Jonathon says: “My insight is that a lot of people are doing lots of content audits or site audits and everything, so you should look at different ways you can automate this instead of doing it manually.”

Okay, so different ways you can automate audits. What are the key areas that you need to automate?

“A lot of stuff. We do content audits in our agency. What I've been able to do is automate a lot of stuff like grabbing meta titles, meta descriptions, and everything like that.

I even recently worked out how you can use Google Search Console API to pull it through to Google Sheets. Most of the things I've been doing are in Google Sheets instead of Excel.”

OK, so that was going to be my next question in terms of software. Is it free to use the software that you're using? Is it just Google Search Console and Google Sheets, or is there anything else that's key?

“I've used ChatGPT as well. That's how I've actually created custom code to pull through. There are a lot of built-in formulas in Google Sheets already, but I've found that they can be quite slow.

What I've started looking at is building custom Google scripts for Google Sheets. Then you can pull through the data a lot quicker. I found it's a lot quicker than using the built-in formulas.”

How'd you go about building a custom Google script?

“I'll be talking at BrightonSEO about how you can use ChatGPT to generate this.

You can literally tell it what code you want to generate and then it will generate it for you. There are a few little tweaks you've got to make for it now and again, because sometimes it won't make it as a formula, so you've got to tell it to make it as a formula. Then it'll create a custom formula you can use in Google Sheets.”

How reliable is it at getting most formulas right?

“I’ve found it's been very cleverly 100% accurate. Now and again, it sometimes takes a little while to get it to what you want it to do – especially when you're using APIs to pull through data from Google Search Console. It took me a couple of hours to work out how to pull it through correctly.

For many things like meta titles and descriptions, it's well easy to do. But if you want to go more advanced, it can take a little while to tweak it and make sure it works. It's a lot of testing it –putting it into Google Sheets to test if it works or not.”

Is it possible to do this if you're not that technical or do you need some kind of education first of all before being able to do this?

“My speciality is technical SEO, and I don't really find it too technical, to be honest with you. ChatGPT does most of the hard work for you, it just makes it a lot easier by doing it for you.”

Have you tried other LLMs to do this or is ChatGPT the only one that you've tried?

“I've only used ChatGPT at the moment. I'm sure that other ones will work as well. I'm expecting that. I'm 100% sure they probably will do it – if not even better. I haven't actually tried them out yet.

We'll probably be trying them out at some point to see if there are any better ones that make it easier and don't require back and forth to get it correct.”

Are these Google Sheets that you share directly with the clients or is this just for your own analysis, and then you actually provide the client with something else to review?

“Once I've done the code, the content audits actually do go to the client. What we do is, the code is in the backend – they can't technically see it, but of course, it's still there.

Then, with the formulas, I won't leave the formulas to run. Otherwise, when they load up, it'll take a while for it to load all the data. Just paste it in as plain text on Google Sheets and then it's really easy. It's there.”

What are you looking to audit? Are you looking to determine if, for instance, pages don't have page titles or if there are too many similarities in various page titles? What do you do with what you find?

“We look at whether the meta titles and meta descriptions can be improved further. That's not a ranking factor, but it hopefully helps to get more people to click through to the content.

We also look at the top 5 queries that are not mentioned in the content itself. Then we can look at how we can adapt the content and improve it further. For some content, we might say that we're going to rewrite it completely. For some content, we might just add a few images in. We found that helps a lot with some content as well.”

Love that. Okay, so you take the data from Search Console to establish the queries that are being used for that particular landing page. Then do you just analyse the page title and meta descriptions to determine how optimised they are for the most common keyword phrases?

“We'll look at the word count and compare that to competitors – and look at schema, looking at how we can improve that. A lot of clients we've seen don't have schema already, so we're looking at implementing that. There's a lot of stuff like that.

We look at keywords, what their main keyword targeting for that is, and even stuff like when it was last modified or who the author is. With the author, we're looking at EEAT and seeing who is most authoritative to hopefully boost the rankings with the EEAT guidelines from Google.”

Okay, so starting with the schema there, is schema necessary for every page?

“Probably not for every page. Most of the clients we work on are WordPress sites, so we're using a plugin like Rank Math to do that. Most of the stuff is automated already. We do this before we’ve even installed that just to see what can be improved. Then Rank Math will do most of the legwork for us.

If there are any How To’s, for example – I know it's not a ranking factor and might only help the site a little bit, but we will put How To schema on blogs that are about how to do something related to their industry.”

You mentioned the age of the content there as well. Is there an age of content that you find that ranking or traffic starts to drop off?

“Not that I've seen. We look at that just to see how regularly it's been updated. We look at when it was first published – and with the article schema already implanted on the site (if it already has it), we can pull through when it was last modified as well, so we can look at whether it's been updated regularly or not.

If it hasn't, that's when we'll look at updating it to hopefully improve it. Of course, we'll look at how it's performing already. If it's performing well already, then we might have a look at tweaking it a tiny bit, but not too much.”

Got you. In general, if it's not been modified within 6 months, would you say that it's necessary to keep on doing that every few months or is there a particular time frame that you advise people to stick to?

“Not really, to be honest with you. Not really. I don't think we really do that.”

So, it's all to do with how you're finding the rankings for the target terms on that particular page, and if it's starting to tail off, that might be something that you look at, but it's not something that you stick to on a regular basis. It's not absolutely key to do.

“It's really just to see the data and pull it through.”

You mentioned authorship and authority as well. Can you give us a little bit more detail on how you analyse that and what you do with your findings?

“With a lot of clients, there might be someone in the company that could be more authoritative – who's well known in the industry, or a bit more well known in the industry – like the owner of the business.

We then look at changing that author to them instead of using someone who's not well known, to hopefully improve the authority. Then, we can build the credibility of that person with author pages, schema, and everything like that.”

How much time does it save you to automate all of this instead of doing it on a relatively manual basis?

“I know it took at least a day to do it normally, and I'd say it's probably cut down to about half a day now, which is quite a big difference. A lot of stuff was using plugins like MarketingSyrup, the Chrome extension from Kristina Azarenko, that you can use, and copying the data from that.

Now we use the script to run it through. Most of the scripts have already got them built in, and we use a template. We create a template, then we save that. Then we can just duplicate it for everyone and use it through that instead, which makes it easier.”

How often should you audit your website?

“We normally do it every 2 -3 months, something like that. Of course, we'll regularly look at – we use SEMrush at Fly High Media, so we look at other ways we can improve it as well. But, we're writing regular content to help boost the site as well.

I'd say every 2-3 months we normally audit our website again, just to check if there's anything that can be improved further.”

Are there any alerts that you set up in between audits just to check if there's a sudden drop in traffic to certain pages?

“We regularly check Analytics and Search Console so, if there are any drops in anything like that, then we will look at improving the content further.

Also, we do regular reports for clients every month. We will say to the client, ‘This is how you've done this month. This next month, we'll be looking at improving it further.’”

When you're doing the automation of your auditing, you talk about the importance of minimising errors. What errors are you trying to minimise here?

“Sometimes the script might not run. With the meta titles and stuff, I've never come across an error. It's more often when you're using an API like Google Search Console to pull through the missing queries in the content.

It's a lot harder to do because it's connected to the API and you've got to make sure that it's all set up correctly in Google's API console to pull through the data. If it's not authorised, it'll just keep throwing up errors and stuff like that. Also, just format how it comes through. Originally, when I first did it, it worked, but it put every bit of data in its own cell, and I wanted it in one cell.

It's a lot of juggling around with stuff like that. Sometimes you need to go back and edit it a bit more. It’s mostly the advanced codes that normally have a few little issues where you need to go back to ChatGPT to improve it further.”

I really like your way of determining the best-referring keywords for a particular page, further optimising a page for that, and analysing the title for that.

Do you do any split testing to establish the impact any changes that you make might have had on click-through rate or user retention?

“Not at the moment, but I think it's something we'll probably be looking into.

If we see a drop in anything since we've done it, we will put it back to how it was anyway and restore it to how it was originally. Then we’ll see if it was anything that had been done in the content audit that had dropped it a bit further, but normally we don't really see that many drops. We see it going further and increasing.”

Is it generally the page title and the meta description that you start off with enhancing?

“Normally I do meta title, meta description, the word count, and everything like that – and we'll also look at improving the content further as well, if that makes sense.”

Is there a minimum word count that you're looking for?

“Really, we look at competitors and see what word count they've got to see if the content's very short, for example.

Of course, with Google releasing last year helpful content update, we're looking at making sure that the content is useful as well. If it can be improved, we will improve it.”

So, it's analysing what the best-performing competitors are doing and how many words they have, and then benchmarking your work against theirs.

“Yeah, exactly. Then if we look at the content and say, ‘Oh, it's not really giving much more information’, maybe the competitors might have the same content, but we'll add more value to the content – rewriting it or adding a new section to it to help improve its performance and make it more useful for users.”

Do you regularly audit competitors' websites as well?

“Yeah, now and again. When we're doing the content audits, we'll double-check and see what competitors are ranking already, and how we can improve the clients' content further to hopefully boost it and get them up to compete with the bigger competitors.”

How do you select the competitors? Because obviously some massive brands can rank for anything, and they might be ranking for different reasons and not necessarily the quality of their on-page SEO.

“Sometimes we won't look at bigger competitors, we'll look at the competitors that might be a bit lower down page one – who might be a little less authoritative – and then look at how we can improve it with them as well.

Also, with a lot of competitors, to get the keyword that we're looking for, we look at the content and see what keyword we think it's relevant to, and then we look that up, and that's how we find the competitors.”

In terms of other things that you might do in the future to further enhance your processes. you talked about maybe doing a bit of split testing. Is there anything else that you've got your eye on to improve your efficiency so that you can cut down from half a day to 2 hours?

“I'm sure you've seen that Screaming Frog has now got a custom JavaScript bit that lets you pull through different data from that. I'm going to start looking at that as my next thing, in case we can do it all through Screaming Frog and it's all a lot quicker again. That's one of the things I'm going to have a look at.

I have tried a little bit of it, but I think it's making sure the script is right. I've been going through it using ChatGPT to generate the code, and sometimes it's not worked. Because it's such a new thing, there are only a small number of templates. Now it's getting used a bit more, people are looking at improving templates. I’ll probably start looking at stuff like that as well.

A lot of people are probably thinking, ‘Oh, why should I automate it?’ Well, it saves time, and if people are a bit hesitant about automating stuff, then you've got to think about things like SEMrush. When you're using position tracking, that's automated already, and that's mostly accurate, so I don't see why some people might be hesitant about it.

At the end of the day, some people are just hesitant about automation. Of course, you've got to review it as well in case it's completely wrong. The word count is a bit of a faff sometimes because I'm trying to pull through the content and it will say it's got 200 words and, just from looking at the content, it's definitely not got 200 words. That can be a bit of a pain.

Looking at the divs in the content on the back end of the site is a bit more complicated. Then seeing what divs the content actually is in, and then editing the coding to make sure that it is actually pulling through the right word count instead of including content from the header or something like that.”

Yeah. Obviously, the challenge is that it's inefficient to do everything manually, but it's also not a good idea to automate everything and not check everything. The sweet spot is in between and what to check.

“There's definitely a sweet spot in there. You can't automate everything, of course.

We do an e-commerce audit for some clients, and we were doing all the actionables for the clients to make it easier for them instead of them seeing the checklist of everything. We were doing that manually for a while, and I've sped that up now. It's literally just a script that you run, and it scans through all the content and pulls the summary, then we just put on the priorities – which makes it a lot quicker as well.

That's another thing we've used for speeding up with automation.”

You shared what SEO should be doing in 2024. Now let's talk about what SEO shouldn't be doing. What's something that's seductive in terms of time, but ultimately counterproductive? What's something that SEO shouldn't be doing in 2024?

“I'm surprised that I'm actually seeing a lot of competitors still using keyword stuffing in their content. I've seen a lot of people hiding keywords.

There's a specific competitor of ours who does it (I won't mention any names), but I have seen that they are ranking. They've dropped a little bit recently, but they've still got their keywords in white text next to their headings. They've got the heading and then they've wrapped the keyword next to it. I see a lot of that still, which is quite funny.

What else? We still do alt text. That's not a ranking factor but it will help with the accessibility of the website, which is a major thing with Google now as well – accessibility and making sure that your website is usable.

I think keyword stuffing is quite a big one still. Some people are still getting away with it. I'm not sure how”

It's incredible. I guess it's to do with the industry and locality and what else Google can rank. I presume that website, for whatever reason, is more authoritative and relevant than other sites out there.

I mean, in relation to the colour of the text, it made me laugh because I remember starting out with website design the best part of 20 years ago and what I could get away with.

I didn't do something as blatant as having white text on a white background. What I did do was have white text on what, from an HTML perspective, looked like a black background. But then I tiled the background with a white image, so the user couldn't see it, but the code made it look as if it was readable text.

I'm not suggesting that. That's obviously something that worked very well for a few years.

“When I was back at uni, I worked on a specific website, and they wanted help with their SEO. That was about 3/4 years ago now. I had just started coding and I remember someone saying to me, ‘What you need to do is you need to put your keywords in white in the footer.’ and I was like, ‘No, you do not want to do that, thank you very much.’

When I went on their website (they're not actually around anymore, I wonder why?), I found that they were doing that exact keyword stuffing in the footer of the website. I don't think it really worked for them.”

Jonathon Roberts is Senior SEO Executive at Fly High Media, and you can find him over at FlyHighMedia.co.uk.