Process: Analysis

We have an Enterprise account at Agency Analytics and provide all of our clients with a rank tracking dashboard. Each blog post that we write is being tracked for at least 3 keywords on both Google and Bing, 24 hours per day.

This gives us a great birds-eye view of your overall footprint on search engines and can help us spot issues if you have any posts that are not surfacing. It can also help us spot posts that are out of date or that get overtaken by competitors so that we can edit and improve them to regain rankings.

Google Analytics gives us both historical data on your existing pages and blog posts, as well as data on how your new posts are trending. This enables us to spot areas for improvement, monitor growth, set up goal funnels, and improve your content strategy.

With one of our clients, we discovered that an old blog post of theirs used to get over 2,000 unique visitors per day until suddenly it slowed down to a trickle. It turns out that their post was outdated and new information had come to light since then, causing their rankings to fall. We added a few paragraphs to it (at no charge of course) to bring it up to date, as well as a couple of other small optimizations and fixes, and they were back on the front page in no time.

We're always surprised by how few of our clients had Google Search Console set up when they were first onboarded. This is Google's one line of communication to site owners, and it's where you receive advanced insights that you can't find anywhere else.

We'll help monitor potential issues such as search penalties, design issues, user experience issues, mobile issues, speed issues, and more. We also monitor your click-through rates in search engines to see what's working and what isn't so that we can update and improve your content accordingly.

Audits are probably our least favorite parts of the job, but they can be hugely beneficial. We usually don't charge our clients anything extra for this, even though they are super boring and tedious to do.

Since our services are geared towards established businesses, many of our clients have had other writers in the past. These can range from freelancers to low-quality articles that were ordered on content mills.

We mentioned this on a previous page, but in the past, John Mueller (head of the Google Search Relations team) has been very clear that Google looks at your average content quality. This means that if you have 50 hall of fame posts and 50 not-so-great posts, your post quality may be considered "Average". Low-quality content can weigh your entire site down.

The hard part is proving to our clients what makes it "low-quality" so that they trust us to make the right decisions.

Here are some of the things we check when auditing old content:

• Indexed on Google: If the post has been around for a while and Google hasn't even bothered to index it on their search engine, that's a bad sign.
• Duplicate Content: Plagiarism is very common, especially for guest posts. If your article exists in a nearly-identical form on other websites, it may look like you stole your content to search engines, which doesn't reflect well on your business.
• Grammar Issues: We count the number of grammar issues in a post and tally it in a spreadsheet. This isn't the most significant factor, but if a post isn't performing and it also happens to have 60 grammar issues, that's something we should know about.
• Word Count: Google considers thin content to generally be any page with less than 500 words.
• Topic Competition: If you run a Google search for the topic of your blog post and the top 10 results are all giant household names who knocked it out of the park, your blog post will likely never see the light of day. It's too competitive.
• Links: Even if a post isn't that great, if it has strong natural links, it's worth keeping and possibly rewriting. It's critically important that links are checked and carefully evaluated before a post is deleted or changed.
• Traffic Past 30 Days: If a post has no traffic, it probably won't be missed. We also look past 30 days to see if it performed at one point.

Here's an example of one of the audits we've done in the past, with sensitive info omitted:

In most cases where we perform an audit like this, the site in question will double or even triple in traffic, even after deleting hundreds of blog posts. The way we see it, if your blog posts aren't helping you in any way, chances are pretty good that they're hurting you. I wrote an article for HuffPost a long time ago about this.

Similar to a content audit, sometimes your old spammy backlinks can come back to haunt you.

We've helped our clients recover from link penalties and audit their backlink profiles, remove their low-quality links, and submit disavow requests to Google. Necessitating a link cleanup is pretty rare these days, but for some sites that are not ranking properly, it may be necessary. We'll let you know if this is the case and do our best to help out.

Our founder, James, has performed hundreds of these while working as the chief marketing officer at a large SEO agency. In most cases, we don't charge anything extra for this, unless your link profile is massive and will take many hours to complete.

As mentioned briefly above, occasionally, your content will become outdated and will need to be edited.

We'll help to edit and improve your content over time. We monitor these ourselves, but we also monitor your blog comments. If a commenter adds an important piece of information to one of your articles, or if they spot an inaccuracy, we'll update the post with the latest information as well.

Google loves it when webmasters show that they make an effort to keep posts up to date. It will improve the performance of your blog as a whole, and it gives them a good reason to trust that the rest of your content is being maintained the same way. It's an underrated search ranking factor.

By now, you should be thinking:

"Wow, they do a lot more than just writing blog posts".

Well, yes - we wear many hats. Developers, graphic designers, web designers, marketers, SEO experts, eCommerce specialists, UX designers, page speed engineers, server admins, security experts - we do it all, in the spirit of helping you build a formidable content strategy.

Any time we spot an area for improvement on your site, we'll let you know. We frequently pull late nights for our clients and go above and beyond our job description to ensure that their sites are performing and growing at a healthy rate. If something is dragging your performance down, or if there's something different that you can be doing, we'll let you know. Sometimes it's nice to have a few extra sets of eyes on your website. You might be surprised what we can help you out with.

This isn't billed separately - we do this as a courtesy for all of our clients. If your business is performing well, we're happy, you're happy, and everyone is happy.