How to Audit Your Website Content to Boost Your SEO & AI SEO Ep. 141

Learn how to audit your content to improve your website's SEO and AI SEO. If you want to get more traffic to your website, show up more often on ChatGPT or AI Overviews or AI Mode, then this is an online marketing strategy that will help you. 

Your website and blog's content can drive lots of website traffic, but we want to make sure it's the right people. 

Learn how to do an audit, what to look for, and how to determine what to keep, remove, and change so that you're more visible in search. 

Transcript

0:33

Hi there. Welcome back to the podcast. I am going to sneak in one more quick episode before I go pick him up at his friend's house. So I'm doing good. I've gotten three recorded while he was at a play date, so yay for that. So this time what I wanna talk to you about is how to audit your website and blog content to boost your SEO, especially your. Ai, SEO, we've talked a lot about AI overviews, AI mode chat, GPT, and the fact that we have to change our content formatting for ai. So today I wanna really look at. What do you have on your website? How is it performing? Can we update it and make it work better for SEO and can we have a better chance of ranking in AI in the overviews, AI mode chat, GPT, perplexity, et cetera. So on a regular basis, like once a year, I go ahead and I update and review and audit my website and blog content. And if I have any pages that really aren't applicable anymore, I go ahead and get rid of those. So say that I had a. Product or course that I used to sell and I don't sell it anymore, or a consulting program that you don't have anymore, you wanna go ahead and get rid of those pages because you don't really want people. To come in and find things that aren't relevant or you're not really helping, you're not offering that anymore. It's not a good user experience, so let's go ahead and get rid of those. Now, when you are getting rid of them, there are a couple things you can do with them. One, you can redirect them, meaning somebody who finds that page goes to another page automatically, they land on a different page. Or you can just remove them. You can just delete them out. Now, if you don't do. An actual, like you don't delete them the correct way on the backend, then you're going to end up with what's called a 4 0 4 error, meaning that the page was not found well, it doesn't impact your SEO. Google doesn't really care. I care because it's not a good user experience. So I had an issue with my. Um, air fryer, toaster oven this morning. It's been acting up for the last week or two, and so I reached out to Cuisinart to find out because I heard, you know, it was under warranty, they'd take care of it. So I searched and sure enough, online I found information. It gave me the website page that I could submit my claim, but when I went to that page, it was a 4 0 4 error, so I couldn't submit my claim, I couldn't do what I needed to do in that moment, and I actually had to call them now. Thank goodness. They were awesome and they answered their phone in like 20 seconds, and I got somebody really nice on the phone and she was super helpful, and they're sending me a brand new air fryer toaster oven because mine broke. But it's not always like that. My microwave decided to die on Memorial Day as I was getting ready to host a pool party with like 25 people at my house. And when I called KitchenAid to get help with it, it ended up taking me three phone calls in about two and a half hours before I got somebody and got it scheduled to have someone come out. So. As a consumer, when I saw that 4 0 4 error on the page, it was like, oh my gosh, no. I just wanna be able to submit this online. I don't wanna have to wait on the phone for hours to get help. So think about that from your consumer's perspective, your reader's perspective. You don't wanna have 4 0 4 errors on your website. Where you're not helping them get to where they need to get to. So really think about that. So go through and clean up any pages that are no longer applicable. You don't offer that. It doesn't tie to anything in your business anymore. Just get rid of them, remove them or redirect them. So I have. Like training classes that I teach live once or twice a year. Well, if I'm not teaching it live, the person doesn't need to end up on a page that says, Hey, this doesn't exist. I just redirect them so that when they search that they end up on the page for the training class. That's currently available because that's what they're looking for is a training class. So think about that. Think about the user experience when you're doing this, and make sure that if you are doing a redirect, you are redirecting them to the correct page. Now, if you are going to do a redirect, you, there are two types. One is a 3 0 1, which is a. Permanent redirect. The other is a 3 0 2, which is a temporary redirect. In most cases, you're gonna use a 3 0 1 permanent redirect. If this is feeling too techy, just have your tech person do it. But realistically, if you're in WordPress and Squarespace and some of those, you're gonna be able to do this pretty easy on your own. Now we've talked about what we need to get rid of. Now what I want you to do is look at your blog or your remaining pages on your website, and I want you to see what you have as far as what content you have. So you can use a tool to help you crawl it, to look at it and see. So if you want, there's a free one called Screaming Frog. I know it's a funny name, but it works really well. It's a free download. You can use it and it'll help you crawl your site and. Can you see what Google sees? Or if you have analytics set up, I just go straight into analytics and I go into my analytics and I like my blog is back or forward slash blog. So I go into analytics and I just look at forward slash blog. I pull the traffic for 12 to 18 months. That way I know I'm not making a decision based on seasonality. Let's say that there's a post most of minor evergreen. Yours may or may not be. An evergreen post just means it's applicable at all times. So most mine are evergreen, but you wanna make sure that if there's something that is seasonal, you're not making a decision to cut it now, when you actually would be getting a lot of traffic to it during the right time of year. So you wanna look at that 12 to 18 month view and you wanna look and see which pages are getting no traffic, which pages are getting a lot of traffic. If you have a keyword ranking tool, you wanna look and see which pages have keywords that are ranking high. Are there. Keywords that you could potentially get to Page two. You know, maybe you're at the top of page two. Maybe you wanna get to page one. There are so many things that you can do when you're auditing your content. What I generally recommend. Is you categorize and prioritize based on opportunity. So if you have blog posts that got like five visits in the last 18 months, you may not even wanna bother with those because you know what? They're not doing much. They're not getting a lot of traffic. Maybe your audience doesn't like'em. Maybe they're not super relevant, maybe they're really old and not very good, and you should consider just getting rid of them. What I want you to really look at are the ones that are getting traffic and the ones that are ranking, and I want you to look for SEO opportunities. So here, if you have ones that are ranking in your ranking. Um, ranking software. Let's say that your tracking shows that you are between 11 and 20 in your keyword rank for a given keyword. I want you to take a look at the blog post that is associated with that keyword and look and see what is the keyword and is it the right one? Should you maybe do a revision on it? Is there something that you should change to improve your SEO and see if you can potentially increase your rankings? So you're gonna wanna go through and use some of your competitive research. I've got some podcast episodes about this. If you're a student in simple SEO content, you have your AI SEO assistant who can help you with this. You also have access to me, ask me questions, I will help you and answer them, and walk you through what to do. So you're looking for opportunities. Are there keywords that you can rank for today that maybe you couldn't rank for before? Are there keywords that you could just adjust the title or the content a little bit and make it more applicable? Do you need to update the formatting like I'm looking at? My original blog post that I wrote here for how to audit your content, and let me tell you before this goes live with the podcast episode and the embed and everything, I'm going to update the formatting on this drastically because this was written probably in 2017 or 2018. It's been updated a few times from an SEO standpoint. But it's not been updated for ai. SEO. I have not formatted it. There is not enough white space on this post. There are different things that I'm going to change now. I update and review my content each. Year. I generally make it a summer project because as you know, I work fewer hours in the summer. I don't do a whole bunch of big launches and things like that, so I try to do projects like this. You don't have to do it in the summer, just do it maybe during your downtime. If you don't have downtime, then just choose a handful of posts and work on'em at a time. As you work your way through everything, you're going to want to determine what to update, what to keep as is, and what to get rid of. Once you've made that decision, like pull your data out of Google Analytics, create your spreadsheet, and just have, keep revise. Delete. And that way you'll know what you have that you need to work with. And then you'll also be able to see like, are there content gaps? Are there posts that you thought you had covered that you didn't or are there posts that you've covered five different ways? One is getting traffic and the others are not. That might be a situation where you want to redirect those others to whichever version of it is getting the most traffic. Because sometimes when we've been blogging for years, we duplicate. We don't realize, we think we have a great idea and we do, and we write it, and then we realize, oh yeah, I wrote one about that five years ago. So, you know, you just wanna look at it and do the update. In the blog post, there's more data, more details on like how do you determine what to look at from a data perspective. So make sure you take a look at that blog post. It was in your, it was linked in your email. It's also linked in the description here, because it does actually walk through, like what questions you can ask yourself to figure out, do I keep, do I edit, do I remove. Last year when I did this, I removed over a hundred posts from my blog because they really weren't applicable. And I'll be honest, it was painful because one of them in particular ranked in position number one. It drove a ton of traffic, but I didn't have anything to sell. The person who came in from that blog post, because it was. It was from 2017. It wasn't super relevant for me anymore. It was how to nail Your First Facebook Live. I got hundreds of visits from that blog post every month. Great traffic, all of it. But I don't really teach Facebook Live. At this point, I don't have a course that teaches anything about it. So while it was a great blog post and it ranked really high and it drove a lot of traffic, it didn't drive traffic for people who were interested in learning about SEO or what content to create. And so I ultimately killed it off. And yes, my website traffic dropped because of that. And so sometimes I have to remind myself. I removed several really good blog posts that were getting a lot of traffic, but I couldn't edit them in a way that was going to make them. Applicable and relevant to my business as it is today, which is why I got rid of them, because it's more important to have the right people coming to your website. Even if you have fewer of the right people, it's going to work better than a bunch of the wrong people, and that's why we wanna audit your content. Then I also want you to look at your content to see what can you adjust to be able to rank in or show up in AI search. AI overviews, AI mode, et cetera, because your old content was not written with AI search in mind. Neither was mine. So we need to go through and revise and audit and update to help that old content drive traffic today. If it is still relevant and applicable to your business, let's update it and let's refresh it and let's get it out there so that it can start doing more. To boost your SEO and your A-I-S-E-O. Alright, hopefully you found this one helpful and gave you some ideas as to what to do. And like I said, make sure you look at the blog post on this one just because I've got a lot of questions you can ask yourself. I've got a lot of notes as to like where you can find the information, what to look at, things that I didn't go into as much in the podcast because you are not gonna probably be jotting a bunch of notes. You are like me, you're probably walking or working out or driving. So. Make sure you review the blog post because it's got lots of data on in there and questions and things you can do to help you go through this process. Alright, that's it for today. You have a great day and I will see you back here next week. Bye for now.