Welcome. In the last lesson, we identified key questions to ask as you review the content and resources on your website. In this lesson, we'll take a closer look at our own sites. We'll break down the process for identifying content step-by-step so that we get the best results. You'll also learn how to apply tools like Google Analytics to get you started on your internal content audit for the most SEO benefit. Let's start with our audit, the first step is identifying where we want to begin our analysis. If you have a larger site, you can easily get overwhelmed determining where to start. To begin with, let's identify low hanging fruit, these are pages that are already receiving organic visits. We know there is an interest in these pages because they are already receiving traffic and they can potentially be improved upon, which would result in more traffic and potentially more social sharing. There are a couple of ways you can do this depending on your preference and the size of your site. One of the ways I start performing a content audit especially on larger sites, is going into Google Analytics and finding current organic landing pages. I tend to look at the last six months of data as this will provide me with a good amount of useful information. You can get here by going to behavior, choosing landing pages, and then sorting by secondary dimension and choosing the medium. This will pull up a list of all landing pages and what medium they are receiving traffic through. For example, through organic search, paid search, referrals or other methods. Next, you will want to take a look at organic visits only. You can do this through advanced sorting and choosing to include the medium containing organic searches, this will remove anything non-organic. Now you can examine this data in a couple of different ways, depending on the size of your site it may be helpful to have one audit for your blog and one audit for internal pages. This way you don't deal with too many types of data at once. I personally like to take different notes depending on whether or not an item is an internal resource or a blog page, so this is the way I always do it. You can filter your data by including landing pages containing the word blog. This will filter out all pages that do not contain the word blog in the URL. Note, this will only work this way if you have your blog in a directory called blog, which most sites do. If your blog is in a directory called articles or something, then filter by that word instead. You can either export this report to a CSV file and sort it in Excel or you can manually review the list and add the pages you want to Excel along with your notes. The end result will be the same. For this lesson, I will make it easier by not downloading the information. For these examples, I will be excluding the landing page URLs for client privacy privileges. What I will do first is sort by sessions, this way I can see the pages that are receiving the lowest amount of organic visits first. This helps me see whether or not these pages can be improved upon in any way. Now we can focus on ways to boost organic visits to these pages. When you do this, especially for blog pages, you're going to see a lot of irrelevant URLs, like pages with a tag, category or archive in the URL. This brings you to pages featuring a list of posts rather than a specific post itself. It's a good idea to filter these out and Analytics or filter them in Excel if you decided to download the data. Some things I notice as I'm reviewing this is that many of these pages with fewer visits actually have pretty decent site engagement. In some cases, the bounce rate is low or even zero because the user navigated to another page. So at least these pages contribute to better site engagement metrics. Because user engagement is high, but traffic is low, this tells me these pages are not getting the attention they need from search engines. By improving the content, for example, adding more content or resources, we can help search engines recognize that these pages offer value to users and should be ranked higher. You should now have a good idea of where to start your internal content audit to receive the most SEO benefit, as well as how to find these pages within an analytics program such as Google Analytics. Next, we will look at organizing the content we find and finding opportunities for improvement.
