Patrick Stox, Product Advisor, Technical SEO, & Brand Ambassador at Ahrefs, walked us through his content audit process, including what data he uses and most importantly how he makes decisions.
Watch the full webinar
Here are our biggest takeaways from Patrick’s talk:
An audit should tell you what the plan is and what you should do now.
Internal links are powerful and often overlooked.
And check out the resources Patrick shared below:
About Patrick Stox:
Patrick is a Product Advisor, Technical SEO, & Brand Ambassador at Ahrefs. He was the lead author for the SEO chapter of the 2021 Web Almanac and a reviewer for the 2022 SEO chapter. He’s an organizer for several groups, including the Raleigh SEO Meetup (the most successful SEO Meetup in the US), the Beer and SEO Meetup, the Raleigh SEO Conference, runs a Technical SEO Slack group, and is a moderator for /r/TechSEO on Reddit.
Follow Patrick on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickstox/
Read the transcript
Patrick:
Yeah, and today this is going to be interesting, at least for me. I'm more known for technical SEO, but I end up putting together a lot of SOPs, a lot of processes, scaling a lot of different systems basically. We're going to talk about my ... I'm going to give a bit of an easier content audit process, but then I'm going to talk about my actual process and decision making. Because I feel like a lot of people put together a content inventory, we'll talk about that in a second, but then they don't really know what to do with the data. They have all this data and then they just get stuck looking at it, so we'll going to go over that a bit. I already got introduced a lot, but I'm really active in the SEO community in general.
One of the reasons you've might want to listen to me, if you don't know, Ahrefs has a very popular blog. We've grown this over time. We are often used as an example of a good content strategy that's business relevant. We're pretty much the main example used for product-led content. It's not that we're just creating this informational content, everything we do teaches people about SEO, about different things like link building, creating content. But we also are showcasing our tool in it, so our own personal processes and everything like that goes into every piece of content. And that works really well. If you don't know Moz, Moz used to be the 800 pound gorilla in the search industry. Everyone was a Moz user back in the day. You don't really hear about them much anymore. Their blog has died off. They're still publishing, but it's not the same as what it was. For years we were playing catch up to them. Now, as I said, you really don't hear much about their content or them as a company anymore.
When people are usually looking in all in one suite, it's pretty much Ahrefs or Semrush when back in the day it used to be Moz was the company to go to. This type of content can drive real business value. Actually still, this is an interesting thing, so this is actually showing referring domains. We're still catching up. They had such a head start. They were founded in 2004. We were founded in 2010, '11, and we didn't really start blogging or being active in the community until 2015-ish I would say. And so they still rank for a lot of main head terms simply because they have links. They have this huge history of being number one in the SEO community that's a hill that we're still trying to climb and pass them on. And really, no matter how good our content is, some of the things they still outrank us for mostly in my opinion, because they still have just a ton more links to some of those pages.
Now this is what I was talking about with a content inventory. I actually pulled this off of a Clear Scopes blog. They have a whole way process for pulling this. This isn't the part I want to cover actually. There's tons and tons of different people's processes pulling a content, making a content inventory, and you're just going to pull out all kinds of data points from all kinds of different systems, usually into a Google sheet or an Excel spreadsheet. They do have a blog. They go through their process, which is pretty cool. I believe they're using Screaming Frog and then they also pull data from Ahrefs, Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and that's a pretty typical process, it's what a lot of people go through.
It's basically like, "What content do I have? What are the metrics for the content? Let me pull things like title and descriptions so I can see what are the content's about." All that's stuff, pretty standard I think. What's harder is the decisions. Once you get to the audit part, it's basically like, "Okay, now I've got all this data, what do I do with it?" And a giant Excel spreadsheet with hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of rows or more can be pretty overwhelming. And so a lot of people get stuck. They get all this data and they're like, "This is a content audit." No, you made a content inventory. An audit should actually tell you what is my plan? What do I do now?
And a lot of people are just like, "We'll deliver that content inventory and say, 'This is your content audit.'" And it's like, "What? What do I do with this? It's a giant spreadsheet that was overwhelming to you and now it's overwhelming me." And that's a pretty typical thing that happens. I've seen agencies pass this off to customers and the customers are like, "Great, I have no idea. What do I do?" I found flowcharts help. This is actually a very basic content audit where you're only looking at organic content. Content that you really want to rank that's really only meant for organic. This is actually the process that we follow with our WordPress plugin. We have a WordPress plugin, for those that didn't know. I don't know how many people actually use it, but the idea of it is to make a content audit simple for people. I kind of ask these questions, goes through the process and tries to help you make the decisions.
And you'll come out with things like, "This page is fine, everything's ranking top three, you're doing good." Or maybe you're not quite there, you're underperforming a bit. It's got a lot of different suggested actions basically. Maybe you want to merge it with another page or just get rid of it. You could kill it off. And so this is actually how it looks. Pulls different data, connects with Google Search Console, Google Analytics. It really is making that content inventory type thing for you, but then just trying to help you with the decisions. I would say take them with a grain of salt. Really look at it, dive in a little deeper, because this is just trying, it's pretty simplified compared to what I would typically want to see.
But it's a decent start in my opinion. And it'll even help you dive into the content itself, improve it. You could also use Clearscope for this. What do I actually make better in my content? Do I need to add internal links? Do I need more external links? Why am I not ranking? Maybe I missed the mark, maybe I miss targeted it. There's a lot of decisions that actually go into something like this, which is why I still think no matter what your inventory has, what your audit process is, you really got to get eyes on. Which is why the content inventory can be overwhelming is do I really want to go look at a 100,000 pages to see are they ranking, why they're not ranking? It's probably a little much, you got to weed that down and prioritize.
One of the things that almost always works, if you're underperforming a little, not performing that well, go look at why. You might have written something three years ago and the entire industry changed. There's new information, you have learned a lot. There's more you could share, you can simplify. Refreshing content works. It works really well. You can see that over time we've actually started to do this a lot more on the Ahrefs blog. Now I think it's roughly a third of our 500-ish posts that we've actually just rewritten, completely republished. Not to say that you should always just completely rewrite them. These are ones where we miss the mark. We also do a ton of tiny updates that we don't really consider a full refresh, but where we'll go in, we'll simplify or we'll add a section, add a little more information, add process or something, update screenshots. We're not really considering that a full on refresh or rewrite. But still the ones that we have fully redone, that's almost a third of the blogs we've written.
You have to make a choice to. Everyone's going to be a little limited in resources, so it's like, "Do I go and create a bunch of new content or do I go and improve old content?" This is one of those decisions where it's like it's a personal decision. You have to make that choice. And there's not really a right or wrong answer. A lot of times I would say you will get more results from updating your old content. But if you're also stagnant, you're not creating, you're not targeting new opportunities, you're going to be missing out. And I'm a big fan of the sooner you can get content out, the better you're going to do over time. There's always a fun argument of like, "Oh, if I have a 1,000 posts, do I drip them out once a week or do I publish them all at once?"
I would choose publish all at once every single time. Simply because it gives them more time to gather links and you can always go in later and add things like internal links, improve that content and figure out which ones were successful. Maybe don't do anything but the ones that kind of miss the mark a little, figure out what you can do better. And pretty much the rest of this presentation is going to be this whole decision-making process here. This is a full content audit. This is one that I actually put together. This is my whole flowchart that I go through in my head usually. It's the first time I'm putting it down on paper, which was fun and interesting. But this is how I am making decisions based on this content audit. Before I really dive into that, are there any questions, Travis, that we might want to talk about?
Travis:
Yeah, we do have one. What do you do if you audit a site that's on Squarespace or a site where you have limited access editing code and then the tech audit says the text HTML ratio is bad? Do you ignore it? You write tons of texts on those pages, or what?
Patrick:
Yeah, so as a technic SEO, if I ever saw a code text ratio at an audit, I'd just be laughing. That's not a thing. I don't know why it's in people's audits. I would absolutely be ignoring that. It's not going to have any kind of impact. Google's constantly said for 15 years now, probably the text HTMO blah, blah, blah, not a thing. Or yeah, text to code, text to HTML. If you see something like that, it's just kind of BS. It's like we added another check to our 500-point checklist and does nothing.
Travis:
Awesome, yeah. And then another person asked, kind of going back to the Ahrefs WordPress plugin, "Is there an equivalent plugin for Webflow?"
Patrick:
No, I don't think Webflow really has a huge market share yet. As I said, I don't even know what our usage statistics are for our WordPress plugin. I hope more people are starting to use, I know initially we had some trouble and all with the slowing down sites, but all that's been fixed for at least a couple years now.
Travis:
Awesome.
Patrick:
And it's a pretty good starting point, I think. Where I hope it will go is ultimately like what I have here. Going from what was the very basic flowchart that only includes organic traffic to being able to audit and answer all the questions. There are some things that we have to build in order to make that happen, but that's the future state that we're aiming for.
Travis:
Cool, gotcha. Awesome. Yeah, we can continue. I think there's a couple more questions, but we can hold those for a little bit. They may be answered soon.
Patrick:
All right, I'm going to try and zoom in here.
Travis:
Yeah, I also dropped in a link to the flowchart and chat too.
Patrick:
Oh, awesome. Perfect. Yeah, so the other one basically only covered organic search traffic, but what do you do with pages that don't have organic search? And that's this part of the flow chart here. Is it getting traffic from another source? There are things that are useful that you don't want to just go and delete, and the problem with the content inventory and some of the decisions made people will be like, "Well, it's gotten no traffic from Google in the last six months. Let me delete that." It's typically going to delete things you probably don't want to delete. Things like case studies, social proof, even user studies.
I actually have a legit story where once someone told me we should go and delete our terms of service page, and I'm like, "That sounds like a bad idea." This was not at Ahrefs. This was back when I worked in-house and I'm like, "What are you talking about?" But that was a decision that they came back after they went through the content inventory and they're like, "Well, just delete all the pages that don't get X amount of traffic or blah, blah, blah." The decisions they make sometimes are ridiculous. That's why I say, you really got to look at this stuff. Deleting navigational pages, deleting paid search pages. Okay, cool. You got no traffic from organic, but you send a 1,000 people every day there and paid. Does that sound like a good idea of something you want to delete? Probably not.
This process can take a lot longer than people realize. Because if you really try and take those shortcuts, you will end up with ridiculous decisions and you will probably hurt yourself. I would say look at those pages, those social pages, case studies, any illegal terms of service, navigational pages, paid pages, and decide, "Do I actually need it? Is it helping in any way?" A case study probably helps with conversions. Now no one is seeing it whatsoever. First I would look and see is it being tracked properly. But if legitimately no one has ever seen it or going to it, I would try and figure out why. Maybe we didn't actually link to it, we didn't include it in our flow, but then after that it's like if this isn't really useful, then you can delete it. If it's not useful for search and you want to know index it, keep it from being seen in an organic search, that's totally fine. That's a decision you can make.
The next part would be like, okay, if you determined, you've now figured out, do I keep these other pages or not? Don't just blindly start deleting stuff. The things that are for search, what you're typically going to find is if it's not successful, there might be an issue. It's just not even being crawled or indexed. It could be that this page isn't linked to internally, it's never been crawled, wasn't included in a site map or just was left with a no index tag on it. There can be some technical issues you want to look at to make sure that you actually are being found, you are being indexed and giving that page even a chance to rank. This is actually the number one thing I tell people to look for. Technical SEO is like, is your page actually indexable? Is it index? Because you can have the best content ever, but if you don't index it, no one's going to find it.
And then this is very similar to the very simplified flowchart. You got to give a page a little bit of time. There's an interesting phenomenon from Google where if you do have a popular site and you publish a new blog, it technically can inherit some of the signals from other pages. I think our CMO, Tim, he once called this spike of hope. Where you might have a terrible piece of content that ranks initially because it basically inherits other signals. If you generally publish really good content, it goes out. Google's going to be like, "Okay, we're going to rank this, because they've proven they publish good stuff all the time." And then once they realize this page needs to stand on its own, it stops having those signals and it was terrible, then it will fall off. That's a pretty interesting phenomenon that happens, but if you're lucky, it will keep those signals and you'll keep your rankings. But if you don't have that huge history, don't have tons of internal linking, don't have a bunch of signals, you have to give that content some time.
On new websites especially my timeframe is generally a year, but depends on the site, depends on the history that I've seen, how long I would give it before I make any changes to it, but generally I would at least give it a few months just to see what happens. And from there it's basically prioritization. Should I even work on this? Does it really have business value? Do I need this to rank? Do I have other stuff that I want to improve instead, do I have new content that I want to create? There's a lot that goes into deciding, what should I do and when should I do it? Everyone has limited resources, limited time, and you can only do so much, I would say. I'm going to go back over here just ... I'll get back down to that section for a second, but if it's already getting organic traffic, what can help with the prioritization is like are you happy with the amount of traffic?
Even some of those posts in the WordPress plugin that are marked underperforming for Ahrefs, I'm totally fine with where they are. They might be ranking fifth or sixth. That's good enough for now because maybe they typically won't have enough business value. There was one I think in one of my screenshots about URL parameters. Great, I wrote that. I want to educate people on that. Is that a huge business priority for Ahrefs or something that's important to our business? Not really, there's I think very few things that even showcase the tool and different use cases for that post. Something like that, even though it's marked underperforming in the automated audit, I personally am not in any rush to update that post. You have to look at that and figure out, "Is this really a priority? Is this something that I should work on or do I have better things to do?"
And that can be a difficult decision to make, especially if you're not necessarily the one involved. If you have a team of writers and you've never even read these posts, it can be very difficult to make those decisions. That's why, again, I say you really have to look at some of these to be able to really prioritize what you should be doing. You can look at things like conversions, conversion rate, are you happy as a driving you value, blah, blah, blah. Tons of different things. All right, back down here, once you decided, "Okay, I want to improve this." Then it's a question of how. One of the first things I always look at is kind of cannibalization. Do I have other pages that are really targeting the same things that are ... This was more common I would say years ago, but people literally write a page for every single term and related term, which was crazy. You don't see that too much now, but you can get some pages that are very close and very similar in ranking for some of the same terms.
It's not necessarily a problem. Maybe one ranks for terms that are valuable enough to stand on its own, maybe it doesn't, maybe you really are targeting the same terms with the same page. In that case, I would be saying, combine them, consolidate them. It's even old pages that you had that might have been deleted in previous processes that could have targeted some of these things. That's something I would say definitely look at. If you had old pages, especially ones that had links to them, you can redirect those to your current version, reclaim some of that value. There's an interesting trick actually with cannibalization. The way it's commonly looked at is people will go into a tool like Ahrefs or Google Search Console and they'll be like, "Okay, this page is swapped at some point. I had this page ranking for this term and now I got this other page ranking." But that can be hard to see really.
If you actually take the Google search URL and add and filter equals zero to the end of it, press enter. It removes what's called domain clustering from Google. It's a filter that they use, and what that will do is show you where each individual page ranks. Basically you're limited mostly to one to two pages that show in the search results. That will unfilter the results so that you can see more of those pages than where they rank. This has helped me solve so many headaches at companies before, I was in-house at a major corporation for years and I used to use that. They're like, "Well, why does this blog page rank for my head term instead of my product page?" And the answer usually was, because every head term is more informational in nature. There might be one product page that ranks from the number one company in the market or something, but six out of 10, seven out of 10 are going to be, what is this thing?
And then one's going to be this thing versus this other thing. And then you might see one product page in that top 10. So it's like, "Why does my informational page rank above my product page?" Because that's probably what most people want to see. But then if I could show them that all my informational page ranks third and the product page is 78, that solved a lot of headaches. It's basically you're not even close. Even if we wanted to optimize this for this term, there's just no way that's going to happen. It's a little tricky. Again, that's and filter equals zero to the URL. And it helps make arguments like that. It helps me make decisions like, "Okay, I've got one page that shows, but I've got two that rank, one that's seventh and one that's ninth. Maybe I actually want to combine those two because then maybe I'll get them up to third or fourth or something."
Or if I've got two that show like, oh, these are fourth and fifth, maybe I just leave those alone. These are kind of the decisions that you'll have to make when you have these competing pages. If you don't have that, if you don't have those opportunities, your next thing is going to be basically your content. Look at the competing content. Be realistic. Everyone thinks their content's the best. It's not always the best. Even my stuff, generally people like the content I write, but it's very technical. It can be very long and sometimes I'm just like, I can simplify that down. Why did I write five paragraphs for that when I could have made five bullet points? I could have explained it better, I could have given more insights to it. Adding my own expertise, real stories, how to use our tool for something. There are almost always ways to make your content better.
And if you really get out of your own head and start looking, you'll almost always see it, not at the time you write it, but go back a few months later with a clear head when you're not tired and spent all these late nights writing this content and blah, blah, blah. When you go back with a clear head, you're like, "Yeah, they wrote that better. They simplified that part. That was nice the way they did that." And you can really find these opportunities to improve. If you haven't used any kind of assistance software, Clearscope, I've used it in the past. I think it's a grade tool honestly. Pulls a lot of the same data that I would pull myself to say, maybe there's more I need to add to this, more related things. And so you can definitely run through a process like that to see, maybe I need to add a paragraph about this thing that I missed originally. But oh, I got competitors to talk about that, so there might be a more complete answer. And there's some basic on-page optimization, your titles, your headers, et cetera.
A lot of times people will focus on their images. Images really help you more with image search, not necessarily the organic search. So adding your alt text for images, I know it's a ranking factor, was actually a ranking factor for images, not organic search as far as I know. Stuff like that can cause you to waste a lot of time, especially if you got an image-heavy sight. Where it might not really help you in the organic searches that you want to rank for.
Internal links would be the next thing I would look at. I actually plan out all internal links before I even publish an article. I go ahead and look and say, "Where on my site am I talking about this thing? This is what I wanted to rank for. Let me search for some of these terms and then let me go at it." But even then I don't find everything. I think Clearscope even has something like that as well for the internal link suggestions. Ahrefs within our site auditor has internal link opportunities and it basically, we'll look at, "Here's what you rank for. Here's everywhere on your side that mentions this stuff. You may want to add a link from here to here if it doesn't already exist."
Internal links are powerful. They pass page rank, which I know a lot of people don't pay that much attention to anymore, but everyone's heard of EAT, right E-A-T or now it's E-E-A-T. That authority in EEAT is mostly paid rank. That's been confirmed by Google by the way. I think a lot of people are like, "Oh no, I need to work on my author box and blah, blah, blah." Paid rank, paid rank. Internal links are easy. You control your site, you can add those.
External links are harder, but that's where I would go next if it's really not ranking. I've done the best I can do with my content. I've been through a couple of revisions to try and make the content better. I've got all the internal links that I can get, what's left? And the answer's usually going to be links, the external links. And I think a lot of people, they really don't like link building, so you might just get stuck there. Some companies just are not allowed to link build. I've had many companies that are like, "No, no, no, you can't do outreach. Corporate says, legal says. You can't represent the company, you can't reach out, blah, blah, blah."
You got to get more creative, do things like data studies, blah, blah, blah, maybe some digital PR. And then get links to those pages, internally link back to your relevant pages. There are ways around it basically. But any link building is generally hard. We have a ton of guides. There's a ton of different methods. I would say for the most part, for the SEO niche where we play, a trust blog can pretty much hit page one for any topic we write about. We are pretty well known and really we have that history where we pretty, almost everything you search in SEO related, well you'll probably see Ahrefs rank. But where we can still struggle is for very competitive terms. We might hit fourth through seventh. Usually the reason we're not higher is, the example I gave with Moz earlier. Their beginner's guide to SEO for instance over the years was the go-to resource to learn SEO. It has a huge history of links.
I think our beginner guide is better objectively. I'm actually a 100% sure it's better as far as the content, but basically we can't overtake them unless we really build more links over time than they do for that. We can even still struggle at a certain point. We basically hit these roadblocks where it's like, "Yeah, even for Ahrefs, we need more links." And I think that's pretty much it. I'm going to say thank you for your time and I am happy to answer any more questions that people have.
Travis:
Awesome. Yeah, way to go. Thanks for the presentation, Patrick. Very insightful. We do have quite a few questions to get through as well. Starting off, we had the first question is can you talk more about comparing your content to competition? How do you do this without copying what others are doing? Trying to have original content?
Patrick:
Isn't that the million dollar question in the age of ChatGPT and all these tools that help you create content that's similar to other content? I don't think it's a difficult concept of what you need to do. In fact, people needed to do it for years. I think it's just now Google's really going to make a push towards it. Because you have all these tools that guide you in the same way, you're researching the keywords. They're like, "Here are the related things, here's the sections your competitors have." And almost any main term that I go to now, if I read the top five results, I'm like, "I just read the same thing over and over." It's the same blog post, just repeated basically. I would say what you can do better, simplify it. Make it easier for people to read. Add your own expertise, add your own insights.
If you don't have that, find someone that does, find your expert. I think my content in particular usually gets shared because I will add interesting stories and interesting insights that other blogs don't have. I'll be the first to tell people about something. How many people here have heard that paid rank is part of EEAT? Probably not a ton. So yeah, it's really going to be simplify it, write it better, include a lot of this. You still have to include a lot of the same things. At least right now in Google. They're not that great at saying this is a huge diversity of thought, diversity of opinion there. It's still a lot of the main things that you need to talk about, but the way you talk about it, adding your own unique experiences, that's the other E in E-A-T now is experiences. So that's something they're going to start looking for more.
Travis:
I like that. That's a good answer. And the next one is, do you have any recommendations for how to identify cannibalization at scale?
Patrick:
Cannibalization?
Travis:
Yes.
Patrick:
At scale. About the best you can do at scale is one of the reports I mentioned that we have a little toggle. You can see there's a few reports with Google Search Console that will show you basically where pages have swapped over time. And that's the current state of the industry. I have something proposed that would actually help solve for that by pulling the unfiltered search results. We'll see if I can get that in the product anytime soon. Because that's really the only way to see it is if it's not swapping, but you're cannibalizing. There's no current way or tool that really shows that well in my opinion.
Travis:
Oh, interesting, yeah. And then how would you recommend balancing potential cannibalization with building topical authority?
Patrick:
I'm not even sure I understand that question.
Travis:
I think what they're saying is, if they're building topical authority writing about the same topic, how do they prevent themselves from cannibalizing their content?
Patrick:
I mean, try not to write about the same things. Yeah, I guess write about related things, but slightly different that are targeting at least another main term. You might get too close to rank for the same thing, but as long as they rank for other things as well that are different, then you're fine. It's not really cannibalization, I would say.
Travis:
Gotcha. And then another question is, while audit should be ongoing based on your flow chart, what timing and milestones would make most sense? Obviously the size of your audit has a lot to do with that, but when you get to tasks, how do you assign in timelines?
Patrick:
Yeah, there's no one answer for this. I've seen people that do this try and go through this process every month, every quarter, once a year. It depends on how in-depth you want to go, how many things you want to look at. Is there a particular part of the site or a particular term or category you want to prioritize? There's not a one-size-fits-all answer for that one.
Travis:
Yep. And then can you elaborate on when you would consider no indexing pages that don't have any potential to perform well in organic search?
Patrick:
Yeah, I mean, I think probably the simplest that most people understand are case study pages. What are you going to rank for with a case study? Most of the time it's you and plus another business. At best you're going to rank for the other business' name. Most of the time that's going to be on page two because they're going to have their side and a bunch of social profiles and blah, blah, blah. Maybe other news articles and stuff about them. Something like that doesn't really drive much value for organic search. In which case I would say, but you're totally fine to now index that like, "Oh, I got a case study with this company and they improved their SEO by 300%." It's good social proof, it's good things to show people on the site. Is anyone really ever going to see that in organic search? Probably not. That's something where I might know index for instance.
Travis:
That's a good point. And then could you talk briefly about how you approach filtering or categorizing URLs into page types to audit from a crawl export?
Patrick:
Well, you probably have an idea just from the URL structure, like /blog /blah, blah, blah. That's probably your blog pages/product/whatever/services/whatever. Depends on how you set up your site. If you use the flat architecture completely, good luck with that. You may have some identifying markup that you could pull from the pages itself. That's where something like a custom extraction could work. For instance, if you've got Author markup, that's probably a blog, so you could pull the author name in even if you want. It might have some identifying marks for the system. My blog is WordPress. My main side is reactjs. You could look for specific code snippets that are in one but not the other. But this is going to be different in every use case. But usually custom search, custom extraction, some kind of pattern is what I would be looking for.
Travis:
Gotcha. And then another question is, is the Ingram analysis helpful while analyzing top results for creating better content than the already ranking? If yes, how do you do it effectively?
Patrick:
I like Ingrams personally. I would say I will look at the related things and try to determine is that something I should use or not. Where my personal opinion, a lot of the content tools go wrong is like you need to use this term 13 times, use this one 17 times, blah, blah, blah. I don't believe in that. I believe you probably should be using a lot of those terms, but not necessarily counting the exact number of times or uses. If I see a main thing, like a term that has a lot of volume, I probably want a section about that. That's how I would interpret that personally, rather than saying, "I need to mention this term a certain number of times." I just need to write about it and cover that in probably a whole heading section about it, but not exact counts. That's almost like going back to what's the ideal, I'm blanking here on the name, but oh, you need to mention this term 3.4% of the time in your article. Not really a thing I would say.
Travis:
Yeah, I agree. And then a question from Jason, "Should you syndicate external article mentions the website, any impact any example of press releases?"
Patrick:
You have to be a little careful with content syndication. Press releases are probably fine. With news sites in particular the risk you run is that another news article could be picked up and actually rank above you. So their ranking instead of your content is a real possibility. And Google has a whole bunch of guidelines around content syndication where ideally they would have a canonical tag that points back to your original article. Almost no one does that. Second best is have a link that basically is this was originally found on blah blah, blah, back to you. And that I think solves for most of the issues. But I have seen many times where it's like this is the wrong version of the news article, the ranks. They usually figure it out over time. A month or two later you go back. But that's not that useful for news sites that are like they're getting 90% of that traffic right then for that story. They can hurt themselves by syndicating their content sometimes.
But still, it's a strategy I would pursue. If you have partners, if you can set standards, yeah, you can syndicate, but you have to add this canonical back. And they're fine with that. I'm perfectly comfortable with it then. If it's just the link, then I'm a little, okay, better than not having it syndicated, I guess, bigger reach, bigger audience potential.
Travis:
Perfect. And we're getting several questions, but what are your thoughts on using AI to help write content?
Patrick:
I mean, I wouldn't publish any of it written by AI. It's funny, so I mentioned earlier I worked in-house, I worked at IBM and I actually worked with the Watson team with NLG and the same stuff that they were mentioning five, six years ago is the same stuff people were realizing with ChatGPT, it's making stuff up. I remember an example when the movie Queen came out, they had something that came up with ... Rami Malek was the lead singer of Queen. And it's confident that that's correct. Well, Rami Malek was the actor that played the lead singer of Queen in the movie, so it's obviously not correct. You can't necessarily trust it. It's never going to add any real insights, expertise, thoughts of its own. Even the way it reads to me most of the stuff, it's good for a quick answer, good for simplifying things. I can't stand to read it. It's repetitive on a lot of the things that it writes.
Use it as a baseline, use it to come up with an outline or even a blueprint for what you want. But then I think it's really going to take some editing and adding your own knowledge to it to really be successful. Plus Google's probably going to crack down on a lot of that AI-generated content soon.
Travis:
Yeah, it's only a matter of time. But yeah, I agree with the overall strategy. And then Roger has another question. "What is your approach to optimizing internal links? How do you find opportunities, anchor selection, number, et cetera?"
Patrick:
Honestly, I just use our internal link opportunities report inside audit these days. I actually was the product manager for that and it replaced the process. So [inaudible 00:45:32] in the past used to be mostly responsible for internal linking. Why? Because to find those opportunities you had to scrape search results and you had to scrape the websites, pull out all this stuff, do a few checks. It was 15 minutes for me to run through to see the opportunities for one page. The internal link opportunities tool is basically that at scale. It's like, "Okay, these are what they rank for. Where do I mention this? What pages do I mention this on that I don't already link to this page that ranks for this term?" It really simplified a lot of things. We also have a search within HTML feature, so new content doesn't really rank for anything. I haven't published it yet.
I can say, "Well, this is my main term, this is what I wanted to rank for. These are some related things." And then I can search and see what pages that I actually mentioned this term on already on my website, so I can go ahead and plan to go add internal links to those.
Travis:
Oh, perfect. Fantastic. And it's actually the last question that we have so far, "But are there any particular types of conversion tracking that you recommend having set up in Google Analytics to help with the content audit process?"
Patrick:
I mean, anything that helps you attach it to revenue, I would say. Leads revenue. If you've got an average order value. At the end of the day one is for ourselves and businesses to make more money. Any conversion metrics you can pull that's like I am doing well or even trend history, I think that gets overlooked a lot of times in the audits. It's like maybe this last year at this time I was getting an average of a 100 orders a month on this page and now I'm getting 10. Data points that can really help you say, "This has the potential to do more to be better." I even pull, we have a metric at Ahrefs that's like traffic potential. And it's basically the traffic of the number one page ranking for something. I'll pull stuff like that personally to say, "Okay, my page is getting a 100 and someone's getting 10,000 searches a month for this thing or 10,000 clicks to their site a month for this thing. I'm probably not doing something as well as I could have."
There's no really right or wrong way. I didn't really want to cover content inventories because I feel like that is covered very well by a lot of articles online. But it's the decisions that you make with that are more complicated. I think so many people spend a lot of time making the inventory that when they come to the decisions, they just blank or something. They're like, "It's too much data." They make those weird decisions like, "Oh, it's got no organic traffic, let me delete it." And then they're like, "We need to delete our terms of service." What? No.
Travis:
Yeah, it's a good example. And we actually have one more question that kind of came through from Brett, actually, maybe two more. "What are some things that can cause a sudden drop in organic traffic? And what would you suggest doing to bring it back up?"
Patrick:
Most likely cause I would say would be either a change on Google's end, like a core algorithm update or any of their big updates. Or could be an indexing issue, with JavaScript sites could be some of your content basically disappeared, didn't get indexed, could be page got blocked and [inaudible 00:49:24] texts suddenly can't see your content, you fall. Those are going to be the typical big changes I would say. In which case it's mostly fix what you can do, try and do things better if it was an algorithmic update. I typically would say try and figure out what dropped. Usually at a page level, individual keywords is where I would start. Ahrefs Site Explore is the perfect use case for this because you can select any two dates in history so you can be like, "Oh, well this is where I was then, this is where I am now. These are my biggest drops on traffic or keywords, et cetera."
From there, it's probably looking at not necessarily something I did, it could be a search intent shifted in Google. Suddenly probably during COVID a bunch of things changed. A bunch of the intent changed from I'm going to go to the store to, I'm going to order online because that's what we did. After that, probably be looking at individual pages. Could be my competitors updated their content, someone published some new content. I'd really be looking at did they get more links, did they get more internal links? Did they make content changes to their site? So stuff like archive.org can help answer that to say, "Did they actually change their content? Is that why they're higher and I'm now lower? Did they update theirs? Did they publish something new?" There's a lot of things that could go into it, I would say.
Travis:
Awesome. And we had a couple more questions roll in. So if you're okay with it, can we run until-
Patrick:
Yeah.
Travis:
... couple more minutes. Awesome. So moving on. Casey asked, you kind of answered already, "But curious, what would be the key things you look at if you were evaluating an opportunity for a new blog as a distribution channel for business?"
Patrick:
A whole new blog or just a new post?
Travis:
She says, new blog or Casey says new blog, but maybe tackle it with the new post.
Patrick:
All right. Yeah, we typically will look at the volume of things plus a business value to us. We assign that when we're even pitching posts, so we're like, "Here's the search volume for this one main term, but post rank for a bunch of things." We typically will include things like the traffic potential, here's how much traffic the main post is actually getting, along with a business value score. We might even look at things like what competitors are ranking there? Is this valuable for them? Is this driving success for them just to decide what should we go after next, basically.
Travis:
Gotcha. And then Keeley, "What are your thoughts on infographics, aiding in organic visibility? Are they worth building or no?"
Patrick:
If done correctly, probably. This is a tough one, because infographics got overdone and spammy for years in SEO. I still personally like a good infographic. I think it can help, but it's different then the days of like, "Hey, I've got this infographic, would you include this on your blog and linked to me," kind of thing? Because that was a thing for years, SEOs did that. They created infographics to try and outreach to people to embed on their blogs and sort of worked for a while. And now I think everyone was, or at least maybe it's coming back now, but for a while everyone was so sick of infographics and seeing them. I still like a good infographic because it's an easy explainer, but could go either way. Some people may not respond well to infographics because of that history.
Travis:
That's a good point. This is probably the last question for today. Justin asked, "Assuming it's been around over a year and all the right things are being done, should you delete no index content that's still getting zero organic traffic?"
Patrick:
It's a personal decision. If it's still getting zero, maybe you just missed the mark. You might want to look at just even approaching it completely different. It could be the intent of the blog that you wrote is completely different then what's out there. Or maybe just everything out there is the same and what you really need is to do something different to interject your own opinion into the topic. If it's something I want to rank for, I would be hard pressed to say, "We should now index it just because it's not getting traffic." But if I really want to rank for it, I would just try something different and see if that works. Because whatever it's doing now, I guess just is not working.
