Basic Content Audit: How to Identify $711,240 in Lost Content Value on Your Website (in an Afternoon)
Apr 11, 2024
I recently audited a site with ~250 posts.
70% of those pages received 0 traffic.
This isn’t unique.
But what made it really stick out was the huge amount of lost value.
Looking at the data, this wasn’t just money wasted on content that wasn’t performing.
It was a literal goldmine that they were missing out on.
In our analysis, we found that these pages had an estimated value of $711,240 per year in potential search traffic and conversions.
😱
Amazingly, though, this is just one example. We’ve seen many companies with the same struggle.
Tons of content just sitting there, not working for their business. And they might be sitting on hundreds of thousands — or millions — of dollars in revenue potential.
💰 meet 🔥.
But you can recover that lost opportunity.
You just need to identify the content that isn’t performing and figure out why — and how you can fix it.
In my experience, there are 3 huge money-costing opportunities most businesses miss.
#1 - Search intent mismatch 🙅
Search intent is about matching the type of page or article on your site with the type of page or article that someone expects when they search for that topic.
If you search for “content marketing agency”, you don’t want a long-form article about how to start an agency.
You want agency websites or maybe a list of great agencies to consider.
And, unsurprisingly, that’s what ranks for this keyword!
Understanding search intent is understanding if the user is looking for information, products/services, lists, or something else entirely.
Then make sure that the page you want to rank for that query matches their needs.
Every keyword or topic you’re targeting on your site can be categorized based on intent.
We generally look at 4 main types of search intent:
- Informational: The user is searching for information on a particular topic or subject.
- Navigational: The user is looking for a specific website or web page.
- Transactional: The user is looking to make a purchase or engage in some other type of transaction.
- Commercial: The user is comparing products or services with the intention of making a purchase in the future.
Swimming upstream against search intent is nearly impossible.
If you write a great, in-depth article, chances are it will never rank for a topic that has commercial intent.
Plus you’re missing out on putting a higher-converting product page in that SERP!
It’s a double-whammy of missed traffic and revenue opportunity.
How to assess search intent mismatch
So how do you find this revenue-killer? The process is actually quite simple.
- Find the pages on your site that are performing the worst in search
- Look at the keywords you targeted for that page
- Search the keyword in Google
- Analyze the results — what kind of pages appear?
If the page you have targeting this query is clearly misaligned (you wrote an article but everything else is a product or feature page), then you know that you need to target a different keyword for that page!
Don’t bring a 🔪 to a 🔫 fight.
#2 - Cannibalization 🍖
There's a thin line between building topical authority and keyword cannibalization.
Keyword cannibalization is when you have 2 or more pages on your site competing for the same topic. This can confuse Google and makes it hard for any of the pages to rank.
In many cases, the same or very similar topics were covered in multiple posts or multiple pages. We’ve also found cases where blog content was targeting commercial queries — and those queries were also targeted on product, use case, or persona pages.
No bueno. 👎
This isn’t always wrong (it’s sometimes possible to rank 2 different pages for the same query).
But, usually, it kills the SEO of your high-value money pages.
How to identify cannibalization issues
Finding and fixing cannibalization problems can be a bit tricker.
But there are two main processes that can help you quickly find these issues and create a plan for how to fix them.
💡 Make identifying cannibalization issues super simple with our Keyword Cannibalization report template!
Find it here: Keyword Cannibalization Analysis (+Template)
#1 - Content audit
- Go through every page on your website
- Identify the target topics and keywords for every page
- Look for overlap — are you repeating the same keywords (or very close versions) on multiple pages?
- Bonus: Use a SERP overlap analysis to compare the search results and find “hidden cannibalization”
- Sometimes, it seems like we’re targeting 2 different keywords, but Google actually groups them together and sees them as the same topic. (E.g., “content marketing agency” and “content marketing company”). Using a SERP comparison tool (or manual analysis), you can compare 2 or more keywords side by side and see if they’ve been semantically grouped by Google’s algorithm.
#2 - Google search console analysis
- Open search console
- Click “Performance”
- Turn on “Click-Through Rate”
- Sort the Queries tab by CTR (ascending)
- Look for the highest-impression, lowest-CTR queries
- Click on each query you find to apply a filter
- Flip to the “Pages” tab
- See how many different pages are generating impressions for this query
- If there are multiple pages showing, analyze the distribution of impressions
- Very skewed toward one page = usually not a threat
- Close to an even split = possible cannibalization issues
This example is healthy. Although a few pages have received impressions, it’s clear that Google sees the homepage as obviously most relevant.
#3 - Thin content 📉
Thin content is a budget killer.
You get budget to create content.
You invest it in thin, “cheap” content.
The content doesn’t perform.
The ROI is 0.
Budget gone. 💨
Thin content, or low-value content that lacks depth and expertise, may seem like it saves you money in the short term. But it's a complete waste of money in the long run.
SEO is winner-takes-most.
If you rank #1, you get most of the search traffic.
If you rank #2, you get just a fraction.
If you rank #9, you probably get 0.
This means that if you have content that’s 50% as good as the #1 result, you don’t get 50% of the traffic. You get 0%.
As always, quality beats quantity.
(After all, 1,000 pages of content generating 0 traffic…is still 0 traffic!)
We found >50 opportunities to repurpose, refresh, expand, and revive content in our recent audit. That’s a huge win to boost ROI of all their content marketing to date.
The key here is finding thin content — the dead weight on your website — and decide if it can be salvaged. Some content isn’t worth saving — but much of it is!
How to find thin content
- Crawl all of the content on your site and toss the URLs in a spreadsheet (you can also export directly from GSC)
- Export Google Analytics traffic data for the last 6 months (sessions by landing page)
- Run a VLOOKUP to sync up all of the content → traffic to each page
- It’s important to do it this way versus just looking at GA, because you may find many pages get 0 traffic and don’t show up at all in Google Analytics!
- Copy & paste the data back down using “Paste values” (to remove the vlookup link)
- Find and replace “N/A” with “0”
- Sort your sheet by traffic in ascending order
- Analyze all of the lowest-performing (or 0-traffic) pages
- If they weren’t created to rank, then it may be okay to keep them
- If they were created to rank but aren’t receiving traffic, then they may be thin content
- Assess if the content is “thin”
- Compare it to other content that ranks for the target keyword
- Consider using a tool like Clearscope, Content Harmony, or MarketMuse to quickly assess its quality versus top ranking content
- If the content is, in fact, thin, then there are a few courses of action:
- Refresh the existing page to improve quality and depth
- Combine or repurpose the content with another page
- Delete it ❌
Using these 3 assessments, you could easily uncover tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of fixable content on your site.
Once you’ve uncovered them, that’s when the real work begins. 😁
Have fun!
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