Step-by-Step Blog Content Audit Guide
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I want to go over how to perform a content audit. To get started, though, we got to understand what is a content audit? I use this from Moz. They have a great blog post kind of running through the very similar process that I’m going to be outlining here. They define a content audit as for the purpose of SEO includes a full inventory of all indexable content on a domain. Indexable meaning, Google can see it. Then, analyzing performance metrics from a variety of sources to determine, which content to keep as-is, to improve, and remove, or consolidate. We have the four different elements, things we’re going to identify for each piece of content and then figure out what ways to actually make everything better, or delete, or whatever.
Why do a content audit? The typical results are, it can increase traffic to your website, it can also increase and improve user experience, so people that do come to your website, no matter where they come from, whether it be from Google, or from Facebook, or Instagram, or whatever source, or just a direct referral, they have a better user experience. Also, better conversion rates. This helps you push people down the funnel the right way, to where you get more inquiries, and more people interacting directly with the site.
Some of the benefits, clean up or delete old posts. Kind of prune bloated websites, as Moz, refers to it. Identify leaks in your website, so where people are bouncing or exiting, identifying what’s within striking distance opportunities. Maybe you’re on page two or three for some really big keywords you didn’t even know about if your content is working really well. Prioritize content for enhancement, so this helps you figure out where do you start, I’ve got all this stuff that needs to be fixed, but which one do I start with that’s going to give me the best results the quickest. Identify keyword gaps, you can see what piece of content is directed for what keyword and identify ultimately what’s wrong with any given page. With a prioritized list you can go through and be able to clean it up.
We’ve got some steps here. The first thing we’re going to do is, we’re going to collect the data. Then we need to organize the information, then we need to analyze it and we can set a priority and also, at that point, take action and then track and repeat. It’s not something you do just once, but something you can do on a regular basis, so let’s just jump right into it.
There are some tools that we need to be able to do this correctly. We have, of course, Google Analytics. We have Google Search Console. We need either Excel or Google Sheets, and then we’re using a tool called URL Profiler for this. Now, I do have an affiliate link, which means I get a little bit of a little commission from that, if you don’t want to use it, you can go directly to non-affiliate link there below it and sign up and it doesn’t change it, nothing costs different or whatever. It’s just for a little love there.
I also want to say that URL Profiler is a 14-day free trial, so on the 13th day, go in and, if you don’t intend on continuing to pay for it, make sure that you cancel it, or whatever you’re doing. Otherwise, you will get charged and I am not liable for any charges, or whatever you have if you go Profiler, or whatever it is nothing. I just want you to be careful, set an alarm, whatever. Or, if you want to pay for it and you want to use it on a frequent basis, trust me, there are plenty of other uses for this tool. It’s amazing, you can dive deep into that and find a lot of information and to me, it’s worth the monthly. It’s like $20 a month, or something like that. It’s not bad at all.
Now, Excel is a paid, it’s Microsoft, but you can use Google Sheets instead if you want to. You don’t have to use Excel, but if you have it, I think it’s a little bit easier of an interface, personal preference.
Now, with Google Analytics and Google Search Console, we’re going to be pulling 90 days worth of data, from each of these. Now, if you don’t have Google Analytics set up current on your website, and you don’t have any analytic data, and/or you don’t have any Google Search Console set up, I would say you need to, before you can actually perform this effectively, that you need to have that all setup and ready to go. So, if you don’t have that, go ahead and get analytics. You can go to this link here and set it up, and get it tracking and then you can perform this without it. This is just the data and the information you have, there will be some key elements that you’ll be missing and the terms of that. Also, the Google Search Console, we’re going to make sure that we have that setup as well.
Now, the other thing I want to say is, URL Profiler is going to pull in data from analytics and search console and then several other sources. You can manually go in and pull data from analytics, the same data, the same information from Google Search Console, and not even have to pay, or try using URL Profiler. It is definitely going to take a lot more time and be more arduous in terms of … Unless you’re really good at Excel, or whatever, it’s a lot of work. Just keep that in mind. To me it’s definitely worth that, to save the amount of time. You could literally save hours and hours by using URL Profiler. And you actually ask yourself how much is an hour of my time worth and should I pay for this tool, or you can get the 14-day trial, it’s free. Enough about that.
The first thing we’re going to do is collect data. So, there are certain things here, this is the interface for URL Profiler, that you’re looking at here. What you’ll have is, you want to have everything that’s in pink is what we’re requiring, what we’re saying we want to do. And everything in the blue is, we’re not going to do. So, when you open up URL Profiler, you fire it up, you want to check off the ones you see checked off here, at a minimum. And, if you want to grab the other stuff, it’s a little bit more complicated when you get into the duplicate content you have to set up proxies and it just becomes this whole thing. Also, when you’re setting up Mobile Friend, and Mobile PageSpeed, for the first time, there are a few extra couple steps. I’m not going to cover it in here. There’s plenty of documentation on how to do this, on the URL Profiler website. If you get stuck, let me know, and we can take a look at it and I can give you more succinct information. But, you want to go through this process and get those set up. Let’s go ahead and jump over there on URL Profiler and take a look.
Here I have the URL Profiler interface here to set up and this is what it looks like and it’s simply a matter of clicking on, or off, this right here. And, if you get on here, you have accounts. Here you can look at your Google page speed and safe browse, and stuff. So, you just have to click here, click follow the full guide, and this will walk you through how to do it. You just need to make sure you have a Google account and it is all set up there. When you get into things like Copyscape, or if in class you want to do some of these advanced features, you certainly can. But, definitely, recommend a minimum of getting the Google one’s set up so you can get these done. Now, since I already have you set up, when I check it, if you don’t have it, it will bring up a screen. You can also do social accounts, or Social Shares rather, and pull in some Majestic information. But, for the sake of this video, I’m not going to run the duplicate content checker, but we will run the free Majestic and the Social Shares.
The next step, when you are running this, is we want to use a site map to pull in the web pages. So, we need to find your sitemap. If you don’t have one, you can reach out to your website provider. Or, you can use a plugin if you’re using WordPress, called Yost. Squarespace, all these another site will provide that, show it. You just need to find that actual XML sitemap. You also need to make sure that your sitemap is configured correctly, to actually have all of your post and pages as part of what’s being submitted to Google.
Now, in this example, I will be doing a content audit for KimHildebrand.com and over here I have her sitemap, as identified right here. We can go in and copy this URL right here. When you go into URL Profiler, you’ll do a right click and you’ll notice that you have different options here. You can if you’re on Screaming Frog or some other things. You can use other systems, but just to keep it simple. I like to use the XML sitemap as the method here. You’ll just paste the URL and then click import.
All right, so the entire crawl took two hours and nine minutes, to be able to pull all the data into everything. So, now we have this file here, we can go ahead and click “open file” and it will open up the file that we saved, whatever the location is that we saved it as. I have Excel, so it will actually open up in Excel. If you don’t, you can actually just click close and then you can upload this file to Google Sheets and be able to edit and modify it from there. I’m just going to go ahead and open this up, and what you’ll notice here is you’ll have a keyword opportunity tab. Sometimes this will be filled in, sometimes it won’t, and it just depends on … What they’re going to basically look at are keyword clicks and impression, and then they’ll pull some data in here and I generally will just ignore this and delete because we’ll do our own keyword opportunity check in a different way. So, I’m going to go ahead and delete this tab.
Now we’re stuck with this particular here. The first thing you want to check to make sure is that you have GA Segments and you want to make sure that you actually have numbers here. If you don’t have your Google Analytics tied in property, this will all be blank. The same thing here when you get into these keywords over here. This is going to be SA, which stands for Search Analytics and make sure you have all this data over here. You’ll also want to check to make sure that Mobile Friendly test was done correctly and then the Speed Test. Overall, there’s a huge mound of data, as you can see here, as it is visible.
Back over to that actually content audit. Now that we have pulled in all the information, now what we want to organize the data. Simply here, there are no magic things that you want to delete, or not, but you can delete unused columns and delete extra rows. Then we’re going to import extra columns from the spreadsheet, which I’ll show you here in just a minute. Again, there’s no real specific requirement on what you delete, or remove, or keep, or whatever. But, what I like to do is expand everything out, so with Excel, you can actually highlight the entire document and if you go right in between you can actually double click and it will expand everything out to where every single row is visible for everything that there is. There are different ways to do that in Google Sheets.
A couple other things that you can do. Just for customization, you might want to zoom in a little bit, just so it’s easier to see and read. What I like to do also is, it’s just my personal preference, again there’s no real reason or rhyme behind doing it any particular way, but I like to have it bolded. Then you can actually go and do some things like doing some freeze frames or data … Let’s see, get the data like this and you can set up to where you can … Make sure the top stays where it is. I like to freeze the top row so that whenever you scroll, it still stays there. So you can see what all the documents are.
So now that we have all the information here, we just want to kind of do a visual double check, make sure all your pages are here, everything you have is accurately there. Make sure nothing’s left out. There are other ways to find out exactly what you have yourself. What I like to do then is, because you have the URL, typically I don’t need this extra, I don’t need this path which basically just shows everything. You can leave it in here if you want to sort it out. Again, no real direction to get, you have to do this, or you have to do that. I like to just delete as I go here just to kind of clean it up, so then I’m not dealing with too much data here. Everything here looks like it was two, actually, you have one three and one redirects. I don’t really need the status. Actually, I’ll leave that in here. The status is okay. I don’t need the URL yet again. I can just kind of go through here and clean it up. And I typically will go everything from the status code all the way over to, I don’t even really deal with the text HTML stuff because we’re just mainly focusing on content. It’s really getting out here.
So now we have the page titles. The title length. We have the descriptions. We have word counts that show you actually how many words per page. Sentence count, paragraph count, and reading time. It actually looks at all the different words used in the page. Here we start getting into things like sentiment, where you can say positive or negative. The sentiment score. And then we have the readings. So we can sort things here by difficulty. And one of the things you can do with Excel and also Google Sheets is turn on this filter option. So now you can, when you’re looking at filtering things, you can filter and start looking at, oops I want this whole row selected. And then turn the filter on. Because I want to filter out on every column. And then like for example, you can go here and just set things in order. Any of the difficult, easy, fairly difficult, fairly easy standard. And you can start seeing very confusing.
So we’re now looking at stuff that’s sort of confusing. We start tagging stuff for repair, we can do that. So as we scroll through here, we’re not using any of the author information. I mean you can leave this stuff in here, but I just like to delete it so it doesn’t make it seem too much information there. We can take out the filter here for this one. We also don’t really care about this segment because it’s all the same. And then you get over into the majestic information. Actually, this is all Google search console. I like to leave that all there. I don’t really delete any of those. And then we get into the majestic. And then this is gonna be the status here. You got citations, and these are just individual links here.
You also have topical trust flow. So you have different types of, it can kind of pick up where the links are coming from. I guess it’s just good information. And then your social share information and then all your mobile friendly. I mean you can remove stuff like this. The cleaner you can make it, the easier it’s gonna be to deal with this stuff here. I don’t need this one either. And the same with this one. So we end up with this document, it’s a little bit cleaner, a little bit easier to understand because we don’t have so much information. So when we’re looking here at organizing, the delete extra unused columns that we just did, now if we’re looking at deleting any of the rows, you can look and see if you have anything duplicated.
So what you can do is you can sort this here by sending. Here I notice we have the two of the home pages for some reason. So we just delete one of those right here. Sometimes you’ll also find coming here that you have like pagination pages here, like part 1, 2, you have dates, just things that you might see that are duplicated that you don’t necessarily want to or even care about in terms of this right here. So in this particular case, I don’t see anything that really needs to be deleted. Everything looks like it belongs. And we want to be able to take it from there. So the next thing is gonna be import extra columns from the spreadsheet, link provided. So in this spreadsheet, I am providing, you’ll have the ability to pull in some extra columns. So this is the other spreadsheet, this is my content audit template. And what we have here is we have several rows added. And we’re just gonna simply, there are columns there, I’m gonna simply just copy these here, I want to click copy, and then with over in Google, and then we can again you can do the same thing on Google Sheets. But as I open up the audit checklist here, I go to the very front of the document and I want to insert copied sales.
And notice here that all these sales end up before it. Now one thing you’ll also want to do, if you turn the filtering on before, you want to make sure that you just want to toggle it off and then toggle it back on so it includes all these extra columns that we have here to be able to have those as filterable and you’ll kind of carry along as you move things around. So we have these other ones. Now the other tab that we have on this is this key tab. And what we’ll do with this, is you can do it a couple ways. You can just copy these right here, and grab those four rows, and then you go ahead and minimize that because we’re done with it. You can add a new tab. And you can call it key, if you want to, or whatever you want to make it. And then you can insert, you can paste cells, and then here we have those. And then you can go ahead and again just do like we did before where you highlight all of them and you can stretch them out.
So now we have everything imported. We have everything organized. And then we can begin to do the actual audit itself. So now what we’re doing is analyzing the data. And what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna tag each page for action. We’re gonna go through speed, copy, image alt text, page titles and meta descriptions, and call to action. And so each one of these, if you’ll notice here, we have each one of these are associated with that, and we have this key. So in the key, we have a threshold. So for example, we’ll go ahead and start with this one. So we have speed issue actions, mobile or desktop speed is 59 or less. And here’s a video on how to fix it. But this is gonna be the threshold for speed that we set. So if we go in here to speed issues right here, this is what we’re going to do.
So we’re actually gonna head on over to the speed section. And roll right over through everything, and then get into over here. We have mobile friendly, [inaudible 00:19:57], speed, mobile speed score right here. So, actually, we have mobile speed score right here. So then what we can do is we can do ascending. So everything that is a 0, anything below a 59 basically is what we want to tag as it needs some love here. And it looks like here they only have one image or one actual page that has a mobile speed score that is gonna be suitable. So for our thresholds, actually at the very last one. So now we’ve sorted by that. What we can do then is the way you do that, is you click on and we’re going to tag it by just simply placing an X, right. So this page now needs some sort of speed action.
And with Excel and Google Sheets, you can actually, if you notice here, you can highlight over it and then notice how your cursor changes to a solid. If you pull it down it actually duplicates it. And if you pull it down again, it duplicates it even more. So we can go ahead and duplicate and put Xs all the way down the row until we get to the position, the last one that we have, except for the last with like items over 200 and whatever it was. And then we can move on to the next one.
And then ideally we would move into looking at the desktop score, but we can assume though that because it fails on the mobile, then it will, we don’t need to put two Xs on here. So sometimes we’ll have some that pass mobile and some that don’t pass desktop. Either way, they both get an X in that speed issue action. Now the next one that we’re going to work on is going to add fix copy. So we’re gonna do a couple things here. We’re going to look at things with the sentiment that’s negative. We’re gonna look at has less than 250 words, or if they’re very confusing we will identify that it needs, it’s either got thin content which is the less than 250 words, it’s got a negative sentiment, we’re gonna make that positive, or it’s very confusing and hard to read, and we want to improve that.
So what we’ll do then is head on over to the, let’s see here. We’ll get into the content, the word count. So here we can go ahead and do ascending. If we look here at word count, it looks like here about 250 words, we get all these here have less than 250 words, so we’re at number 122. So that’s the actually 123. And up is what needs the X for that one. So we can go ahead and print an X here. And go all the way up to everything above that, is everything that needs, and it has thin content. And then we look at the items that have the sentiment that is, there are a couple ways you can do it. You can actually just go to the ones that have negative, right. And you could do it like this, where you are now, these already had the X, so now we want to just do X, X, X on those. And then when you come back over here to that sentiment issue, what you’ll do, come over here and you’ll clear filter. And then we want the Flesh-Kincaid, and we want to unselect everything, only have the very confusing. And then we can go back over here. And it looks like these all already have that issue identified as well.
So then we come over and go through the add alt text. This one here. We look at pages that have, this is different. Some of those I have four or less, so we can actually just kind of make sure we go in here and clear the filter for this one. And as you can see, we’re just kind of working our way through everything. Images without alt text, right here. So we can ascend, or descend. It looks like here we’ve got 42 and above all have ones here without alt text. X marks the spot. Bam. All right, so then we look at the next one we can look at here is going to be meta description. So meta description, things need to, first of all, they need to have one, and they need to be between 70 and 156 characters. So what we can look at here is just do ascending. We can look at the ones that are gonna be too short. So anything under 70 characters needs to be updated.
So we have here item number 51 and up, that is going to be needing some sort of meta description issue, whether it’s making it longer or something. And then the other part it is if it’s too long. So we can do ascending, or descending rather. And there’s only really one that has a meta description that’s too long, which is great. And then we can look at ones that are potentially duplicated. So you can see here, you can just put them in alphabetical order, and start seeing if there’s anything that has duplicate meta descriptions, kind of jumps out at you. We get some of these pages that are very similar but not quite. And just kind of scrolling through here, I don’t see any that jump out at me as being duplicates. Now there is one that’s missing. Right down here. So again, that’s probably already been checked. So that’s good.
Now is there anything with the page title … um, oops, I’m looking at the page title right now. So we want to make sure we’re looking at, all right. So basically, see you gotta be careful because it’s really easy to get those misplaced. So I’m gonna highlight everything and I’m going to clear contents. Now if we go back like I was just looking at page title, so we want the page title needs to be between 30 and 65 characters. So we’ll just do that for ascending. 30, so that’s the top one, needs a good page title. Updated, and then we have 65 characters. We’re dealing here with, let’s see, let’s go ahead and do descend. So all these here are have page titles that are too long, all the way down to 178. So, back over here for page titles. Actually, we’ll start from the bottom because it’s a bit easier. So 178, and X. And then we just get these all going here. The right to the top.
And then we already looked to see if there are any duplicates and we didn’t see any. Now we come over here to meta description, a similar type of thing. First off, let’s figure out which ones have, let’s see here. We’ll do ascending here for a number. So these are all missing meta descriptions. And then we don’t have any that are too short. So other than the fact that they’re not there at all, so we have number 66 and up have a meta description action required. So then we can take that and go all the way up. And I don’t want to go too far. So those are all the ones that have the meta description issues. Again, we can look at the meta description also to see if there are any duplicates in terms of exactly the same meta descriptions. Just kind of quickly run through them. I don’t see anything there. And then we do have a couple that is gonna be too long, 217 and 218 we’re gonna say have meta description issue as well. And so now we get into some deeper elements here. And we look at things that need a call to action.
So this is a little bit less technical. What we’re looking at here, if we’re looking at the call to action, we’ll look at exit or bounce rate that is over 80%. So then we can come over here and what an exit is, is that when someone is on that page and then they leave the website. So here we have page views, we can see how many people visited certain pages, new sessions, bounce rates, and things like that. So what we can see here is, what I like to focus on, is gonna be exit rate. So if we do descend, we got the higher exit rates on top. We do have quite a few pages that have a 100% exit rate. And one thing that I notice, when you’re looking at this, is they don’t have any time on site. So this could be reported by as a bot, particularly if there’s like not even one second on the site. That means it was a computer that did it. And those exit rates are gonna be erroneous.
So then what I really like to focus on is everything that’s kind of below that. So what I end up doing is taking out the 100 as an option, and then I look at these right here. So anything with an 80. So we have number 89 through we can head it over to that and go back over to our list, and identify. And this probably needs a call to action. And so what that’s saying there is people are leaving those pages on a high frequency. There’s a lot of people that leave there for some reason. Not very many people are saying. So it’s got a high bounce rate. Now if you want to, you can set that threshold a little bit lower if you want to, if you want to go to the 70s and 60s. You certainly can. Or once you get those fixed, then you can start focusing on some of the other ones. The other one here is going to be bounce rate. We just want to make sure that we turn off the filter, and then we get into bounce rate here, and again I’m gonna take off the 100.
But I’m gonna make it descending. And if you start looking at the time on site, and page visits and stuff like that, we’re pretty good. So there is one here that is a 100 that I would say has some actual time on the site, so it’s a legit 100. And the same with all of these right here that actually have time on site. So these right here I would say 79 down to, oh I’m sorry, getting up to the 80s pretty quickly, so 79 to 151 I would say we want to add a call to action to those. So I’m gonna do 151, I want to do an X, and I want to go up to number 79. Okay, try it again. 151, all the way up to 79. All need some sort of call to action. So these are either people that are bouncing high, or they are exiting high. So the next thing that we want to look at then, so these are all the actions that we have. These are the pages that have certain actions that need to be done. We can clearly see here what, we look at a page, what needs to happen.
So the next thing I want to look at is a priority and set up the priority, and the way I like to do the priority is to look at Google search analytics. So what we’re looking at here is, this is search analytics. So here we can see the total number of keywords per page, how many clicks, how many impressions. So what I like to do is focus on the number of impressions, and here what I can see, what an impression is, is every time Google shows your page in the search results, it is going to be an impression. So whether or not you’re clicked on or not, the idea is the more impressions you have, the more clicks you’re gonna get, more traffic. So we want to increase this. So the ones that have high amounts of impressions, those are the ones that Google’s love the most. And so by improving those, you can actually get more impressions and more traffic quickly because of optimization that you have here. So I simply will use this, now that it’s sorted in this way, the thing you can do with this feature is I can go to one, I can click two, and then I can highlight both of these and then pull down notice it automatically adds a three, four, five, and adds it all the way down like that.
So now I can go ahead and take this down, and I’m just gonna prioritize for the sake of for what we want in this order, because the ones that have the high impressions, if there’s some sort of issue with the calls to action or whatever, I can have people convert better, and then also I can have, by improving it, Google will tend to love it a little bit more in terms of you can give it more impressions. So that’s gonna be the priority that I have here for the different pages. And if we look back over at this, we have the kind of going over this detail and everything, then we have prioritizing pages.
so just to recap what we went over here, we tagged each page for speed copy. We’re gonna get in this here, delete, improve, combine, leave alone, those are one of the four categories. And then we went through analytics, the URL, title page, exit bounce sites. Those are just some things you can look at, total impressions, keyword level impressions, click through rates, keyword duplication. We looked at the mobile usability, we have mobile password fail, and then we have page speed and readability here that we’ve already gone over. And then we have prioritized, sort by total impressions, and here’s why. And the other thing too with the priorities, you can reorder based on target priorities. So target keywords and things like that. So if you look at the list, and now we have it in an order of 1 through 200 or whatever it is the thing, you can start seeing here is looking at these are the top pages here that are resonating with your site.
Now do any of these not resonate with what you want? Maybe you are not wanting to, how do you use the zone system, maybe you don’t want to promote that and it’s something you don’t want to share with. Or maybe you don’t want to shoot in Bellview or whatever it is, you can opt out and put things down the list. So you can go through and figure it out. The other thing too, when you have this information, you have your keywords. So these are the keywords that you are ranking for, is gonna give you the top 10. So this is the average, you have a total number of keywords, so this number one page ranks for 28 different phrases. And you have a total of 149 clicks in the last 90 days out of 26,000 impressions which give you a click-through rate of .5%. So out of every 100 visits you get, basically out of every 200 visits you get one click, 200 impressions rather. And the average position is seven. And that’s gonna cross the board on the average. But if you look here at, this is gonna be the number one keyword which has for some reason this particular one gets searched 20,000 times in the last 90 days, and she’s showing up on average position six, and got clicked on 106 times.
And there are other different iterations of it, this one gets a little bit less as it goes down. So you can start seeing the value of that. So you can start looking at some of these keywords. I don’t really want to rank for this stuff or I do, or whatever. And then you can opt out of certain phrases that you want to deal with. So that’s gonna be the prioritization so you can figure out where you want to focus your efforts on. If there are certain sets of keywords or groups of keywords or type of things that you want to rank for, then you can certainly do that. The other thing that you can do at this point is to look at, if you find some big keywords that you like, let’s say you really wanted to push your photography classes in Seattle, this gets off 46 different searches a month, and we’re on page two, actually this is page three for this particular keyword. And so here you can probably go through it, there are 46 people that get on page three. That means that page one is probably quadruple that. So there’s probably 160, maybe 200 searches in a 90 day period for this particular term. And if you really want to shoot for it, here you have your top keyword and you can go back to this content and start looking at improving this piece of content so that you could potentially rank for it.
And if we come back over here, we can see that it needs some speed issues. It also needs an appropriate page title. A page title is not optimized as it should be. And you can start looking through some other things. You have some good amount of words, you can start looking at the different phrases and the wording and make sure it’s aligned with what you have there. And then you get into some standard levels of reading ease. You can look here some images that have with alt, it’s got plenty of alt text. You could also go back in and look at that alt text, and determine whether or not they need any type of help. And then it only had three people that it registered that looks like that visited the site from Google, or in terms of actual different users. So this same person visited the site multiple times. It’s got an exit rate of 66%, and bounce rate is there so two out of three people that visited were there even though there’s because there’s only one click to it from here. So this is just an opportunity maybe to look at ways to fix that.
And then you got beginner photography class, you can start seeing where your placement is and the different words and get an idea of also what kind of maybe some verbiage that you need to add to the content itself. And then you can deep dive into the mobile usability if it’s mobile friendly, in which you need to speed up some things that can help you actually rank that. So here you can quickly see this is something that could be optimized, and you can see where potentially, just by quickly doing some math, you can probably if you get that click through rate to double, by fixing the page title, the meta description and also the placement. And then you were able to get up to page one for this particular phrase. If you got a 4% click through rate and you had 200 people searching, you could easily get 8 to 10 clicks to your website just from this one keyword. Probably from some of these other ones here. You could probably get maybe up to 20 total clicks to your website a month that are people that are actively looking for photography classes and you’re trying to push that, this can really help you drill down on what to do to make that happen.
And this is just one example. Same thing with any one of these here where you can really dive deep into the keywords and start looking at the metrics, and really figuring out what is gonna be the most appropriate way for you to make a decision that hey I need to fix this, this is what I need to fix, this is how I need to fix it, and here are the potential outcomes of fixing that piece of content.
All right so the next thing that we want to circle back to is to figure out each piece of content, if we’re gonna delete, improve, combine, or leave alone. So the ones that we are leaving alone are perfectly optimized, there’s nothing that we need to do. Very rarely do you do this in the first round and find stuff that you leave alone. But as you move into round two or three doing this, then you probably find more that you’ll categorize as this. Ones that are combined, you might find that you have two pieces of content that are competing against each other for the same keyword. Improve is gonna be the majority of what we’re looking at, and there’s gonna be some instances where we’re going to want to delete some content right out. So let’s go ahead and look at, leave alone is pretty straightforward, but let’s look at some things that we need to combine. Now what I’m looking at here is two pieces of content that are competing for the same keyword. So what I can do here is I can sort the keywords in an order here.
So here we have, for example, we have two pieces right here. We have Bellview family photographer, and then Bellview private photographer. So we have the same keyword as it appears, and one of them is actually showing up in position 12, and one is position 14. This one gets 34 impressions, this one only gets 3. So they’re both on page two. This one seems to be a little bit more, have a little bit more love from Google, so we can actually take a look at this and see here we have a project and a family page here. So this is actually the original post and then, in fact, we can go ahead and take a look at this actual content and see what we possibly would want to do with this here. So that’s the one, and then here we have an opportunity to look at the second one.
So here we have the project page for this individual one, and then so this is gonna be the project, and we can see a bunch of images. No real text. And then if we look at the actual post, here we have the actual post, and then we have room to comment. Same images look like it is competing for that. So here we can see where those are at. So now the way that she has hers set up is she has this personal projects page where people can click through and look at a gallery and be able to pick on a particular, no that’s actually Instagram. She has down here these different projects. This is a camp project, this is a film project, looks like there’s not much in this one. This is all Instagram stuff. But then we get down here, and we have different projects listed that can be scrolled through to find the individual project that was associated with what she’s got going on and all the different camp projects. So this how she kind of navigates, and as you get on these project pages, there’s gonna be some different text here.
So what looks like probably needs to happen in this particular one is to combine these two posts or these two pieces of content. And what I would suggest is it looks like you already have the post page is performing better. It’s got some text, so there are two ways that you can combine this. One would be to just simply delete it and then redirect this URL to the new one. The other thing that you can do is to simply add a canonical tag to this particular piece of content where the canonical tag would point to the actual family photographer page. In this particular example, that’s what I would recommend, is adding a canonical tag, which is simply a canonical tag is saying that this other piece of content is the primary source of it, and is original. So if there’s any duplicate content, you can have them in here. So this is gonna be duplicate content, that we would recommend adding a canonical tag to the original family and that way we’re not competing against it.
So this here would be an example of combined with another page. So what I’m gonna do is you can indicate this one of two ways. One is you can actually pull this in and let’s see, we’re going to, I’m just gonna paste the page that needs to be combined with, like the primary, the winner or whatever. And then you can do something like highlight these into, you’ve got plenty of colors to choose from. So I start combining them like that. So we look back over here, and we’re still sorted by these keywords here. We noticed we have a lot here that are competing for her name. That’s something you definitely want to look at, that’s the number one keyword. And then also you have some multiple ones here for bad mamas. You have motherhood mini sessions. This could be an interesting one. It looks like here, probably something similar, where this one is, it looks like you got your two of the same pages. So maybe an opportunity to just maybe delete one of these and make one super motherhood mini session pages and really drive traffic to that.
And then just kind of reorganize that. Any time you delete a page you want to make sure that you’re doing the appropriate thing. So you gotta look and see between these two which one is the strongest, and which one has the most content. And sometimes you have some content on one page and different content on another, and you can maybe combine, you can take the content off the one you’re gonna delete and add it to the main one and be able to perform that. So we have photography camps. We started seeing stuff here that could be clearly combined. It looks like there’s lots of duplication here in terms of that.
So then we get into this area here where there are no keywords associated with, even though we do have some volume, we have some impressions here in terms of search, but it’s such a low amount that Google is not really even reporting on the ones that have that. So what we want to look at then in terms, this is gonna go ahead, I’m just gonna look at the number of impressions, and I’m gonna get down here and find the ones that have nothing, right. So these are the ones here that have zero Google love. Google is not using these at all. If we’re looking at the time on site, there’s some here that have zero. Some actually have some visitation. So what I’m gonna do with this, I want to look at this right here, is the number of the time on a page here. What I’m gonna do is I’m gonna select this and I’ll select all, and I only want the ones that have zero. And now what we can do then is we have these sorted.
And so these right here, these pages right here have zero Google analytics. There’s no one has been on these pages. No one has visited these pages. So actually one out of three people that it’s a robot or whatever, there’s no Google love, nothing is happening on these. And I’m not gonna say we’re gonna delete these. But what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna put them into the potential delete column here. So I’m just gonna put a question mark on that, and then I’m gonna pull these in. So these are gonna be items that possibly I should remove, or delete, or combine, or figure out what it is. Again these look like there are some of these pages, I need to go back in and figure out, looking at these here, they need page titles, a lot of them have speed issues, they have some copy issues. For some reason, these are not resonating with Google at all. These are ones here that we could possibly delete straight from the page, or repurpose the content, or something like that. So we could start looking at things along those lines, and how we can try to get them either to work for us. But these right here is not doing anything for us.
Another column here that we can look at is, we can start sorting to things that are not found. All right. So these are, Google is not looking at those at all. I also want to, if you forget where the filter is, like I just kind of, I think it’s this one right here. Clear filter. So there’s no filter now on that. This right here is Google, even though you have it listed in the sitemap, Google is not, no one has visited this in the last 90 days. And these happen to also be, some of these actually have keywords in them. Some impressions, but no one has clicked on them. So they’re here, we have some things here and for some reason, Google analytics, or no one’s visited them so they’re not really resonating even though we did have, let me see, that’s gonna be keywords, yeah no clicks or anything to report here. So you could take these and figure out if they need to be deleted or not. Again we can add those question marks and then start sorting through that. And if we notice here, the ones that have, those are just the 21s. Pretty high priority. But yet, it has nothing here.
So we can start to question whether or not we want to delete those. But if you ever need to clear off the filters, what you can do is just turn the whole filter off and then turn it back on. So now you have those filters set up to be able to identify what needs what. So we have all these identified, and we have some pages that need to be combined that I haven’t completely gone through yet. But we start seeing how we could fix this. So then the next step is to look at what we, obviously things that are marked, they’re not deleted, they’re gonna be improved. We can figure then combine, and then we can start in stuff. So then the next thing that we want to do is take action. So we’re gonna fix speed, copy, alt text, all those actions that we have, we want to do that. And then we’re going to repeat this every three to six months.
Also, I recommend setting up conversion tracking. But and there’s a video on that that I’ll share with you that’s on the YouTube channel. But this here is going to be overall the strategy that we’re going to use. Again, you can pull all this same data straight from Google analytics and search console. It would take a lot of work. But here you can see, you have now a clear roadmap on exactly what needs to be done, so then we can just tackle one at a time. So we start looking at this page, and we can figure out what it is. Now adding the things, the actual solutions here, there’s going to be videos that cover how to address these, and how to fix those that are going to be associated with this sheet here, so you can jump on those videos and watch them separately and go through what does it mean to add a call to action, and how is it important, and what’s it gonna do. It’s gonna plug the leaks, right, so and then all the different elements here for these.
So I hope you found this useful. This is the content audit worksheet and checklist, and method that we use here at Term Services. Definitely want you to give it a shot, download the files, try out your profiler, and see what kind of results you can get. Please let me know if you have any questions. And feel free to subscribe on YouTube and be able to get more videos just like this. So thank you for checking it out, and let me know how it happens.
I want to go over how to perform a content audit. To get started, though, we got to understand what is a content audit? I use this from Moz. They have a great blog post kind of running through the very similar process that I’m going to be outlining here. They define a content audit as for the purpose of SEO includes a full inventory of all indexable content on a domain. Indexable meaning, Google can see it. Then, analyzing performance metrics from a variety of sources to determine, which content to keep as-is, to improve, and remove, or consolidate. We have the four different elements, things we’re going to identify for each piece of content and then figure out what ways to actually make everything better, or delete, or whatever.
Why do a content audit? The typical results are, it can increase traffic to your website, it can also increase and improve user experience, so people that do come to your website, no matter where they come from, whether it be from Google, or from Facebook, or Instagram, or whatever source, or just a direct referral, they have a better user experience. Also, better conversion rates. This helps you push people down the funnel the right way, to where you get more inquiries, and more people interacting directly with the site.
Some of the benefits, clean up or delete old posts. Kind of prune bloated websites, as Moz, refers to it. Identify leaks in your website, so where people are bouncing or exiting, identifying what’s within striking distance opportunities. Maybe you’re on page two or three for some really big keywords you didn’t even know about if your content is working really well. Prioritize content for enhancement, so this helps you figure out where do you start, I’ve got all this stuff that needs to be fixed, but which one do I start with that’s going to give me the best results the quickest. Identify keyword gaps, you can see what piece of content is directed for what keyword and identify ultimately what’s wrong with any given page. With a prioritized list you can go through and be able to clean it up.
We’ve got some steps here. The first thing we’re going to do is, we’re going to collect the data. Then we need to organize the information, then we need to analyze it and we can set a priority and also, at that point, take action and then track and repeat. It’s not something you do just once, but something you can do on a regular basis, so let’s just jump right into it.
There are some tools that we need to be able to do this correctly. We have, of course, Google Analytics. We have Google Search Console. We need either Excel or Google Sheets, and then we’re using a tool called URL Profiler for this. Now, I do have an affiliate link, which means I get a little bit of a little commission from that, if you don’t want to use it, you can go directly to non-affiliate link there below it and sign up and it doesn’t change it, nothing costs different or whatever. It’s just for a little love there.
I also want to say that URL Profiler is a 14-day free trial, so on the 13th day, go in and, if you don’t intend on continuing to pay for it, make sure that you cancel it, or whatever you’re doing. Otherwise, you will get charged and I am not liable for any charges, or whatever you have if you go Profiler, or whatever it is nothing. I just want you to be careful, set an alarm, whatever. Or, if you want to pay for it and you want to use it on a frequent basis, trust me, there are plenty of other uses for this tool. It’s amazing, you can dive deep into that and find a lot of information and to me, it’s worth the monthly. It’s like $20 a month, or something like that. It’s not bad at all.
Now, Excel is a paid, it’s Microsoft, but you can use Google Sheets instead if you want to. You don’t have to use Excel, but if you have it, I think it’s a little bit easier of an interface, personal preference.
Now, with Google Analytics and Google Search Console, we’re going to be pulling 90 days worth of data, from each of these. Now, if you don’t have Google Analytics set up current on your website, and you don’t have any analytic data, and/or you don’t have any Google Search Console set up, I would say you need to, before you can actually perform this effectively, that you need to have that all setup and ready to go. So, if you don’t have that, go ahead and get analytics. You can go to this link here and set it up, and get it tracking and then you can perform this without it. This is just the data and the information you have, there will be some key elements that you’ll be missing and the terms of that. Also, the Google Search Console, we’re going to make sure that we have that setup as well.
Now, the other thing I want to say is, URL Profiler is going to pull in data from analytics and search console and then several other sources. You can manually go in and pull data from analytics, the same data, the same information from Google Search Console, and not even have to pay, or try using URL Profiler. It is definitely going to take a lot more time and be more arduous in terms of … Unless you’re really good at Excel, or whatever, it’s a lot of work. Just keep that in mind. To me it’s definitely worth that, to save the amount of time. You could literally save hours and hours by using URL Profiler. And you actually ask yourself how much is an hour of my time worth and should I pay for this tool, or you can get the 14-day trial, it’s free. Enough about that.
The first thing we’re going to do is collect data. So, there are certain things here, this is the interface for URL Profiler, that you’re looking at here. What you’ll have is, you want to have everything that’s in pink is what we’re requiring, what we’re saying we want to do. And everything in the blue is, we’re not going to do. So, when you open up URL Profiler, you fire it up, you want to check off the ones you see checked off here, at a minimum. And, if you want to grab the other stuff, it’s a little bit more complicated when you get into the duplicate content you have to set up proxies and it just becomes this whole thing. Also, when you’re setting up Mobile Friend, and Mobile PageSpeed, for the first time, there are a few extra couple steps. I’m not going to cover it in here. There’s plenty of documentation on how to do this, on the URL Profiler website. If you get stuck, let me know, and we can take a look at it and I can give you more succinct information. But, you want to go through this process and get those set up. Let’s go ahead and jump over there on URL Profiler and take a look.
Here I have the URL Profiler interface here to set up and this is what it looks like and it’s simply a matter of clicking on, or off, this right here. And, if you get on here, you have accounts. Here you can look at your Google page speed and safe browse, and stuff. So, you just have to click here, click follow the full guide, and this will walk you through how to do it. You just need to make sure you have a Google account and it is all set up there. When you get into things like Copyscape, or if in class you want to do some of these advanced features, you certainly can. But, definitely, recommend a minimum of getting the Google one’s set up so you can get these done. Now, since I already have you set up, when I check it, if you don’t have it, it will bring up a screen. You can also do social accounts, or Social Shares rather, and pull in some Majestic information. But, for the sake of this video, I’m not going to run the duplicate content checker, but we will run the free Majestic and the Social Shares.
The next step, when you are running this, is we want to use a site map to pull in the web pages. So, we need to find your sitemap. If you don’t have one, you can reach out to your website provider. Or, you can use a plugin if you’re using WordPress, called Yost. Squarespace, all these another site will provide that, show it. You just need to find that actual XML sitemap. You also need to make sure that your sitemap is configured correctly, to actually have all of your post and pages as part of what’s being submitted to Google.
Now, in this example, I will be doing a content audit for KimHildebrand.com and over here I have her sitemap, as identified right here. We can go in and copy this URL right here. When you go into URL Profiler, you’ll do a right click and you’ll notice that you have different options here. You can if you’re on Screaming Frog or some other things. You can use other systems, but just to keep it simple. I like to use the XML sitemap as the method here. You’ll just paste the URL and then click import.
All right, so the entire crawl took two hours and nine minutes, to be able to pull all the data into everything. So, now we have this file here, we can go ahead and click “open file” and it will open up the file that we saved, whatever the location is that we saved it as. I have Excel, so it will actually open up in Excel. If you don’t, you can actually just click close and then you can upload this file to Google Sheets and be able to edit and modify it from there. I’m just going to go ahead and open this up, and what you’ll notice here is you’ll have a keyword opportunity tab. Sometimes this will be filled in, sometimes it won’t, and it just depends on … What they’re going to basically look at are keyword clicks and impression, and then they’ll pull some data in here and I generally will just ignore this and delete because we’ll do our own keyword opportunity check in a different way. So, I’m going to go ahead and delete this tab.
Now we’re stuck with this particular here. The first thing you want to check to make sure is that you have GA Segments and you want to make sure that you actually have numbers here. If you don’t have your Google Analytics tied in property, this will all be blank. The same thing here when you get into these keywords over here. This is going to be SA, which stands for Search Analytics and make sure you have all this data over here. You’ll also want to check to make sure that Mobile Friendly test was done correctly and then the Speed Test. Overall, there’s a huge mound of data, as you can see here, as it is visible.
Back over to that actually content audit. Now that we have pulled in all the information, now what we want to organize the data. Simply here, there are no magic things that you want to delete, or not, but you can delete unused columns and delete extra rows. Then we’re going to import extra columns from the spreadsheet, which I’ll show you here in just a minute. Again, there’s no real specific requirement on what you delete, or remove, or keep, or whatever. But, what I like to do is expand everything out, so with Excel, you can actually highlight the entire document and if you go right in between you can actually double click and it will expand everything out to where every single row is visible for everything that there is. There are different ways to do that in Google Sheets.
A couple other things that you can do. Just for customization, you might want to zoom in a little bit, just so it’s easier to see and read. What I like to do also is, it’s just my personal preference, again there’s no real reason or rhyme behind doing it any particular way, but I like to have it bolded. Then you can actually go and do some things like doing some freeze frames or data … Let’s see, get the data like this and you can set up to where you can … Make sure the top stays where it is. I like to freeze the top row so that whenever you scroll, it still stays there. So you can see what all the documents are.
So now that we have all the information here, we just want to kind of do a visual double check, make sure all your pages are here, everything you have is accurately there. Make sure nothing’s left out. There are other ways to find out exactly what you have yourself. What I like to do then is, because you have the URL, typically I don’t need this extra, I don’t need this path which basically just shows everything. You can leave it in here if you want to sort it out. Again, no real direction to get, you have to do this, or you have to do that. I like to just delete as I go here just to kind of clean it up, so then I’m not dealing with too much data here. Everything here looks like it was two, actually, you have one three and one redirects. I don’t really need the status. Actually, I’ll leave that in here. The status is okay. I don’t need the URL yet again. I can just kind of go through here and clean it up. And I typically will go everything from the status code all the way over to, I don’t even really deal with the text HTML stuff because we’re just mainly focusing on content. It’s really getting out here.
So now we have the page titles. The title length. We have the descriptions. We have word counts that show you actually how many words per page. Sentence count, paragraph count, and reading time. It actually looks at all the different words used in the page. Here we start getting into things like sentiment, where you can say positive or negative. The sentiment score. And then we have the readings. So we can sort things here by difficulty. And one of the things you can do with Excel and also Google Sheets is turn on this filter option. So now you can, when you’re looking at filtering things, you can filter and start looking at, oops I want this whole row selected. And then turn the filter on. Because I want to filter out on every column. And then like for example, you can go here and just set things in order. Any of the difficult, easy, fairly difficult, fairly easy standard. And you can start seeing very confusing.
So we’re now looking at stuff that’s sort of confusing. We start tagging stuff for repair, we can do that. So as we scroll through here, we’re not using any of the author information. I mean you can leave this stuff in here, but I just like to delete it so it doesn’t make it seem too much information there. We can take out the filter here for this one. We also don’t really care about this segment because it’s all the same. And then you get over into the majestic information. Actually, this is all Google search console. I like to leave that all there. I don’t really delete any of those. And then we get into the majestic. And then this is gonna be the status here. You got citations, and these are just individual links here.
You also have topical trust flow. So you have different types of, it can kind of pick up where the links are coming from. I guess it’s just good information. And then your social share information and then all your mobile friendly. I mean you can remove stuff like this. The cleaner you can make it, the easier it’s gonna be to deal with this stuff here. I don’t need this one either. And the same with this one. So we end up with this document, it’s a little bit cleaner, a little bit easier to understand because we don’t have so much information. So when we’re looking here at organizing, the delete extra unused columns that we just did, now if we’re looking at deleting any of the rows, you can look and see if you have anything duplicated.
So what you can do is you can sort this here by sending. Here I notice we have the two of the home pages for some reason. So we just delete one of those right here. Sometimes you’ll also find coming here that you have like pagination pages here, like part 1, 2, you have dates, just things that you might see that are duplicated that you don’t necessarily want to or even care about in terms of this right here. So in this particular case, I don’t see anything that really needs to be deleted. Everything looks like it belongs. And we want to be able to take it from there. So the next thing is gonna be import extra columns from the spreadsheet, link provided. So in this spreadsheet, I am providing, you’ll have the ability to pull in some extra columns. So this is the other spreadsheet, this is my content audit template. And what we have here is we have several rows added. And we’re just gonna simply, there are columns there, I’m gonna simply just copy these here, I want to click copy, and then with over in Google, and then we can again you can do the same thing on Google Sheets. But as I open up the audit checklist here, I go to the very front of the document and I want to insert copied sales.
And notice here that all these sales end up before it. Now one thing you’ll also want to do, if you turn the filtering on before, you want to make sure that you just want to toggle it off and then toggle it back on so it includes all these extra columns that we have here to be able to have those as filterable and you’ll kind of carry along as you move things around. So we have these other ones. Now the other tab that we have on this is this key tab. And what we’ll do with this, is you can do it a couple ways. You can just copy these right here, and grab those four rows, and then you go ahead and minimize that because we’re done with it. You can add a new tab. And you can call it key, if you want to, or whatever you want to make it. And then you can insert, you can paste cells, and then here we have those. And then you can go ahead and again just do like we did before where you highlight all of them and you can stretch them out.
So now we have everything imported. We have everything organized. And then we can begin to do the actual audit itself. So now what we’re doing is analyzing the data. And what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna tag each page for action. We’re gonna go through speed, copy, image alt text, page titles and meta descriptions, and call to action. And so each one of these, if you’ll notice here, we have each one of these are associated with that, and we have this key. So in the key, we have a threshold. So for example, we’ll go ahead and start with this one. So we have speed issue actions, mobile or desktop speed is 59 or less. And here’s a video on how to fix it. But this is gonna be the threshold for speed that we set. So if we go in here to speed issues right here, this is what we’re going to do.
So we’re actually gonna head on over to the speed section. And roll right over through everything, and then get into over here. We have mobile friendly, [inaudible 00:19:57], speed, mobile speed score right here. So, actually, we have mobile speed score right here. So then what we can do is we can do ascending. So everything that is a 0, anything below a 59 basically is what we want to tag as it needs some love here. And it looks like here they only have one image or one actual page that has a mobile speed score that is gonna be suitable. So for our thresholds, actually at the very last one. So now we’ve sorted by that. What we can do then is the way you do that, is you click on and we’re going to tag it by just simply placing an X, right. So this page now needs some sort of speed action.
And with Excel and Google Sheets, you can actually, if you notice here, you can highlight over it and then notice how your cursor changes to a solid. If you pull it down it actually duplicates it. And if you pull it down again, it duplicates it even more. So we can go ahead and duplicate and put Xs all the way down the row until we get to the position, the last one that we have, except for the last with like items over 200 and whatever it was. And then we can move on to the next one.
And then ideally we would move into looking at the desktop score, but we can assume though that because it fails on the mobile, then it will, we don’t need to put two Xs on here. So sometimes we’ll have some that pass mobile and some that don’t pass desktop. Either way, they both get an X in that speed issue action. Now the next one that we’re going to work on is going to add fix copy. So we’re gonna do a couple things here. We’re going to look at things with the sentiment that’s negative. We’re gonna look at has less than 250 words, or if they’re very confusing we will identify that it needs, it’s either got thin content which is the less than 250 words, it’s got a negative sentiment, we’re gonna make that positive, or it’s very confusing and hard to read, and we want to improve that.
So what we’ll do then is head on over to the, let’s see here. We’ll get into the content, the word count. So here we can go ahead and do ascending. If we look here at word count, it looks like here about 250 words, we get all these here have less than 250 words, so we’re at number 122. So that’s the actually 123. And up is what needs the X for that one. So we can go ahead and print an X here. And go all the way up to everything above that, is everything that needs, and it has thin content. And then we look at the items that have the sentiment that is, there are a couple ways you can do it. You can actually just go to the ones that have negative, right. And you could do it like this, where you are now, these already had the X, so now we want to just do X, X, X on those. And then when you come back over here to that sentiment issue, what you’ll do, come over here and you’ll clear filter. And then we want the Flesh-Kincaid, and we want to unselect everything, only have the very confusing. And then we can go back over here. And it looks like these all already have that issue identified as well.
So then we come over and go through the add alt text. This one here. We look at pages that have, this is different. Some of those I have four or less, so we can actually just kind of make sure we go in here and clear the filter for this one. And as you can see, we’re just kind of working our way through everything. Images without alt text, right here. So we can ascend, or descend. It looks like here we’ve got 42 and above all have ones here without alt text. X marks the spot. Bam. All right, so then we look at the next one we can look at here is going to be meta description. So meta description, things need to, first of all, they need to have one, and they need to be between 70 and 156 characters. So what we can look at here is just do ascending. We can look at the ones that are gonna be too short. So anything under 70 characters needs to be updated.
So we have here item number 51 and up, that is going to be needing some sort of meta description issue, whether it’s making it longer or something. And then the other part it is if it’s too long. So we can do ascending, or descending rather. And there’s only really one that has a meta description that’s too long, which is great. And then we can look at ones that are potentially duplicated. So you can see here, you can just put them in alphabetical order, and start seeing if there’s anything that has duplicate meta descriptions, kind of jumps out at you. We get some of these pages that are very similar but not quite. And just kind of scrolling through here, I don’t see any that jump out at me as being duplicates. Now there is one that’s missing. Right down here. So again, that’s probably already been checked. So that’s good.
Now is there anything with the page title … um, oops, I’m looking at the page title right now. So we want to make sure we’re looking at, all right. So basically, see you gotta be careful because it’s really easy to get those misplaced. So I’m gonna highlight everything and I’m going to clear contents. Now if we go back like I was just looking at page title, so we want the page title needs to be between 30 and 65 characters. So we’ll just do that for ascending. 30, so that’s the top one, needs a good page title. Updated, and then we have 65 characters. We’re dealing here with, let’s see, let’s go ahead and do descend. So all these here are have page titles that are too long, all the way down to 178. So, back over here for page titles. Actually, we’ll start from the bottom because it’s a bit easier. So 178, and X. And then we just get these all going here. The right to the top.
And then we already looked to see if there are any duplicates and we didn’t see any. Now we come over here to meta description, a similar type of thing. First off, let’s figure out which ones have, let’s see here. We’ll do ascending here for a number. So these are all missing meta descriptions. And then we don’t have any that are too short. So other than the fact that they’re not there at all, so we have number 66 and up have a meta description action required. So then we can take that and go all the way up. And I don’t want to go too far. So those are all the ones that have the meta description issues. Again, we can look at the meta description also to see if there are any duplicates in terms of exactly the same meta descriptions. Just kind of quickly run through them. I don’t see anything there. And then we do have a couple that is gonna be too long, 217 and 218 we’re gonna say have meta description issue as well. And so now we get into some deeper elements here. And we look at things that need a call to action.
So this is a little bit less technical. What we’re looking at here, if we’re looking at the call to action, we’ll look at exit or bounce rate that is over 80%. So then we can come over here and what an exit is, is that when someone is on that page and then they leave the website. So here we have page views, we can see how many people visited certain pages, new sessions, bounce rates, and things like that. So what we can see here is, what I like to focus on, is gonna be exit rate. So if we do descend, we got the higher exit rates on top. We do have quite a few pages that have a 100% exit rate. And one thing that I notice, when you’re looking at this, is they don’t have any time on site. So this could be reported by as a bot, particularly if there’s like not even one second on the site. That means it was a computer that did it. And those exit rates are gonna be erroneous.
So then what I really like to focus on is everything that’s kind of below that. So what I end up doing is taking out the 100 as an option, and then I look at these right here. So anything with an 80. So we have number 89 through we can head it over to that and go back over to our list, and identify. And this probably needs a call to action. And so what that’s saying there is people are leaving those pages on a high frequency. There’s a lot of people that leave there for some reason. Not very many people are saying. So it’s got a high bounce rate. Now if you want to, you can set that threshold a little bit lower if you want to, if you want to go to the 70s and 60s. You certainly can. Or once you get those fixed, then you can start focusing on some of the other ones. The other one here is going to be bounce rate. We just want to make sure that we turn off the filter, and then we get into bounce rate here, and again I’m gonna take off the 100.
But I’m gonna make it descending. And if you start looking at the time on site, and page visits and stuff like that, we’re pretty good. So there is one here that is a 100 that I would say has some actual time on the site, so it’s a legit 100. And the same with all of these right here that actually have time on site. So these right here I would say 79 down to, oh I’m sorry, getting up to the 80s pretty quickly, so 79 to 151 I would say we want to add a call to action to those. So I’m gonna do 151, I want to do an X, and I want to go up to number 79. Okay, try it again. 151, all the way up to 79. All need some sort of call to action. So these are either people that are bouncing high, or they are exiting high. So the next thing that we want to look at then, so these are all the actions that we have. These are the pages that have certain actions that need to be done. We can clearly see here what, we look at a page, what needs to happen.
So the next thing I want to look at is a priority and set up the priority, and the way I like to do the priority is to look at Google search analytics. So what we’re looking at here is, this is search analytics. So here we can see the total number of keywords per page, how many clicks, how many impressions. So what I like to do is focus on the number of impressions, and here what I can see, what an impression is, is every time Google shows your page in the search results, it is going to be an impression. So whether or not you’re clicked on or not, the idea is the more impressions you have, the more clicks you’re gonna get, more traffic. So we want to increase this. So the ones that have high amounts of impressions, those are the ones that Google’s love the most. And so by improving those, you can actually get more impressions and more traffic quickly because of optimization that you have here. So I simply will use this, now that it’s sorted in this way, the thing you can do with this feature is I can go to one, I can click two, and then I can highlight both of these and then pull down notice it automatically adds a three, four, five, and adds it all the way down like that.
So now I can go ahead and take this down, and I’m just gonna prioritize for the sake of for what we want in this order, because the ones that have the high impressions, if there’s some sort of issue with the calls to action or whatever, I can have people convert better, and then also I can have, by improving it, Google will tend to love it a little bit more in terms of you can give it more impressions. So that’s gonna be the priority that I have here for the different pages. And if we look back over at this, we have the kind of going over this detail and everything, then we have prioritizing pages.
so just to recap what we went over here, we tagged each page for speed copy. We’re gonna get in this here, delete, improve, combine, leave alone, those are one of the four categories. And then we went through analytics, the URL, title page, exit bounce sites. Those are just some things you can look at, total impressions, keyword level impressions, click through rates, keyword duplication. We looked at the mobile usability, we have mobile password fail, and then we have page speed and readability here that we’ve already gone over. And then we have prioritized, sort by total impressions, and here’s why. And the other thing too with the priorities, you can reorder based on target priorities. So target keywords and things like that. So if you look at the list, and now we have it in an order of 1 through 200 or whatever it is the thing, you can start seeing here is looking at these are the top pages here that are resonating with your site.
Now do any of these not resonate with what you want? Maybe you are not wanting to, how do you use the zone system, maybe you don’t want to promote that and it’s something you don’t want to share with. Or maybe you don’t want to shoot in Bellview or whatever it is, you can opt out and put things down the list. So you can go through and figure it out. The other thing too, when you have this information, you have your keywords. So these are the keywords that you are ranking for, is gonna give you the top 10. So this is the average, you have a total number of keywords, so this number one page ranks for 28 different phrases. And you have a total of 149 clicks in the last 90 days out of 26,000 impressions which give you a click-through rate of .5%. So out of every 100 visits you get, basically out of every 200 visits you get one click, 200 impressions rather. And the average position is seven. And that’s gonna cross the board on the average. But if you look here at, this is gonna be the number one keyword which has for some reason this particular one gets searched 20,000 times in the last 90 days, and she’s showing up on average position six, and got clicked on 106 times.
And there are other different iterations of it, this one gets a little bit less as it goes down. So you can start seeing the value of that. So you can start looking at some of these keywords. I don’t really want to rank for this stuff or I do, or whatever. And then you can opt out of certain phrases that you want to deal with. So that’s gonna be the prioritization so you can figure out where you want to focus your efforts on. If there are certain sets of keywords or groups of keywords or type of things that you want to rank for, then you can certainly do that. The other thing that you can do at this point is to look at, if you find some big keywords that you like, let’s say you really wanted to push your photography classes in Seattle, this gets off 46 different searches a month, and we’re on page two, actually this is page three for this particular keyword. And so here you can probably go through it, there are 46 people that get on page three. That means that page one is probably quadruple that. So there’s probably 160, maybe 200 searches in a 90 day period for this particular term. And if you really want to shoot for it, here you have your top keyword and you can go back to this content and start looking at improving this piece of content so that you could potentially rank for it.
And if we come back over here, we can see that it needs some speed issues. It also needs an appropriate page title. A page title is not optimized as it should be. And you can start looking through some other things. You have some good amount of words, you can start looking at the different phrases and the wording and make sure it’s aligned with what you have there. And then you get into some standard levels of reading ease. You can look here some images that have with alt, it’s got plenty of alt text. You could also go back in and look at that alt text, and determine whether or not they need any type of help. And then it only had three people that it registered that looks like that visited the site from Google, or in terms of actual different users. So this same person visited the site multiple times. It’s got an exit rate of 66%, and bounce rate is there so two out of three people that visited were there even though there’s because there’s only one click to it from here. So this is just an opportunity maybe to look at ways to fix that.
And then you got beginner photography class, you can start seeing where your placement is and the different words and get an idea of also what kind of maybe some verbiage that you need to add to the content itself. And then you can deep dive into the mobile usability if it’s mobile friendly, in which you need to speed up some things that can help you actually rank that. So here you can quickly see this is something that could be optimized, and you can see where potentially, just by quickly doing some math, you can probably if you get that click through rate to double, by fixing the page title, the meta description and also the placement. And then you were able to get up to page one for this particular phrase. If you got a 4% click through rate and you had 200 people searching, you could easily get 8 to 10 clicks to your website just from this one keyword. Probably from some of these other ones here. You could probably get maybe up to 20 total clicks to your website a month that are people that are actively looking for photography classes and you’re trying to push that, this can really help you drill down on what to do to make that happen.
And this is just one example. Same thing with any one of these here where you can really dive deep into the keywords and start looking at the metrics, and really figuring out what is gonna be the most appropriate way for you to make a decision that hey I need to fix this, this is what I need to fix, this is how I need to fix it, and here are the potential outcomes of fixing that piece of content.
All right so the next thing that we want to circle back to is to figure out each piece of content, if we’re gonna delete, improve, combine, or leave alone. So the ones that we are leaving alone are perfectly optimized, there’s nothing that we need to do. Very rarely do you do this in the first round and find stuff that you leave alone. But as you move into round two or three doing this, then you probably find more that you’ll categorize as this. Ones that are combined, you might find that you have two pieces of content that are competing against each other for the same keyword. Improve is gonna be the majority of what we’re looking at, and there’s gonna be some instances where we’re going to want to delete some content right out. So let’s go ahead and look at, leave alone is pretty straightforward, but let’s look at some things that we need to combine. Now what I’m looking at here is two pieces of content that are competing for the same keyword. So what I can do here is I can sort the keywords in an order here.
So here we have, for example, we have two pieces right here. We have Bellview family photographer, and then Bellview private photographer. So we have the same keyword as it appears, and one of them is actually showing up in position 12, and one is position 14. This one gets 34 impressions, this one only gets 3. So they’re both on page two. This one seems to be a little bit more, have a little bit more love from Google, so we can actually take a look at this and see here we have a project and a family page here. So this is actually the original post and then, in fact, we can go ahead and take a look at this actual content and see what we possibly would want to do with this here. So that’s the one, and then here we have an opportunity to look at the second one.
So here we have the project page for this individual one, and then so this is gonna be the project, and we can see a bunch of images. No real text. And then if we look at the actual post, here we have the actual post, and then we have room to comment. Same images look like it is competing for that. So here we can see where those are at. So now the way that she has hers set up is she has this personal projects page where people can click through and look at a gallery and be able to pick on a particular, no that’s actually Instagram. She has down here these different projects. This is a camp project, this is a film project, looks like there’s not much in this one. This is all Instagram stuff. But then we get down here, and we have different projects listed that can be scrolled through to find the individual project that was associated with what she’s got going on and all the different camp projects. So this how she kind of navigates, and as you get on these project pages, there’s gonna be some different text here.
So what looks like probably needs to happen in this particular one is to combine these two posts or these two pieces of content. And what I would suggest is it looks like you already have the post page is performing better. It’s got some text, so there are two ways that you can combine this. One would be to just simply delete it and then redirect this URL to the new one. The other thing that you can do is to simply add a canonical tag to this particular piece of content where the canonical tag would point to the actual family photographer page. In this particular example, that’s what I would recommend, is adding a canonical tag, which is simply a canonical tag is saying that this other piece of content is the primary source of it, and is original. So if there’s any duplicate content, you can have them in here. So this is gonna be duplicate content, that we would recommend adding a canonical tag to the original family and that way we’re not competing against it.
So this here would be an example of combined with another page. So what I’m gonna do is you can indicate this one of two ways. One is you can actually pull this in and let’s see, we’re going to, I’m just gonna paste the page that needs to be combined with, like the primary, the winner or whatever. And then you can do something like highlight these into, you’ve got plenty of colors to choose from. So I start combining them like that. So we look back over here, and we’re still sorted by these keywords here. We noticed we have a lot here that are competing for her name. That’s something you definitely want to look at, that’s the number one keyword. And then also you have some multiple ones here for bad mamas. You have motherhood mini sessions. This could be an interesting one. It looks like here, probably something similar, where this one is, it looks like you got your two of the same pages. So maybe an opportunity to just maybe delete one of these and make one super motherhood mini session pages and really drive traffic to that.
And then just kind of reorganize that. Any time you delete a page you want to make sure that you’re doing the appropriate thing. So you gotta look and see between these two which one is the strongest, and which one has the most content. And sometimes you have some content on one page and different content on another, and you can maybe combine, you can take the content off the one you’re gonna delete and add it to the main one and be able to perform that. So we have photography camps. We started seeing stuff here that could be clearly combined. It looks like there’s lots of duplication here in terms of that.
So then we get into this area here where there are no keywords associated with, even though we do have some volume, we have some impressions here in terms of search, but it’s such a low amount that Google is not really even reporting on the ones that have that. So what we want to look at then in terms, this is gonna go ahead, I’m just gonna look at the number of impressions, and I’m gonna get down here and find the ones that have nothing, right. So these are the ones here that have zero Google love. Google is not using these at all. If we’re looking at the time on site, there’s some here that have zero. Some actually have some visitation. So what I’m gonna do with this, I want to look at this right here, is the number of the time on a page here. What I’m gonna do is I’m gonna select this and I’ll select all, and I only want the ones that have zero. And now what we can do then is we have these sorted.
And so these right here, these pages right here have zero Google analytics. There’s no one has been on these pages. No one has visited these pages. So actually one out of three people that it’s a robot or whatever, there’s no Google love, nothing is happening on these. And I’m not gonna say we’re gonna delete these. But what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna put them into the potential delete column here. So I’m just gonna put a question mark on that, and then I’m gonna pull these in. So these are gonna be items that possibly I should remove, or delete, or combine, or figure out what it is. Again these look like there are some of these pages, I need to go back in and figure out, looking at these here, they need page titles, a lot of them have speed issues, they have some copy issues. For some reason, these are not resonating with Google at all. These are ones here that we could possibly delete straight from the page, or repurpose the content, or something like that. So we could start looking at things along those lines, and how we can try to get them either to work for us. But these right here is not doing anything for us.
Another column here that we can look at is, we can start sorting to things that are not found. All right. So these are, Google is not looking at those at all. I also want to, if you forget where the filter is, like I just kind of, I think it’s this one right here. Clear filter. So there’s no filter now on that. This right here is Google, even though you have it listed in the sitemap, Google is not, no one has visited this in the last 90 days. And these happen to also be, some of these actually have keywords in them. Some impressions, but no one has clicked on them. So they’re here, we have some things here and for some reason, Google analytics, or no one’s visited them so they’re not really resonating even though we did have, let me see, that’s gonna be keywords, yeah no clicks or anything to report here. So you could take these and figure out if they need to be deleted or not. Again we can add those question marks and then start sorting through that. And if we notice here, the ones that have, those are just the 21s. Pretty high priority. But yet, it has nothing here.
So we can start to question whether or not we want to delete those. But if you ever need to clear off the filters, what you can do is just turn the whole filter off and then turn it back on. So now you have those filters set up to be able to identify what needs what. So we have all these identified, and we have some pages that need to be combined that I haven’t completely gone through yet. But we start seeing how we could fix this. So then the next step is to look at what we, obviously things that are marked, they’re not deleted, they’re gonna be improved. We can figure then combine, and then we can start in stuff. So then the next thing that we want to do is take action. So we’re gonna fix speed, copy, alt text, all those actions that we have, we want to do that. And then we’re going to repeat this every three to six months.
Also, I recommend setting up conversion tracking. But and there’s a video on that that I’ll share with you that’s on the YouTube channel. But this here is going to be overall the strategy that we’re going to use. Again, you can pull all this same data straight from Google analytics and search console. It would take a lot of work. But here you can see, you have now a clear roadmap on exactly what needs to be done, so then we can just tackle one at a time. So we start looking at this page, and we can figure out what it is. Now adding the things, the actual solutions here, there’s going to be videos that cover how to address these, and how to fix those that are going to be associated with this sheet here, so you can jump on those videos and watch them separately and go through what does it mean to add a call to action, and how is it important, and what’s it gonna do. It’s gonna plug the leaks, right, so and then all the different elements here for these.
So I hope you found this useful. This is the content audit worksheet and checklist, and method that we use here at Term Services. Definitely want you to give it a shot, download the files, try out your profiler, and see what kind of results you can get. Please let me know if you have any questions. And feel free to subscribe on YouTube and be able to get more videos just like this. So thank you for checking it out, and let me know how it happens.
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