What Your Content Auditing Is Missing

You could be producing the most engaging and valued content, but it may struggle to rank if there are technical disruptions holding it back.

This thread will cover six of those issues, and which metrics and tools you can use to resolve them.

1. Ensure your content is being fully accessed and rendered (HELLO JavaScript SEO)

While dynamic & powerful, JavaScript comes with its own set of (potential) SEO issues. Quick & dirty method: use Screaming Frog's SEO Spider to compare the raw & rendered HTML vs visible content, and ensure nothing important is missing.

🧠 Need a deeper dive on this one? Check out our in-depth SEO JS Audit

Guide: https://thegray.company/blog/seo-javascript-audit-guide (over 700 shares of this piece from my tiny agency. I swear it's worth it!)

2. Audit Core Web Vitals and Optimize for Page Speed, UX

Core Web Vitals (LCP, FID, CLS) are easily measured through several commonly used tools. The foundational tool is the Chrome User Experience Report, which collects real user data and shares it via tools like PageSpeed Insights and Google Search Console.

💰 Yada yada yada: speed isn't a huge SEO factor, but it IS a conversion and "user happiness" factor - which will affect the bottom line $$$ your content drives. At minimum, make sure you are faster than your core competitors.

3. Audit Index Bloat and Keyword Redundancies, and Prune Mindfully

☝️ A Cannibalization Analysis is a great way to start the process of identifying index bloat. This helps identify problematic pages which may be competing against themselves due to keyword redundancies.

Cannibalization audits are harder in an age of indented results, mind you, so audit your findings carefully (eg., two pages ranking on page one is a GOOD thing, not an issue!)

Focus your pruning efforts on true "strategic" cannibalization. This means: 2+ articles (or whatever page type) that actually intentionally cover the same keyword/user intent (likely by accident.) If the 2 posts actually have different targets (eg primary vs secondary or "next step" intent), they may be targets for future indented result posts!

⁉️ How to do it? The big SEO tools have their versions (e.g., https://ahrefs.com/blog/keyword-cannibalization/); but also consider checking out the GSC Cannibalization Dashboard template made by Alamy's amazing Roxana Stingu (template; how-to instructions)

4. Identify (And Improve) Pages Where You're Losing Users

👣 Google Analytics is a great way to pinpoint pages with high exit rates. For deeper investigations, it can be helpful to collect additional user behavior data and feedback with tools like session recordings, heatmaps, and on-site surveys. Although more labor and resource-intensive, they are very often worth the effort.

5. Leverage Content Gaps Inspired by Competitors and Keyword Data

🎯 Target closely related competitors who are concentrated in your niche and dive into their content to see the effort and quality they've invested and how they’ve positioned themselves. Using tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, SpyFu, and Sistrix for content gap analysis is extraordinarily helpful in pulling the curtain on valuable gaps worth exploring.

6. Incorporate non-SEO Segments, Engagement Metrics and Overall Conversion Value

🌎 Using a holistic approach, use All Users as a separate segment and apply a VLOOKUP to important metrics – like sessions, user behavior, and conversions – from BOTH segments. Pull in data about historical social shares, user comments, etc.

Cross-referencing more than just Organic segments into a single dashboard can help you avoid missed opportunities by discounting content that might have more value than expected (especially if certain pages do have content, links and sessions.)

✨✨ Remember: other channels drive business value too! And removing content that has business value too! And removing content that has business value - just b/c it doesn't have SEO - is a surefire way to shoot yourself (and the brand) in the foot. ✨✨

You can find a longer discussion here on TOFU about that, as well as a link to an even longer one on Twitter!: https://topofthefunnel.slack.com/archives/C010UM9P151/p1650030426609339

For links to the tools I've talked about and additional info check out https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/conducting-an-seo-content-audit/

Thanks for joining me today!