The way site audits are typically done hasn’t changed much in the past five years. New and better tools come out, but they still seek to analyze the same things: content and links as it relates to rankings.
Meanwhile Google is deeply focused on using all the data available serve users the precise results they are looking for at any given moment.
While you might be interested in what keywords have the highest search volume or whether you can move from position 10 to position 3, Google is much more interested in mining and understanding the richer (real) relationships and context of your site as it fits in the web, and you as you fit in the world.
Are you an expert?
Can you be trusted to provide good information?
Are you consistently giving your users what they want?
Those questions are a far cry away from “how many links this page has versus that page.”
Feels more like a deep background check on who you are as a person, a business owner, partner, agent from someone doing serious due diligence.
And yet, in the world of SEO, it’s treated as a numbers game.
A “better” process just means layering in more of the same, often manually.
- Look at your Google rankings, traffic, estimated impressions and click-throughs in Google on a per page, per topic, and per phrase basis.
- Look at other sites that are consistently ranking on those same search results pages and inspect their content.
- Use third party tools to look at other phrases those pages rank for that we don’t rank for, or look at what pages link to those pages from other sites.
- Find gaps, make recommendations to fill those gaps
- Repeat
To do this is an ongoing struggle: collect, analyze, look for patterns by hand, repeat. It is hard trenches work.
I’m not saying being in the trenches or having an ongoing, iterative process of filling gaps is wrong or even avoidable, but I do think that we need to be thinking more like Google does and less like everybody else.
We make data actionable by enriching it with relationships. Those relationships surface insights about the context of our content, our ideas, and our existing and likely next connections.
For example, it’s easy to find your “close neighbors,” a list of those best suited for you to potentially partner with, which would result (naturally) in more links between your sites, mutual sharing with each others’ audiences, more opportunities for sales.
It’s a completely different way of thinking about something like link outreach. You move from cold emailing a list of competitor link profile webmasters to strengthening ties with those around you, and those around them.
Just like you draw connections between ideas, we can draw connections between your content and pretty much anything directly and indirectly associated with it. When we have that awareness, then we have the insights we can act on, confidently.
I’m launching a productized service for graph content audit + ongoing recommendations at $500/month per site.
Because it’s early stages, I’m looking for 5 sites to help guide the direction of features, priorities, and better understand what insights and results you’re looking for.
If you’re interested and an expert with at least a few hundred page website, info products, and an audience, hit reply and let’s chat.