Want to conduct an SEO content analysis? Seeking advice on evaluating you and your competitors' content to drive more traffic and organic revenue?
Let's face it; SEO content is an essential (maybe even the most important) element of any SEO strategy. It impacts rankings, user engagement, and link acquisition.
As AI search experiences continue to reshape how users discover information, through generative answers, summaries, and conversational results, content quality and structure matter more than ever.
A modern SEO content analysis must account for how content is interpreted not just by traditional ranking algorithms, but also by AI search engines designed to surface authoritative, comprehensive answers.
In this post, you'll learn about common problems with SEO content, how to analyze existing content assets, and how to conduct an analysis of new content ideas.
How to Collect Content Analysis Information Using Content Analysis Tools
SEO content analysis is the process of evaluating content (both new ideas and existing assets) for factors that can help or deter its organic performance.
At the core of an SEO content analysis is a simple idea – Not all crawled URLs will end up in the search engine’s index.
Or, to put it more bluntly, just because Google or other search engines have crawled your website doesn’t mean that they will rank your content.
This is even more relevant in an AI search landscape, where content may be crawled and indexed but still excluded from AI-generated answers, summaries, or conversational results.
SEO and AEO content analysis now extends beyond rankings alone, evaluating whether content demonstrates the clarity, depth, and topical authority required to be understood, trusted, and surfaced by AI search systems.
I typically split the content analysis into two phrases:
We'll look at each of them in turn. But before we dive in, there's one more important topic to discuss: common problems with SEO content.
Creating content, if done well, is one of the most profitable ways to drive the business forward.
However, to hit your content marketing goals, you must ensure that your pages rank for the relevant phrases. Otherwise, there is little or no chance of them driving the organic search performance.
Unfortunately, from experience, I know that a lot of content suffers from common problems such as:
Often, companies target the wrong topics with their blog posts and other content.
The issue isn’t a single keyword choice but the broader topic itself.
Content may target a theme that is tangential to the business, misaligned with the company’s products or services, or irrelevant to the needs and expectations of its core audience making it difficult to drive meaningful organic visibility or downstream conversions.
Similarly, content often fails to include key on-page SEO elements such as internal links, optimized titles and meta descriptions, and more, limiting its ranking potential in the search results.
Recommended Reading: How to Conduct On-Page SEO Analysis at Scale
Unfortunately, a lot of content also targets the wrong user search intent.
Customers have a clear goal in mind when searching for information. A well-optimized piece of content should provide such information at a level that exceeds the person’s expectations without introducing unnecessary or off-topic information.
That’s what Google wants to promote at the top of the SERPs and it’s also what AI search engines prioritize when choosing which pages to cite and mention.
This means including information that doesn't clearly align with the searcher's intent will reduce the page’s online visibility for its target query.
Granted, some queries exhibit a mixed intent, meaning that the SERP features a whole variety of information – commercial pages, informational blog posts, how-to tutorials, and so on.
In most cases, however, you can tell what information search engines consider to match the user intent, and your web page should focus on it too (and do it better than the competition.)
Similarly, a page can provide the right information but fail to cover it in enough detail.
It may only cover the general aspects of the topic, while the audience requires a more in-depth approach. As a result, such a short page would stand little chance of ranking well.
Insufficient information often stems from a lack of topical depth across related pages.
When supporting subtopics aren’t covered or linked together, search engines struggle to recognize authority.
Building topic clusters, comprehensive content connected through clear internal linking, helps demonstrate expertise and relevance.
Without this broader coverage, even accurate pages may fail to compete in search results.
Finally, the readability – or the quality of writing – can affect the SEO performance of a piece of content.
Think about it; if readers can’t understand your content, they’re likely to abandon the page and move on to a competitor’s resource.
Since the goal of both traditional and AI search engines is to provide the best possible user experience, it’s important to create content that’s clear, concise, and quick to address the topic at hand.
When key points are buried under wordy or unfocused writing, it becomes harder for search engines to interpret the content and deem it as useful. As a result, your website’s content is less likely to rank or appear in AI-generated results.
Now let's dive into the content analysis process, starting with an audit of existing assets.
This analysis aims to identify various site-wide issues that can hinder SEO efforts. The most common of which include:
Unfortunately, as the number of pages increases, so does the potential for duplicate content. Some pages will reuse existing templates, along with various snippets of content.
Other pages might feature content copied directly from other assets, only because it is easier to create them that way, rather than write new copy. New product pages might feature the same copy across different product variations, and so on.
Content analysis will uncover those problems, and help you create more unique content to rank.
Keyword cannibalization occurs when a group of pages targets the same keyword or search phrase. In most cases, the cannibalization occurs unintentionally.
As the number of pages on the site grows, it gets harder to keep track of the queries all those assets have been optimized for.
Sadly, such an issue may confuse the search engines and result in the wrong page ranking for the query.
A content audit will help identify instances of keyword cannibalization and potential ways to eliminate the issue.
SEO content analysis will also pinpoint assets that have been losing traffic and rankings continuously over several months.
This content may either be out of date, hence the diminishing performance, or experiencing problems (such as duplicate content or keyword cannibalization.)
As part of the analysis process, you will be able to decide whether those pages need to be removed, consolidated with other assets, or simply updated to improve their performance.
Finally, analyzing the existing content will also help you discover pages that may have retained the same rankings but a drop in organic click-through rate.
The issue might be caused by a shift in the audience’s interests or other search listings attracting more attention (due to the presence of SERP features, for example.)
Nonetheless, it is a serious one, and certainly a cause for concern.
This part of the content analysis process focuses on understanding what both traditional and AI search engines surface as authoritative content, not just what ranks highest in SERPs.
It involves analyzing the current topical landscape, along with the content that earns mentions or citations in AI-generated answers, to come up with new content ideas based on:
Metadata matters for both AI search and traditional search because it gives search engines clear context about your content, making it easier to understand, surface, and match it to the right users at the right time.
Often, when you look at top ranking content, you’ll notice similarities.
Take the phrase, “Small business CRM” for example. Most organic listings have quite a lot in common, don’t you agree?
Most are listicles, featuring what the authors believe to be “the best” CRM packages.
Understanding such patterns will help you plan your content strategy as well as write meta title tags and meta description tags that match the intent of the SERP.
High-performing content often shares structural similarities in how topics are broken down and labeled.
This includes top-ranking pages in traditional SERPs as well as content cited or referenced in AI-generated answers.
Analyzing these patterns in headings can reveal how search engines understand and extract meaning from a page.
For example, clear, descriptive headers that explicitly define what each section covers often make it easier for AI search engines to interpret the content.
Evaluating these patterns helps establish the baseline structure your page should include to improve both organic rankings and AI search visibility.
The information above helps define a starting point for writing the page. The next challenge, however, is to identify how to exceed the person’s expectations.
One of the best ways to do it is by identifying additional questions users might have on the topic.
While this can be done manually, Sia Journeys and AI Content Optimizer help surface these questions at scale by analyzing search behavior, related queries, and AI-driven signals.
This makes it quick and easy to identify the follow-up questions both users and AI systems expect comprehensive content to answer.
However, if you decide to go the manual route by reviewing the SERP directly, here are the two specific sections we suggest analyzing:
Naturally, those will provide only a partial insight into the user’s intent.
If you want to go beyond that, however, you will need to turn to a dedicated content analysis software.
Analyzing the content that gets mentions/citations in AI answers.
Content analysis tools are essential for optimizing SEO performance, as they provide data-driven insights on keyword usage, readability, engagement, and competitor benchmarks to improve rankings and user experience.
Content Fusion, an AI-driven content optimizer, provides users with an incredible experience in addressing their content and analysis needs.
We take a specific, data-driven approach to combine content creation and analysis into one, easy-to-use SEO tool, putting the power in the hands of the user to be the hero in solving their company’s greatest content challenges.
Recommended Reading: 7 Content Fusion Success Stories
Now more than ever, users seek more in-depth information when determining where, how, and why they should take an action or make a purchase on your site.
Content Fusion allows clients to ensure they are including all of the necessary topics in their content to improve their visibility in the search, thus improving their overall traffic.
Imagine you have content on your site that ranks for the term “marvel avengers”, but it doesn’t appear high in the SERP and you hardly receive any organic traffic. Let’s run both the target URL and keyword through Content Fusion.
Content Fusion relies on its own AI and proprietary algorithms to present the user with the related topics to the search query of “refrigerator repair”.
The user can determine what topics are missing from their content that, when added, will signal to both users and Google that this content is the appropriate authority on the target topic.
While Content Fusion alone does not provide analytics, it powerfully arms users with insights for them to draw upon to create new authoritative content or refresh old existing content for better visibility.
In addition, Content Fusion has been integrated with Sia, our AI-driven SEO assistant, to streamline the process of writing or revising content.
By clicking Sia's lightning bolt icon, Sia automatically generates outlines, drafts paragraphs, and rewrites existing content. All of Sia's outputs are personalized based on the topic and preferences.
Plus, the new "Content Profiles" capability allows you to specify your target audience, tone, language, and content type for Sia to adhere to when generating content.
Sia's outputs serve as suggestions and should always be reviewed and edited by a content team member.
Harnessing the power of AI content marketing through Content Fusion allows users to analyze their content gaps and develop new content ideas at scale.
By creating authoritative content or breathing new life into old content with low traffic value, content creators attract the right audience with improved search visibility.
>>>Editor's Note: this post was originally published in July 2020 and has been updated.<<<