Introduction
A landing page should ideally serve one or very few primary topics, in order to have a high content focus and authority to rank on top. Serving too many primary topics dilutes the content focus, and therefore, hurts the ranking of the page on that topic. To address this, the content on the pages that serve too many primary topics must be streamlined into different topically separated pages. Manually identifying topic overlaps can be subjective, and with several landing pages, resolving these overlaps can get laborious.
This is where Content Audit steps in, to point out these topic overlaps as optimization opportunities, and provide you with the necessary metrics to help you prioritize them. These are identified in a data-driven way, based on how topics are covered on the top 10 search results for each topic.
How it works
Content Audit identifies the landing pages that serve too many primary topics, and flags them alongside metrics such as the number of keywords affected, their search volume, % Clicks and Visibility. This is also supported by the Opportunity metric, a combination of how difficult it is for the landing page to reach the top 10 and the additional organic traffic it would bring to the website, once you reach top 10. This helps you understand the potential of each optimization opportunity and prioritize them accordingly.
Clicking on each landing page takes you to the sidebar, where you can see which are the specific overlapping topics and how many keywords are part of it, along with topic-level aggregated Visibility, search volume and Opportunity score. This supports your decisions on how you might want to address the opportunity, for instance, by streamlining your content to one or very few primary topics and creating separate pages for the others, if necessary.
Here's our process, for identifying these optimization opportunities:
The system first identifies the top 10 ranking pages for each of the keywords from the Rank Tracker. It then analyzes all the ranking keywords for each of those pages to identify related keyword clusters or topics. This tells us which primary topics the top 10 landing pages are targeting.
It then identifies which of your website's landing pages serve more than one of these topics (topic overlaps).
For the identified overlapping topics, if the top 10 ranking websites have dedicated pages but your website does not, the system flags the landing page serving these overlapping topics as an optimization opportunity.
Use case
For example, this landing page ranks for 8 keywords spanning across two topics, "career test" and "career aptitude test".
The page has a better Visibility and better Opportunity score on "career aptitude test", but the topic "career test" includes7 keywords that have a combined search volume that is more significant. You can look at the keywords that are contributing to this combined search volume and analyze their metrics to see how you can restructure the content and create separate pages for the topics.
Conclusion
Content Audit can identify landing pages that serve too many primary topics or search intents and provide key metrics that help you prioritize these optimization opportunities, in order to streamline your content, improve your content focus, and hence page rankings.