Have you tried auditing your content? We'd love to hear about your results (good or bad) 😀Also, if you found this video helpful, we have a ton of great weekly content to help you improve your SEO and marketing. Be sure to subscribe and follow ua-cam.com/users/AhrefsCom
Hi Sam Oh, With plersure,Ican tell, Content audit Sheet &organic traffic, In this Video you taught So many points all are amazing Self development parts, Here,404.301, different dealing , Sheet developing all are different, I will practice all It my confidence, You continue long long research. It proved. thank you alots. Mostofa
Hi, I followed the instructions for adding the GA data, and it uploads the data, but the master sheet says 0 pageviews and 0 organic sessions, even though they aren't all 0s. The only difference I see between this one and Search Console tab, and the sitemap tab is that the GA page column doesn't include the domain. I had to use Ahrefs to retrieve the sitemap links, and GSC for the top linked pages.
OMG! This is a great actionable video. I can’t wait to do my first site audit. I love that there is a template available to help automate the process. Keep these great videos coming!
Hi Sam, can this work with new Google Analytics? The exported CSV is different and although we formatted it like the old one, it doesn't seem to be working. Thanks!
Wow, just wow. That was A LOT of value crammed into a sub-14-minute video. Great template as well. I bet this took a lot of work to put together. Thanks for this!
I love your content so much. Although I'm still a beginner in this realm of SEO, I get a ton of value from you guys. I can't skip a video ... However, I'm still building my first website. Keep it up guys
WOW! Seriously impressive video and thorough coverage of a topic that is scary for most of us to undertake. Thanks for making this a LOT easier to implement.
Hey there...have you changed the formula in the spreadsheet? It looks different to when I did this the first time last year? I followed the same steps and nothing is pulling through.
Hi, I've had a great disgust when I tried to do my first audit with this tool that I think is great, and it has not worked for me at all. Of course, I have begun to think and I have realized that I am watching the video in English, and therefore, the tool must be in the same language, (I'm from Spain) . so I started looking at the formulas and, effectively, translating the name of the segment to use, works perfectly. And he knew that he could not fail something done by the great Sam Oh, \ o /. It's just something I wanted to say, because surely like me, many others will have tried without realizing this detail. Maybe it is better to put a clarification in the text of the video. Thanks for this contribution Sam, as always, very very useful.
6 років тому+1
Hola David. ¿Te importaría decirme qué es lo que cambiaste exactamente para que te funcionara? Porque a mí me pasa lo mismo: En la pestaña Master del Excel tanto las celdas de Pageviews, Organic Sessions y Ahrefs followed BLs me dan 0 y como consecuencia en Suggested action me dice Delete (404) en practicamente todas las url´s :-(
@ vale, en la primera celda de cada columna después del título, está la fórmula. Verás unos literales como "organic trafic" y los demás, estos los cambias a como te los nombra analytics ("tráfico orgánico") y listo, solo tiene la fórmula en la primera celda, luego es fórmula de propaga sola, (no tengo ni idea de cómo, pero es algo que quiero averiguar), al resto de celdas de la misma columna
We haven't tested the template in Spanish, but I would guess it deals with the name of the headers. You can either dig through the formulas for any heading titles and alter those to Spanish, or change your language to English in Ahrefs/Google Analytics.
6 років тому+1
@@DavidHuerga Ha funcionado perfecto. Mil gracias David
Thank so much, this will be super helpful!! I've done this type of thing manually before and just like you said, it could be VERY time consuming, so THANK YOU! 🙏
Thank you Sam Oh and Joshua Hardwick. This is awesome. (I had also got the Ryan Stewart version but, although their one is more automated, it also requires a premium Supermetrics account to keep using it). My question to you guys is how do you refresh the data in the master sheet if you edit the variables in the Start Here page? I have been making multiple changes to the variables but it seems to make no difference to the Master sheet.
I'm also not sure why many cells are returning leave as is when there are no backlinks and page views/sessions are both below the thresholds on Start Here. Shouldn't these be showing as 'Delete'?
Hi Sam! I wonder if it makes sense to noindex pages instead of deleting these. This should still reduce the amount of indexed "unuseful" content and add space in crawl budget (I will block "noindexed" pages with robots.txt in a month or so, once G catch up "noindex" tag everywhere). The reason why I want to keep the content - just user experience. Couple of sites I work with require 80% of content to be deleted, but this will lead to an "empty" site and reduce the overall "authority" of the website in terms of its appearance. In example, right now site offers short info about 100 cities, but only 5 cities rank well. Just wonder about your opinion regarding this matter. Thank you (or SQ maybe =P) in advance!
Depends really. For my specific use case, I had a lot of traffic from other sources outside of search going to these pages. These pages weren’t really relevant to other pages on the site. The pages were generating $. Noindex was the choice i made. Lots of scenarios to consider noindexing but really up to you. - Sam
Hi Sam, this is a great video and tool, thank you. However, after following the steps, my Google Sheet is displaying 0 for all Pageviews and Organic Sessions for all rows? I've exported and imported my Google Analytics data as described, but the sheet is not processing the data as intended?
If you've exported it in a different language (not English), then that could be the reason why. You can either rework the spreadsheet to match the column headers in your language or export your GA results in English.
Thanks for the video! Question: Do the URLs in the sitemap, GA and Links tabs need to be in the exact same order? My page views and organic sessions are not populating...
My copied template doesn't seem to be working right. My Pageviews and Organic Sessions are not getting pulled in from the GA tab. They all list 0. Yes, my data was all exported in English (I've seen that a couple times here as a "fix" for 0 results). Help?
Thanks, buddy........ for this video... I like all Ahrefs workers because they know how to teach ......clear sound.....practical video..... I miss Kathryn and love Ahrefs simplified SEO videos most.. I also miss that guy who did simplified SEO video... love from India
@@AhrefsCom Good keep it up man ... To be honest why I do not use other tool and why I use Ahrefs----- just because of your videos. Lucid, point to point and clear. I do not know other but tool is useless without a good tutorial. Love you ahrefs workers each and every person of Ahrefs are excellent.
please do add the link for the "script" of the subtitle to the description of the video. If we would get the document file of the script, we could have read it like a book whenever we want, without playing the video again and again which is time-consuming a lot.
DARN. I was just about to use this as a standard content audit for all of my clients when I realized one of my clients only has a GA4 property connected. What you've created here is nothing short of incredible. Is there a way to use data from GA4 and get this working again???
Thanks for sharing all your hard work! Two Questions... 1) The results you cited speak for themselves, but do you guys have any info about WHY deleting pages using this criteria can actually improve your site's organic search 'health'... does it just come down to Google seeing your site as being filled with high-value and popular content, so it ranks your 'good' pages even better? 2) Do we HAVE to delete pages that don't make the cut, or can we we no-index and exclude them from our sitemaps and still get the same benefits? I'm thinking sites that host many guest/sponsored posts where if you start deleting ones that are over a year old, the SEO companies you worked with to publish them may take notice. ;) Thanks for your thoughts!
I'm afraid I (Sam) can't provide any 'definitive' answers, so I'll speak from my research and my understanding of how search works. 1. John Mueller's quote says a lot, which I mentioned in the video should give us a bit of insight that Google wants us to improve or remove low quality pages. 2. Crawl budget could be an issue for larger sites. Google says on the webmaster blog, "According to our analysis, having many low‐value‐add URLs can negatively affect a site’s crawling and indexing." I have other speculations, but all-in-all, the vast majority (if not all) of a site's low quality content probably doesn't help its visitors. So beyond SEO, it's a nice way to keep your internal linking tighter to only pages you would want to direct them to. Hope that helps.
I would look at which of your pages are competing for the same keywords. Delete one of the pages because the two pages will likely rank on different pages of serps. Now google doesn’t have to chose which one to show. The target page can then be optimized to show higher. This is my opinion on pruning.
That's a good point :) Keyword cannibalization can definitely be another layer to add to your content audit. But rather than deleting, redirecting the "worse" page may be a better option.
Josh Hardwick did a post on keyword cannibilsation on the Ahrefs blog last year. There's a template at the end of the post that can identify any potential issues. ahrefs.com/blog/keyword-cannibalization/
@Sam Thanks for replying! But I think my question was unclear so you have given me a vague answer. Let me rephrase my question again, what I was asking earlier was what should one do for step 2(shown on the video around 8:14 seconds) as an alternative if they never installed Google analytics on the site or don't have enough data (like 6 months)? Is there other options available like ahref or google search console(you said on your reply),if yes how do one collect those data's from ahref or google search console to replicate step 2? Thank you
Not sure what I did wrong (I followed the steps twice) but the Master tab shows a lot of pages with 0 traffic that I know (from GA) get good organic traffic. Would love to be able to get this to work.
It's possible that your hosting server may have blocked our crawler. For specific issues like this, I highly recommend contacting support. They should be able to help you out specifically with your website, Stephanie :)
Hey Team - this might be a stupid question, but is there an easy way to incorporate the 'published date' into the audit to easily identify anything published in the last 6 months and exclude it?
When you run a crawl on screaming frog or another crawler, you can extract the xpath of the publishing date (inspect element) then once you’ve exported it to excel or sheets, you can filter by age of content! Hope this helps
Hi Sam... Big fan of you! I have something to ask you, when events are ahead, how can I know the volume of Keyword from Ahrefs tool and also if the keyword is pretty new how much time it needs to shown in the Ahrefs keyword explorer.
You can't know the search volume of a keyword if we've never discovered it. We do update the "new keywords" reports, so you could check back each month and see what new keywords appear for your target.
@@AhrefsCom Basically supporting articles that are there to build relevance can have 0 traffic as long as the ranking page is getting ranked. Not sure if I misunderstood that in the past.
So awesome Sam! One of my favorite posts of Robbie's is actually the one where he shares his content audit process and spreadsheet. You didn't by chance decide to do this after using Ahrefs Top Pages report on his site, did you? :) Anyhow, LOVE the template, how you can edit the criteria and how simple it is. Would love to see a conversation piece built into it.
This seems like a really complicated way of building this view, rather than just using Screaming Frog connected to the Ahrefs, GA and GSC APIs to get the same thing in a few clicks
Thanks for this. I am having a 0 in the organic column and the language is English. I have followed the GA section three times and still same results. Is there anything else I can try?
you've lost me at 7'23. "Go to the site map". Go to the sitemap where? What page is that you are using?? It seems like you focused on Wordpress/Yoast users... my website is custom-made...so....where do i find the list that you show it at 7'23?
@@AhrefsCom Thanks for responding, Max. No, i got that! I had the sitemap page opened, copied the domain name, and "Scraped" using the "Scrape similar" feature. However, when the Scraper pop-up opens, the window is empty, although i have 1,300 on my website... what am i doing wrong? Also, I am thinking: when i open my website's sitemap's page, it shows the whole sitemap, but also at the top of the page says "This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below." So maybe that's why it doesn't scrape properly? What can i do? Thanks!
I did this and it works good, but I found a problem where its listing posts with 0 / 0 and only a few days old to delete. When you have 1000's of pages it can be a pain to open every url to see when it was published. Can we let this to show only posts/ pages that where created 365 days ago
The audit applies too. I believe you can follow the general flow, but keep the pages you think are important (even though they may not generate organic traffic.) - SQ
@@AhrefsCom Hi, Sam! I have the same doubt. In that case, should I keep all the news and just optimize articles made for SEO? Or does the audit also apply to all news?
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How do you that or similar to enter in a client, meaning you don't have access to GA.
Would you mind addressing your issue to our support @ahrefs.com 🙏 -Helen
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Hey, Sam. I have followed all the steps of the tutorial and also those of the video and it doesn't work for me. In the Master tab I get both in Pageviews, Organic Sessions and Ahrefs Followed the result of 0. As a consequence the Suggested Action is always Delete (404). Maybe it's because I'm Spanish and it's exported everything in my language and maybe it won't work, but how could I solve it? Thank you
The language is likely the reason. You can try changing the translation to English > export your results and see if that works. Just make sure you are adding the additional segment of "organic traffic" as shown in the video. Let me know how it goes.
6 років тому
@@AhrefsCom Indeed, it was the language. Thank you
Hey Ahrefs, awesome concept, but my Master page returns "O" for pageviews and organic sessions and an incomplete column for Links so suggested action for all pages is 301. What am I doing wrong?
Is your Google Analytics report in a different language by chance? If so, you would need to change some of the formulas to have the columns match the name.
@@AhrefsCom Yes! Actually, I scanned all the comments to see if anyone else had the same problem. I work (and sadly only speak) one language: English. I did notice that the formula in column A in the Master sheet that can be (sort of) seen in the video instructions is totally different than the formula that was included in the downloaded content template. Not sure if that's the problem or if the uploads are in the wrong format (ie: column headers are not right). I don't know enough about UNIQUE query formulas to "amend" the formula but the current formula is: =UNIQUE(query(Sitemap!A2:A,"select A where not A contains '.xml' and not A contains '.pdf' and not A contains '.doc'"))
Oh, column B formula is: =iferror(arrayformula(if(A2:A="","",VLOOKUP(regexreplace(A2:A,"^(?:https?:\/\/)?(?:[^@ ]+@)?(?:www\.)?([^:\/ ]+)",""),filter(GA!$A1:$G, GA!$B1:B="All users"),4,FALSE))),0) Is that correct?
My client has over 1k “news” posts that get little to no traffic in Google, even though they are indexed. Do you think Ahrefs would have data on these when it comes to updating the internal links after removal? The domain has been around for about 20 years. Thanks :)
Hey John. We should have backlink data on their pages. I recommend checking the "Top Pages" report and the "Best By Links" report to see which pages drive the most traffic and have the most links. As for removing internal links to pages, you can use Site Audit tool to crawl the website and find all internal links pointing at whichever page you'd like to see.
Appreciate the fast response :) Re: internal links I have also since discovered a few WP plugins such as ‘Broken Link Checker’ that will scan the site and bulk-Unlink destination URLs that 404. Do you think this would also be a feasible option to consider vs manual checks? Thanks again :)
It's probably best to leave the column names the same as to not break the spreadsheet. After you make a copy, you can try and modify it for your own needs if you wish.
awesome video and template - however, I've followed the steps and got 0 pageviews and 0 organic sessions in the 'master' tab... has anyone had something like this?
khmmm, ok. so you want to make sure that analytics is set to english :D (different languages - or at least hungarian for sure - generates a different number format)
Hi Sam, in my case at step three, the best by links showing me all my Urls 406 not acceptable. Could you please tell me how to fix that? Here is the snapshot: prnt.sc/ui97mv
I'm sure you could work out a content audit with ScreamingFrog, GSC and GA. Personally, I prefer Ahrefs' backlink data since GSC limits the number of export rows (last I checked) + I find that GSC is full of a bunch of "spammy" links that I wouldn't want to consider in my analysis - obviously I'm biased. As for the template we provide, that's set up for plug and play with Ahrefs' data + GA. Feel free to modify it for your own needs if you choose to use other data sources. -Sam
@@Tomek-tiON I had the same issue but managed to fix it. When I downloaded and made a copy of the template the formula in the Master Tab Cel A2 came through incorrectly. It had REF! where it currently cites Sitemap!A2:A. The formula should be: =UNIQUE(query(Sitemap!A2:A,"select A where not A contains '.xml' and not A contains '.pdf' and not A contains '.doc'"))
Have you tried auditing your content? We'd love to hear about your results (good or bad) 😀Also, if you found this video helpful, we have a ton of great weekly content to help you improve your SEO and marketing. Be sure to subscribe and follow ua-cam.com/users/AhrefsCom
Ahrefs thanks for your helpful template Sam. I am going give it a try to do content audit for my niche site.
Hope it works out well for you! Let us know how it goes :)
Hi Sam Oh,
With plersure,Ican tell,
Content audit Sheet &organic traffic,
In this Video you taught So many points
all are amazing Self development parts,
Here,404.301, different dealing ,
Sheet developing all are different,
I will practice all It my confidence,
You continue long long research.
It proved.
thank you alots.
Mostofa
Sadly doesn't work with GA4 anymore. Would love to see the updated video and Google sheet!
How do you get the data from GA4 to use the sheet now?
Hi, I followed the instructions for adding the GA data, and it uploads the data, but the master sheet says 0 pageviews and 0 organic sessions, even though they aren't all 0s. The only difference I see between this one and Search Console tab, and the sitemap tab is that the GA page column doesn't include the domain. I had to use Ahrefs to retrieve the sitemap links, and GSC for the top linked pages.
OMG! This is a great actionable video. I can’t wait to do my first site audit. I love that there is a template available to help automate the process. Keep these great videos coming!
More on the way! Glad that you loved it. I'm sure you'll love it even more if your website traffic goes up, right? 😂
Ahrefs More organic traffic would be absolutely amazing!
Hi Sam, can this work with new Google Analytics? The exported CSV is different and although we formatted it like the old one, it doesn't seem to be working. Thanks!
What do you do if the sitemap in question does not have links to scrape? It actually shows and tags?
Wow, just wow. That was A LOT of value crammed into a sub-14-minute video. Great template as well. I bet this took a lot of work to put together. Thanks for this!
Thank you!
I love your content so much. Although I'm still a beginner in this realm of SEO, I get a ton of value from you guys. I can't skip a video ... However, I'm still building my first website. Keep it up guys
Thanks so much! Glad you're enjoying our content. Hope you'll come to rewatch once your site is up and ready.
WOW! Seriously impressive video and thorough coverage of a topic that is scary for most of us to undertake. Thanks for making this a LOT easier to implement.
Glad you found it super helpful! Hopefully you'll be able to get some results or at least approach the job with more confidence 🙂
6:30 - #ContentAudit Template instructions begin here
8:10 - Using #GoogleAnalytics
Hey there...have you changed the formula in the spreadsheet? It looks different to when I did this the first time last year? I followed the same steps and nothing is pulling through.
Thanks, Sam. Just I think you forget put site of your case of study so we can check it out.
Hi, I've had a great disgust when I tried to do my first audit with this tool that I think is great, and it has not worked for me at all. Of course, I have begun to think and I have realized that I am watching the video in English, and therefore, the tool must be in the same language, (I'm from Spain) . so I started looking at the formulas and, effectively, translating the name of the segment to use, works perfectly. And he knew that he could not fail something done by the great Sam Oh, \ o /. It's just something I wanted to say, because surely like me, many others will have tried without realizing this detail. Maybe it is better to put a clarification in the text of the video. Thanks for this contribution Sam, as always, very very useful.
Hola David. ¿Te importaría decirme qué es lo que cambiaste exactamente para que te funcionara? Porque a mí me pasa lo mismo: En la pestaña Master del Excel tanto las celdas de Pageviews, Organic Sessions y Ahrefs followed BLs me dan 0 y como consecuencia en Suggested action me dice Delete (404) en practicamente todas las url´s :-(
@ vale, en la primera celda de cada columna después del título, está la fórmula. Verás unos literales como "organic trafic" y los demás, estos los cambias a como te los nombra analytics ("tráfico orgánico") y listo, solo tiene la fórmula en la primera celda, luego es fórmula de propaga sola, (no tengo ni idea de cómo, pero es algo que quiero averiguar), al resto de celdas de la misma columna
We haven't tested the template in Spanish, but I would guess it deals with the name of the headers. You can either dig through the formulas for any heading titles and alter those to Spanish, or change your language to English in Ahrefs/Google Analytics.
@@DavidHuerga Ha funcionado perfecto. Mil gracias David
Thank so much, this will be super helpful!! I've done this type of thing manually before and just like you said, it could be VERY time consuming, so THANK YOU! 🙏
You're welcome!
Thank you Sam Oh and Joshua Hardwick. This is awesome. (I had also got the Ryan Stewart version but, although their one is more automated, it also requires a premium Supermetrics account to keep using it). My question to you guys is how do you refresh the data in the master sheet if you edit the variables in the Start Here page? I have been making multiple changes to the variables but it seems to make no difference to the Master sheet.
I'm also not sure why many cells are returning leave as is when there are no backlinks and page views/sessions are both below the thresholds on Start Here. Shouldn't these be showing as 'Delete'?
Very informative, I follow all your videos. Thank you for the good work. God bless you.
Glad to hear you're enjoying our videos! Thanks for stopping by :)
Hi Sam! I wonder if it makes sense to noindex pages instead of deleting these. This should still reduce the amount of indexed "unuseful" content and add space in crawl budget (I will block "noindexed" pages with robots.txt in a month or so, once G catch up "noindex" tag everywhere).
The reason why I want to keep the content - just user experience. Couple of sites I work with require 80% of content to be deleted, but this will lead to an "empty" site and reduce the overall "authority" of the website in terms of its appearance. In example, right now site offers short info about 100 cities, but only 5 cities rank well.
Just wonder about your opinion regarding this matter. Thank you (or SQ maybe =P) in advance!
Depends really. For my specific use case, I had a lot of traffic from other sources outside of search going to these pages. These pages weren’t really relevant to other pages on the site. The pages were generating $.
Noindex was the choice i made. Lots of scenarios to consider noindexing but really up to you.
- Sam
@@AhrefsCom Thanks for sharing Sam! Looking forward to watch new videos;)
Thanks for the vídeo and template. Can't wait to use it.
Awesome! Let us know how it goes.
Hi Sam, this is a great video and tool, thank you.
However, after following the steps, my Google Sheet is displaying 0 for all Pageviews and Organic Sessions for all rows?
I've exported and imported my Google Analytics data as described, but the sheet is not processing the data as intended?
If you've exported it in a different language (not English), then that could be the reason why. You can either rework the spreadsheet to match the column headers in your language or export your GA results in English.
This is a real masterclass. Thank you Sam and Ahrefs!
You're welcome!
How do we do this with google analytics 4?
Thanks for the video!
Question: Do the URLs in the sitemap, GA and Links tabs need to be in the exact same order? My page views and organic sessions are not populating...
The order of the links does not matter, as far as I know. Thank you.
- Max
My copied template doesn't seem to be working right. My Pageviews and Organic Sessions are not getting pulled in from the GA tab. They all list 0. Yes, my data was all exported in English (I've seen that a couple times here as a "fix" for 0 results). Help?
Hi Sam, please where can I find copy of the template?
You can find it in the description :)
Helen
Thanks, buddy........ for this video... I like all Ahrefs workers because they know how to teach ......clear sound.....practical video..... I miss Kathryn and love Ahrefs simplified SEO videos most.. I also miss that guy who did simplified SEO video... love from India
Thanks! We do our best :)
@@AhrefsCom Good keep it up man ... To be honest why I do not use other tool and why I use Ahrefs----- just because of your videos. Lucid, point to point and clear. I do not know other but tool is useless without a good tutorial. Love you ahrefs workers each and every person of Ahrefs are excellent.
please do add the link for the "script" of the subtitle to the description of the video. If we would get the document file of the script, we could have read it like a book whenever we want, without playing the video again and again which is time-consuming a lot.
🤔
Hi, just wondering why the master report only gives you 100 urls when we inputted 130 into the sitemap
DARN. I was just about to use this as a standard content audit for all of my clients when I realized one of my clients only has a GA4 property connected. What you've created here is nothing short of incredible. Is there a way to use data from GA4 and get this working again???
Thanks for the great content - but this one could use a refresh with the new GA4 interface!
Thanks for the suggestion - we'll see what we can do here ;)
-Helen
Thanks for sharing all your hard work! Two Questions... 1) The results you cited speak for themselves, but do you guys have any info about WHY deleting pages using this criteria can actually improve your site's organic search 'health'... does it just come down to Google seeing your site as being filled with high-value and popular content, so it ranks your 'good' pages even better? 2) Do we HAVE to delete pages that don't make the cut, or can we we no-index and exclude them from our sitemaps and still get the same benefits? I'm thinking sites that host many guest/sponsored posts where if you start deleting ones that are over a year old, the SEO companies you worked with to publish them may take notice. ;) Thanks for your thoughts!
I'm afraid I (Sam) can't provide any 'definitive' answers, so I'll speak from my research and my understanding of how search works.
1. John Mueller's quote says a lot, which I mentioned in the video should give us a bit of insight that Google wants us to improve or remove low quality pages.
2. Crawl budget could be an issue for larger sites. Google says on the webmaster blog, "According to our analysis, having many low‐value‐add URLs can negatively affect a site’s crawling and indexing."
I have other speculations, but all-in-all, the vast majority (if not all) of a site's low quality content probably doesn't help its visitors. So beyond SEO, it's a nice way to keep your internal linking tighter to only pages you would want to direct them to. Hope that helps.
@@AhrefsCom Thanks for the reply and insight, Sam. I just read the webmaster blog post you referenced, and this all helps. Many kudos!
thanks for always inspiring, Oh..
You're welcome :)
I would look at which of your pages are competing for the same keywords. Delete one of the pages because the two pages will likely rank on different pages of serps. Now google doesn’t have to chose which one to show. The target page can then be optimized to show higher. This is my opinion on pruning.
That's a good point :) Keyword cannibalization can definitely be another layer to add to your content audit. But rather than deleting, redirecting the "worse" page may be a better option.
Josh Hardwick did a post on keyword cannibilsation on the Ahrefs blog last year. There's a template at the end of the post that can identify any potential issues. ahrefs.com/blog/keyword-cannibalization/
He also made a video on it here explaining the template - ua-cam.com/video/GIoZAx8upmY/v-deo.html
What if our target keyword has less than 200 traffic potential?
Thank you, this was incredible!
Glad you enjoyed it!
-Helen
What should you do when you dont have analytics installed on your site? Which tool should you use for getting those data instead?
It depends on what you're looking for :) You can try Google Search Console or Ahrefs for search traffic-related data.
@Sam Thanks for replying! But I think my question was unclear so you have given me a vague answer.
Let me rephrase my question again, what I was asking earlier was what should one do for step 2(shown on the video around 8:14 seconds) as an alternative if they never installed Google analytics on the site or don't have enough data (like 6 months)? Is there other options available like ahref or google search console(you said on your reply),if yes how do one collect those data's from ahref or google search console to replicate step 2? Thank you
Big Thx @Sam
Awesome video and template!
You're very welcome. Hope it's useful!
Not sure what I did wrong (I followed the steps twice) but the Master tab shows a lot of pages with 0 traffic that I know (from GA) get good organic traffic. Would love to be able to get this to work.
Is your GA export in English? If it’s not, it won’t work properly.
Holy Moly, mind blown. This was quick and easy to produce! Why do my page URLS all have a 403 error in them in ahrefs?
It's possible that your hosting server may have blocked our crawler. For specific issues like this, I highly recommend contacting support. They should be able to help you out specifically with your website, Stephanie :)
Hey Team - this might be a stupid question, but is there an easy way to incorporate the 'published date' into the audit to easily identify anything published in the last 6 months and exclude it?
When you run a crawl on screaming frog or another crawler, you can extract the xpath of the publishing date (inspect element) then once you’ve exported it to excel or sheets, you can filter by age of content! Hope this helps
Hi Sam - having some issues getting the results page to work on the spreadsheet - would appreciate some advice on what I'm doing wrong!
Hey Chris. Did you export the results from GA in a different language? At this time, the spreadsheet only supports English exports.
Hi Sam... Big fan of you! I have something to ask you, when events are ahead, how can I know the volume of Keyword from Ahrefs tool and also if the keyword is pretty new how much time it needs to shown in the Ahrefs keyword explorer.
You can't know the search volume of a keyword if we've never discovered it. We do update the "new keywords" reports, so you could check back each month and see what new keywords appear for your target.
But I heard relevance building pages dont really need traffic. Their purpose is to just build relevance, so should I delete them or keep them?
Not sure what exactly you're referring to?
- SQ
@@AhrefsCom Basically supporting articles that are there to build relevance can have 0 traffic as long as the ranking page is getting ranked. Not sure if I misunderstood that in the past.
So awesome Sam! One of my favorite posts of Robbie's is actually the one where he shares his content audit process and spreadsheet. You didn't by chance decide to do this after using Ahrefs Top Pages report on his site, did you? :) Anyhow, LOVE the template, how you can edit the criteria and how simple it is. Would love to see a conversation piece built into it.
Ha! We didn't take it from Robbie Richards. Both Josh and I had done our own content audits and decided it would be a good time to talk about it :)
This seems like a really complicated way of building this view, rather than just using Screaming Frog connected to the Ahrefs, GA and GSC APIs to get the same thing in a few clicks
Since this video is 3 years old where is the "Data Explorer" tab now?
We removed this tab but you can try Link Explorer tab now
-Helen
Thanks for this. I am having a 0 in the organic column and the language is English. I have followed the GA section three times and still same results. Is there anything else I can try?
You can check out our Wordpress plugin, which helps you perform a content audit: ahrefs.com/wordpress-seo-plugin
- SQ
@@AhrefsCom Wow. How did I miss this? Has it been out long? Thank you!
you've lost me at 7'23. "Go to the site map". Go to the sitemap where? What page is that you are using?? It seems like you focused on Wordpress/Yoast users... my website is custom-made...so....where do i find the list that you show it at 7'23?
Any website should have a sitemap.xml file. If you do not have one, then use a sitemap generate to create one and add it to your site.
- Max
@@AhrefsCom Thanks for responding, Max. No, i got that! I had the sitemap page opened, copied the domain name, and "Scraped" using the "Scrape similar" feature. However, when the Scraper pop-up opens, the window is empty, although i have 1,300 on my website... what am i doing wrong? Also, I am thinking: when i open my website's sitemap's page, it shows the whole sitemap, but also at the top of the page says "This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below." So maybe that's why it doesn't scrape properly? What can i do? Thanks!
I did this and it works good, but I found a problem where its listing posts with 0 / 0 and only a few days old to delete. When you have 1000's of pages it can be a pain to open every url to see when it was published. Can we let this to show only posts/ pages that where created 365 days ago
Try using our WordPress plugin: ahrefs.com/wordpress-seo-plugin
- SQ
@@AhrefsCom Thanks ill give that a try and let you know how it goes :)
Hi Sam,
I wanted to ask you when you have deleted the pages, do you do any kind of redirection or removal request from Search Console?
Thanks
It depends. If there are no backlinks - just remove it from sitemap and you should be OK.
- Max
@@AhrefsCom Thank you very much Max for your help. That's what i needed to know.
Peace!
Super helpful. Thank you! :)
You're welcome!
Amazing content, Sam!
Does it apply for a website that publish news + content articles? What’s the best approach in this case?
The audit applies too. I believe you can follow the general flow, but keep the pages you think are important (even though they may not generate organic traffic.)
- SQ
@@AhrefsCom Hi, Sam! I have the same doubt. In that case, should I keep all the news and just optimize articles made for SEO? Or does the audit also apply to all news?
How do you that or similar to enter in a client, meaning you don't have access to GA.
Do you mean to get traffic numbers? GA is ideal, but if you really can't get access, you can always use Ahrefs as an estimate 🙂
- SQ
My Master tab is not populating at all. Not sure what the issue is. Could you help?
Would you mind addressing your issue to our support @ahrefs.com 🙏
-Helen
Hey, Sam. I have followed all the steps of the tutorial and also those of the video and it doesn't work for me. In the Master tab I get both in Pageviews, Organic Sessions and Ahrefs Followed the result of 0. As a consequence the Suggested Action is always Delete (404). Maybe it's because I'm Spanish and it's exported everything in my language and maybe it won't work, but how could I solve it? Thank you
The language is likely the reason. You can try changing the translation to English > export your results and see if that works. Just make sure you are adding the additional segment of "organic traffic" as shown in the video.
Let me know how it goes.
@@AhrefsCom Indeed, it was the language. Thank you
Hey Ahrefs, awesome concept, but my Master page returns "O" for pageviews and organic sessions and an incomplete column for Links so suggested action for all pages is 301. What am I doing wrong?
Is your Google Analytics report in a different language by chance? If so, you would need to change some of the formulas to have the columns match the name.
@@AhrefsCom Yes! Actually, I scanned all the comments to see if anyone else had the same problem. I work (and sadly only speak) one language: English. I did notice that the formula in column A in the Master sheet that can be (sort of) seen in the video instructions is totally different than the formula that was included in the downloaded content template. Not sure if that's the problem or if the uploads are in the wrong format (ie: column headers are not right). I don't know enough about UNIQUE query formulas to "amend" the formula but the current formula is: =UNIQUE(query(Sitemap!A2:A,"select A where not A contains '.xml' and not A contains '.pdf' and not A contains '.doc'"))
Oh, column B formula is: =iferror(arrayformula(if(A2:A="","",VLOOKUP(regexreplace(A2:A,"^(?:https?:\/\/)?(?:[^@
]+@)?(?:www\.)?([^:\/
]+)",""),filter(GA!$A1:$G, GA!$B1:B="All users"),4,FALSE))),0)
Is that correct?
Can you use another analytics tool that is not Google Analytics for this?
You can use any analytics platform you wish, but our template was built for people using Google Analytics.
Do you have Matthew Barby webinar replay link?
It's a private webinar. You would have to join Traffic Think Tank :)
My client has over 1k “news” posts that get little to no traffic in Google, even though they are indexed. Do you think Ahrefs would have data on these when it comes to updating the internal links after removal? The domain has been around for about 20 years.
Thanks :)
Hey John. We should have backlink data on their pages. I recommend checking the "Top Pages" report and the "Best By Links" report to see which pages drive the most traffic and have the most links.
As for removing internal links to pages, you can use Site Audit tool to crawl the website and find all internal links pointing at whichever page you'd like to see.
Appreciate the fast response :)
Re: internal links I have also since discovered a few WP plugins such as ‘Broken Link Checker’ that will scan the site and bulk-Unlink destination URLs that 404. Do you think this would also be a feasible option to consider vs manual checks? Thanks again :)
I can't speak for how good these are as I've never tested them. Personally, I would remove them manually.
Is is important the name of cells we are going to use?
It's probably best to leave the column names the same as to not break the spreadsheet. After you make a copy, you can try and modify it for your own needs if you wish.
Sam, you are Awesome 😍
Thanks :)
awesome video and template - however, I've followed the steps and got 0 pageviews and 0 organic sessions in the 'master' tab... has anyone had something like this?
khmmm, ok. so you want to make sure that analytics is set to english :D (different languages - or at least hungarian for sure - generates a different number format)
Correct! Our template is built for an English version of Google Analytics. As you mentioned, changing the language should do the trick.
awesome, i love ahrefs.
Glad to hear that!
i have so many 404 error pages..do I need to delete it?
404 pages are "page not found" meaning that it's probably already deleted?
@@AhrefsCom yes already deleted..will it impact my rankings?
Only time will tell :)
Helpful
Thanks!
incredible!
Thanks, Matheus!
I don't understand direct traffic, my site is not popular and I doubt anyone has ever heard about it before they could make a direct visit!
They could be your own visits? :)
Lol :D
Nice.
I am expecting your positive comments daily now😁 I am really happy you love the work we do!
Hi Sam, in my case at step three, the best by links showing me all my Urls 406 not acceptable. Could you please tell me how to fix that? Here is the snapshot: prnt.sc/ui97mv
Check out this help article (scroll to 406 not acceptable): help.ahrefs.com/en/articles/1402668-troubleshooting-common-issues-with-site-audit-access
But Screaming frog can do all this, right?
I'm sure you could work out a content audit with ScreamingFrog, GSC and GA. Personally, I prefer Ahrefs' backlink data since GSC limits the number of export rows (last I checked) + I find that GSC is full of a bunch of "spammy" links that I wouldn't want to consider in my analysis - obviously I'm biased.
As for the template we provide, that's set up for plug and play with Ahrefs' data + GA. Feel free to modify it for your own needs if you choose to use other data sources.
-Sam
Perfecto :)
Thank you
It definitely beats spending thousands on paid ads.
Free consistent traffic definitely brings more value to your site, so agree here
- Max
it doesn't work for me.. I have done exactly what you said :( Master shows #REF!
What didn't work for you?
- SQ
@@AhrefsCom Master didnt show tips :) i've made everything what you said in the movie
@@AhrefsCom sth like that: imgur.com/a/1w0CrFT
@@Tomek-tiON I had the same issue but managed to fix it. When I downloaded and made a copy of the template the formula in the Master Tab Cel A2 came through incorrectly. It had REF! where it currently cites Sitemap!A2:A. The formula should be: =UNIQUE(query(Sitemap!A2:A,"select A where not A contains '.xml' and not A contains '.pdf' and not A contains '.doc'"))
+1
🙂