multiple points efficiently and accurately.
These audits go far beyond basic checks like keyword density or word count. They analyze the quality of your content based on different factors, including subject depth, authority topicality, freshness, readability, and engagement. There are even some that compare your content to high-ranking pages in search results to look for some gaps and areas of improvement.
Important Things AI Looks for in a Content Audit:
- Long-term traffic history
- Backlink power and strength
- Keyword cannibalization and keyword rankings
- Semantic relevance to intent
- Readability and structure of the content
- Dups or thin content
- Internal linking opportunities
- Dead links or stale data
These signals can be leveraged to direct machine learning models to re-learn and re-prioritize pieces of content, categorizing them into more specific categories such as:
- Keep as is
- Update or refresh
- Merge with duplicate content
- Delete or redirect
Prioritization makes your content update plan more defined so that you can determine what really needs to get done.
Why is Updating Old Content More Effective Than Creating from Scratch?
Creating new content takes time, money, and effort, and while it’s extremely valuable, the content you already possess has significant SEO equity. Older content is more likely to have acquired ranks, links, and historical performance that you can bank on.
Updating and reusing content has several vital benefits:
- Recover lost ranks over time
- Strengthen content authority without recreating from scratch
- Ditch content bloat and internal rivalry
- Improve accuracy and relevance
- Facilitate topic clustering and internal linking techniques
Search engines prefer content that is fresh as well as pertinent. AI tools can help you figure out where the old pieces need to be refreshed and how new updates will be most effective.
Refurbishing Old Content with AI
You don’t need to be a data scientist to take advantage of AI in your content strategy. Follow this step-by-step tutorial on how to conduct an AI-powered content audit and refresh.
1. Select the Correct AI Content Audit Tool
There are certain websites that offer content audits using AI and machine-learning-powered tools. The most well-liked of these are:
They use natural language processing (NLP) and SEO metrics to track your content performance and suggest optimization.
2. Find Low-Performing or Declining Pages
Using your audit tool, identify pages that have lost rankings, experienced a decline in traffic, or haven’t been updated in over a year. Be sure not to evaluate traffic in isolation as some pages may still rank on page two or three and could be just one refresh away from reaching page one. AI-powered insights can help surface these hidden opportunities more effectively.
Search for:
- Previously ranked blog posts now falling behind
- Lower click-through high impression pages
- Duplicate content share ranking potential
- Re-pinnable published posts
3. Content Gap Analysis and Competitor Performance
Any quality content software will include content gap analysis. That tells you what your strongest competitors are adding to their content that your page is not.
For example, if your article doesn’t have some of the subtopics or Google ranked questions on page one, the AI will mark it down. It will mark down if your article doesn’t have semantic richness or is not maximally optimized with related keywords.
4. Update, Expand, or Consolidate
After you understand what you need to do from the Ai content audit, the second step is to do it. Some of the most likely things that you will do are:
- Including absent subtopics or FAQs
- Adding new paragraphs to update dull sections
- Making cosmetic and readability enhancements
- Adding multimedia materials such as infographics or videos
- Including internal linking between and among similar content
- Optimizing titles and headings to suit search intent
In some instances, AI will recommend that you consolidate a group of short pieces of content into a single master guide. This will improve performance by eliminating internal competition and boosting topical authority.
5. Monitor the Performance and Re-Audit Periodically
Once you have published your new content, monitor its performance. Most AI tools will monitor over time the trend of rank growth, traffic, and engagement.
Content decay is inevitable. This month’s ranking page will likely require another update in 6 to 12 months. Planned auditing allows you to stay ahead of those changes rather than dealing with lost traffic later.
Actual ROI: Impacts of Refreshing Content with AI
New content doesn’t establish rankings, it produces measurable performance.
A refresh can produce 50 to 100 percent or more of natural traffic increase. Websites have experienced 200 percent page view spikes from refreshing previously written blog posts. Refreshes also take less time to produce than fresh content and are more profitable.
AI enables you to use your energy where it will be most beneficial, and not waste your time rewriting copy that already performs its task or chasing keywords that never will.
Final Thoughts
Your content is probably your richest asset on your website. Even excellent content gets stale and needs to be updated to keep on doing its job. AI content audits enable you to take a swift glance at what you need to tweak, how you need to tweak it, and where you need to spend your time.
Don’t start with a blank sheet of paper; use AI to breathe new life into what you already have.
If you’re ready to realize the untapped potential of your existing content and become more visible online, then Big Drop is the solution. We leverage a more data-driven, strategically grounded machine learning and advanced SEO approach to release the highest value out of every asset in your content inventory. Reach out to us today.