Netflix Ads The Game Changer in Video Ads – Who Needs YouTube.pptx (Chester Y...
Content Audits: how we use search intent to identify a goldmine of content opportunities
1. Content audits
How we use search intent to identify a goldmine
of content opportunities
2. Contents
1 Who am I?
2 What is a content audit?
3 Why is it important?
4 When should you do
a content audit?
5 What does a Seeker content
audit look like?
6 How is it different from the
norm?
3.
4. Paul Wilkinson: Background
Works at
Seeker Digital
Job title
Senior client manager
Specialisms
Content marketing, SEO,
Commercials, relationship
management, operations
5. Paul Wilkinson: Background
Likes
Search intent, ROI-based
marketing, data, film, Spurs, the
environment, carpentry, dogs
Dislikes
Wooly marketing jargon, black-
hat SEO, selfishness
Proud of
Helping Seeker Digital more
than triple in size in two years
21. Seeker’s content audit
Cost
Prices start from £4,000
Tailored to the size of your
site
Discovery call
You can book in a free
discovery call to see if a
content audit will benefit you
Seeker
seeker.digital
07939596172
paul@seeker.digital
Free template
Download our free content
audit template from
seeker.digital/content-audit
Writing degree
Why did you do that? That seems pointless? Well, I clearly knew one day I’d be applying the creative thinking of writing for audiences to tell a story, to help identify search intent within SERPs and apply that to a content audit of course, silly!
Commercial writing, death of print, emergence of digital, content marketing and SEO
Onto the RAC to launch their content hub RAC Drive
Two and a half years working on that where we managed to generate these results:
Insert graph
And of course content - including auditing then planning - played a huge part in that
Then on to Seeker to help more clients where we have developed a templated approach (that can still be made bespoke based on the size and purpose of the website) to how we can help our clients with one of the fundamental parts of on-site SEO
An audit of solely all of the content on your site
In SEO of course we have full technical audits that will check everything on your site from missing meta descriptions, to crawlability, hreflang site speed and everything in between.
A content audit, however, looks at all of the content (effectively all of the pages) on your site and evaluates how well they are performing to determine what more should be done to improve your content, or if some of it is even needed anymore at all.
Typically auditing your content will result in a clear path of action against each URL to either:
Improve its performance
Or
Stop it having a detrimental impact on your site
Typical actions will look like the following:
Optimise
Re-optimise
Redirect
Link build
No index
N/A
A lot of people refer to content audits as ‘pruning’ and I’d agree with this phrase.
Just like a growing plant needs pruning to cut dead leaves that are holding back from growing
A site needs pruning to remove the underperforming content that is restricting the site from improving and gaining either more traffic or revenue
It’s important because you need to always make sure your content is working hard for your site
Content is the most important part of your site, because ultimately that’s what people come to your site for
(as it’s the most important element of your site (In Google’s eyes anyway (well, so they say)))
you need to make sure your content is delivering genuine value and ultimately you need every content piece to have a purpose
It’s also important because if your site has lots of low quality content on it then it could be damaging your site from an organic perspective
Causing cannibalisation
Wasting crawl budget
Or simply damaging your site’s authority in Google’s eyes
Over time most sites tend to amass huge quantities of content
Meaning your valuable content or content with high-potential can become buried
A content audit will help you separate the wheat from the chaff and identify how your underperforming content can be repurposed into something that actually performs better or removed to support your existing high-performing content
I know first-hand from working in a larger corporate you will always be against many different stakeholders each with their own reasons and motives for wanting content on the site.
The problem with this is every time I faced a request for content to be put on the site almost never was there any thought given to how this content would help/be useful to the user, it was often self-serving and meaning you’re not going to be able to actually generate any traffic to this content
Which in turn makes Google perceive it as lower quality
Viewing your site more poorly as a consequence
And making it more difficult to rank for the high-value keywords you do care about.
Our audits are encouraging webmasterfs to question the purpose of every piece of content before they publish it
Top tip, before commissioning any piece of content to go on a site, always push back to that stakeholder and ask them - how are you going to traffic this content?
They may have an idea, but more often than not they will push back to you as the content marketer/SEO and say that’s your job, isn’t it?
While i can think of many other responses to this question, the most constructive is to then show them the marketing channels we have available to us to get people reading this content, then set the criteria needed to justify pushing a piece of content out using one of those channels, for the purposes of getting visits.
This is an important consideration - really if you’re watching and asking this question I’d say the answer for you is right now!
If you have never done a content audit on your site before do it now
If you are considering a site migration (it’s a great excuse to prune your existing content and see what should be carried over to the new site)
If you are merging content from multiple sources. So if you have recently made the decision to create a content hub or new blog section of your site that involves identifying existing content on your site and moving it over to a new subfolder/subdomain.
An often overlooked step is identifying the purpose of the site, how is a content audit going to help the site perform better, rather than just make your SEO team look good
So the first thing Seeker does is works with you to not only understand what your goals are and what purpose you want your content to serve and how is it conducive to your overall marketing/revenue/lead gen goals
Then we tailor the audit to your sites needs
An ecommerce content audit won’t be the same as one for a content hub, affiliate site or SAAS site, for instance.
There are many existing audit templates accessible out there but audits are not one size fits all, so by using a template it might not actually be the best approach to take to your website.
We then identify the priority content within your audit
So rather than saying your site is this big therefore it needs this much time to audit, we will look at it pragmatically to see where you’re going to see the biggest improvements, rather than just reviewing every URL for the sake of it.
Once we have done the initial sweep of URLs to identify their priority orders we can then break that down to tackle the priority 1s first