Content analysis
One of the first things to do is assess the frequency of published content.
This will allow you to:
- Detect any potential anomaly in the management of the website
- Assess the editorial effort to maintain the website
To achieve this, you need to import the website’s Sitemap and then plot it.
Website Due Diligence has a particular algorithm to differentiate the modification of existing blog posts from created ones. In the screenshot above, the owner did not create new content in the past months but only updated old content.
In such a case, the rating to give to this control must be low, and the target value must be high as it would be a quick win to write new articles on different keywords.
This criteria is directly linked to this (control)[https://websiteduediligence.com/docs] in the domain section.
However, contrary to the domain aspect, here you need to assess if existing articles can be extended to include new low-competition keywords. The process is as follows.
- Take the top N-keywords and related webpage
- For each keyword, go to “Keywords Explorer” in Ahrefs, and search for low-competition/high-traffic related keywords
- For each keyword idea, check in the blog post if it has been included
- When a keyword has not been included in the blog post, note it as a potential improvement in the “Notepad” of Website Due Diligence
Let’s do it.
The top N-keywords can be found in Ahrefs, in the section Organic search
, menu Organic keywords
.
Then for each keyword, get new keywords idea. Click on on Keywords Explorer
, then related terms
, and search for low-competition/high-traffic keywords. Here we selected 10 as the maximum Keyword Difficulty
, and 500 as the minimum volume.
Then for each interesting keyword, you can check in the blog post if it is already present. You can do a search on the webpage, it will be faster. If you don’t find a keyword, note it for later: it might be a quick win to gain additional traffic.
You need to check the quantity and length of articles. A lot of articles is better, as it may give you the opportunity to merge some of them to increase your strongest pages. The length is also important, as nowadays a good article should contain at least 1000 words.
To check it, you can use the Content Analysis
tab of Website Due Diligence.
- Click on
Toggle Fetch new posts
- Enter a number (by default 10)
You can choose a higher number but keep in mind that requests will be made to the website, so it’s better to limit the number of articles retrieved.
Once the articles have been fetched (it may take a while), you can see various statistics, averaged by the number of articles.
So here you can check the average length of blog posts. You can also see the evolution over the time, which might be interesting to know if there are some periods where the length of blog posts has been too low.
This criteria should be given a high rating if the number and length of articles are good.
The accuracy of existing blog posts should be checked manually. Read some articles to detect any potential outdated content, especially older ones.
You can use the “events table” to pick a few blog posts and review them.
Another good test to perform is to check for outgoing broken links. Go to Ahrefs, then Outgoing links and click on Broken links. All broken links will be displayed, which may help you to identify outdated content.
The goal is to assess if the website is already SEO optimized. To do this, you can use the Content Analysis
tab of Website Due Diligence, as shown (above)[https://websiteduediligence.com/docs/controls/content/#quantity-and-length-of-articles].
Select a few articles and check them with Copyscape. If you find some duplicate content, it could be a massive red flag and you need to rate this criteria very low. If you do not find any copy-paste, leave this criteria at the default rating (2.5).
Poor content will not bring long-term benefits. You need to review the content to ensure there is no need to rewrite everything.
You will need to review manually a few articles to ensure they are well written. If you want to double-check, you can use a service like (Grammarly)[https://grammarly.com] which would detect mistakes in the text. Beware however, you will find also a lot of false-positive.