SEO
How To Conduct A Content Audit Step-By-Step
It’s a fact that even the best content writers and search engine optimizers occasionally strike out with a new piece of content.
For whatever reason, and despite your best efforts, not everything you publish is going to be a hit.
Sometimes, despite your best efforts, it will get buried, fail to rank in search results, and basically contribute nothing to your overall goals.
Don’t erase things you worked hard on or leave them to slowly fade into obscurity.
Instead, use these less-than-successful pieces of content to figure out where you went wrong, take action to correct it, and use that new knowledge to create stronger new content.
But before you can do that, you need to know which of your webpages are underperforming. And that requires a content audit.
If you’re not sure how to do that, don’t worry.
In this piece, we’ll explain what a content audit is and why it’s important and then give you step-by-step instructions for performing your own.
What Is A Content Audit?
A content audit is a process of systematically inventorying and evaluating your website’s currently published content.
Often, it will be directly linked to SEO efforts, as the goal is to have content that is not only packed with important keywords but also answers specific search queries.
The content you could be auditing runs a gamut of formats and could include:
- Webpages.
- Landing pages.
- Blog posts.
- Product descriptions.
- Videos.
- Slide decks.
- Whitepapers.
If you’ve never done a content audit before, this can sound like a daunting and boring task.
Don’t worry – it’s not nearly as bad as you imagine. But before we dive into the process, let’s talk about why it’s an important process for organizations of all types and sizes.
Why Do You Need To Audit Your Content?
Nothing is immune to the passage of time, including your content.
From geocentrism to who discovered the Americas, things that were once considered irrefutable facts become incorrect all the time. And if anything, the internet age has accelerated this process.
This is exactly why regular content audits are important. They will help keep your content up-to-date and improve your search engine rankings by addressing the following questions:
- What is your existing content?
- Is this content valuable?
- How do people find it?
- How is it performing?
- Is it still accurate?
The answers to these questions will help you ensure your content is of high quality while helping you stay aligned with your content marketing strategy.
How To Conduct A Content Audit
Now that you know why you need to audit your content regularly, let’s get down to the nuts and bolts of how to do it.
Step 1: Set Your Goals
There’s a lot of work involved with content audits, so to ensure you’re not wasting your time and energy, it’s important to start with clearly defined objectives about what you want to accomplish.
You should have at least one goal that will be the driving factor behind the audit and then determine the metrics with which success will be measured. These could include things like:
- Improving SEO results for specific pages or your entire website.
- Increasing engagement and/or conversions.
- Removing outdated or redundant content.
- Improving the standard of existing pieces of content.
- Deciding on a new organizational structure for your site.
Step 2: Collect And Categorize Content
Once you have defined what you’re hoping to accomplish, it’s time to work on inventorying what you have published.
First, determine which types of content you’re going to be reviewing and collect their URLs.
You can either do this manually via an Excel or Google Sheets spreadsheet, or you can use an online tool like HubSpot, Semrush, or Screaming Frog.
(Pro tip: If your site is larger than a few pages, you will likely want to use a content audit tool.)
Once you have a spreadsheet with the content targeted by your audit created, it’s time to categorize it. (Note: Some online tools can do this for you.)
You’ll want to track the following for each piece of content in a separate content details audit spreadsheet:
- URL.
- Author.
- Which team produced it? Content team, social team, SEO team, etc.
- Time: How long did it take to produce the content in its entirety?
- Title.
- Date.
- Content type: Is it a blog post, infographic, case study, etc.?
- Content goal: What was the point of producing the content: backlinks, traffic, conversions, etc.?
- Word count.
- Comments.
- Shares: break this down by social network and total.
This will keep you organized as you determine which existing pieces are okay and which need to be updated or removed. How you structure this information will be determined by your goals.
You may also wish to indicate what products or services this content supports, the keywords it’s targeting, and the word count.
Step 3: Track Metrics And Analyze Data
Now that we’ve got the bones of our audit created, it’s time to take a deep dive into how it’s performing.
You’re looking for tangible KPIs that allow you to assess the health and performance of your site.
The content data portion of your audit needs to come with its own handy dandy Excel doc, just like this one I created
Perform A Past Audit
Before we get into the data, you must backtrack and audit your past-produced content.
Knowing how the content you’ve published performs will help you gauge what kind of content you need to create in the future — and what kind not to create.
This part of your content audit will be time-consuming, at least in the beginning.
You’ll need to decide how far back you want to begin your content audit and then gather all of the content URLs for that time period.
I recommend going back at least one year and gathering data for how your content performed the year before.
Collecting all of your past content URLs doesn’t have to be a manual process, though.
Luckily, many website analytics tools like Google Analytics or Semrush’s Content Audit tool can quickly inventory your content based on your sitemap data. These can provide you with a list of content URLs to audit.
Prepare Yourself For Ongoing Audits
Once you’ve caught up and added all of last year’s content to your Excel doc, you can repeat this audit activity for new content weekly.
It will be much easier to keep track of your content and audit it regularly when you’re only having to go back one week to input data.
Add the data from the next section to your Excel doc and upload the most recent numbers and statistics every week.
Over time, take note of any drastic changes.
Sometimes content, especially evergreen content, can take months before it really takes off.
Metrics To Track
Here are the metrics you’ll want to track for your content data audit:
Comments
A properly moderated comments section can add valuable user-generated content to your blog posts and articles.
If one of your content goals is to build a community on your website, you will want to know what content types and topics generate conversation.
Use the UGC link attribute to ensure you’re compliant with Google’s requirements for link markup.
If you don’t allow comments on your blog, check for comments on your social media posts about your content.
Social Shares
Some marketers brush off social shares as vanity metrics. However, monitoring your content’s social popularity can help you discover the topics most likely to intrigue specific social audiences.
Businesses that know most of their conversions come from Facebook, for example, would want to create content popular with Facebook audiences.
Analyzing which posts had the most social shares on Facebook in the past is a good way to find out what topics may do well in the future.
Organic Traffic
Ideally, your content will receive a lot of organic traffic.
If you aren’t getting organic traffic, that could be a potential red flag.
Perhaps there is something wrong with:
- Your content strategy.
- How you’re distributing the content.
- The content type.
- The content itself.
By evaluating the organic traffic metrics regularly in your audit, you’ll know when you can pat yourself on the back or when you need to start over.
Bounce Rate
Are website visitors arriving on your webpages and exiting without engaging with your content?
If Google Analytics cannot detect scrolling, clicks, or other interactions with your content before a user leaves, it is considered a bounce.
And if you have a high bounce rate, that could be a sign of bad content.
Ideally, your content is a gateway that leads a user from a search to your website, entertains or informs them, and then guides them to more content, depending on their needs.
An extended time on the page in conjunction with a low bounce rate signals “sticky” content that keeps users intrigued enough to continue on to more of your content.
Unsure of what a good bounce rate is?
A range of 26% to 45% is average for retail and ecommerce sites, whereas B2B sites will fall into the 25% to 55% range. For blogs, this number can be as high as 90%.
What’s acceptable for you will depend on your niche.
Backlinks
Bring on the backlinks – but only the good backlinks that give us a lot of boost and credibility, please!
You need to track the backlinks that your content regularly produces for two big reasons:
- Your backlinks will change over time. The first day you publish a new piece of content, you may gain two to three backlinks. Let a week go by, and maybe now 10-12 backlinks have appeared. A year down the road, you could have 589 backlinks to one piece of content as it is promoted, discovered, and shared.
- Not all backlinks are good. Sure, 589 backlinks might sound like a good thing, but not if 500 of those backlinks are potentially dangerous to your website, lead to spam, paid, or lead to a poor website. You may want to consider removing those unnatural backlinks.
Time On Page
If your content is a long-form blog post of 2,500 words and the average time on the page is 18 seconds, something is wrong.
This metric will inform you if your content just isn’t right for your audience or if it is, and you need to create more content focusing on topics just like it.
Unique Visitors
We want lots of unique visitors viewing our content and increasing the number of views the piece of content gets.
The more views, the more chances of return on investment (ROI) from content like conversions, engagement, shares, and backlinks.
Pages Per Session
How many pages is the user looking at after viewing your content?
What pages are they going to?
A blog post about the best winter coats can encourage a user to click on links within the blog post and shop around on your website for different coats. They may even make a purchase, which is the ultimate goal of any business marketing.
New Vs. Returning Users
Are you attracting a new audience with this piece of content?
Returning users are great. Returning customers are even better.
But we also need to aim to attract new users with our content. Ideally, you want to see a good mix of both.
Traffic Sources
Learn where your traffic is coming from by defining your main traffic sources.
If a majority of your content’s traffic is coming from Facebook, post more of your content on your Facebook page.
If hardly any is coming from your email newsletters, it may be time to restructure them.
Conversions
If your goal for a new piece of content is to generate 100 conversions in the first quarter (let’s say email opt-ins for your email newsletter), you need to add a column and track the number of conversions coming in from that piece of content.
Perhaps in the first week, there are only two conversions, and you begin to doubt the content entirely.
Let two months go by, and continue to audit each week. You may notice that now, the content has produced 140 total conversions, not only hitting your goal but surpassing it.
Auditing on an ongoing basis helps to give the figures you’re seeing valuable context, enabling you to make smarter, data-backed decisions.
Additional Information To Track
If you want to add more details about your content, here are some ideas of what to track.
SEO Title & Meta Description
Add columns to your spreadsheet for these SEO fields on each piece of content.
It will help when optimizing your content in the future to see all of the SEO titles and meta descriptions you’ve used in one place.
UTM Parameters
Keep track of specific promotional campaigns for each piece of content by logging any custom UTM parameters you used to track your content.
These may come in handy when you’re creating UTM parameters for new content or when you’re looking for data on past content in Google Analytics.
Leads Sales
If you have conversion events set up in Google Analytics, you can see which landing pages generate the most revenue.
Visit the Pages and screens report under Engagement to see which pages on your website are leading to conversions.
This will give you insight into the types of content and content topics that make a positive impact on your ROI.
Email Metrics
How well did your content perform when you shared it with your email list?
If email engagement is an important goal for your content, you’ll want to keep track of your opens, clicks, and forwards to see which content performs best.
Repurposed Content
Have you taken a collection of posts and turned them into an ebook or vice versa? Keep track of the content you’ve repurposed.
Combine metrics from the main content and additional pieces of related content to see how repurposing benefits your content strategy.
Top Keyword Ranking
Did a particular piece of content stay at the top of the SERPs for its target keyword phrase?
Note the best keyword rankings and how long they lasted to determine which types of content have long-term search wins and which types have short-term search wins.
Influencer Reach
Did you work with any influencers to get the word out about your content? Note the influencers that generated the most traffic or social shares for content.
You may want to work with them again in the future for similar types of content.
Step 4: Take Actionable Steps And Develop A New Content Strategy
By now, you should have all the information you need to determine what content is working and what isn’t. Now it’s time to use that information to create a plan to improve it.
Add another column to your spreadsheet to indicate what action you need to take for each piece of content. This could include deleting, refreshing, rewriting, or reusing.
Determine the priority for each action. Deleting content is quick and usually easy.
Refreshing may consist of minor updates to facts or links. A complete overhaul, on the other hand, could be a massive undertaking.
You may find it helpful to add a priority column to your spreadsheet to keep track of what’s most urgent.
Because your content audit should have hot topics and successful posts at the top of your mind, this is also the perfect time to develop a new content strategy.
Define how and why your marketing content will be used, as well as how it will help you achieve specific goals.
For more information on creating your own content strategy, click here.
Summary: Audit Content Often
Content audits are not the most glamorous part of marketing, but they’re absolutely essential.
Remember that what works today may not work tomorrow, and your top-performing pieces can become quickly outdated.
To ensure you’re getting the most out of your hard work, you should regularly perform content audits.
It’s the best way to keep an eye on the overall health of your website. It will also help you spot new opportunities and reach your goals.
Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
SEO
How To Become an SEO Expert in 4 Steps
With 74.1% of SEOs charging clients upwards of $500 per month for their services, there’s a clear financial incentive to get good at SEO. But with no colleges offering degrees in the topic, it’s down to you to carve your own path in the industry.
There are many ways to do this; some take longer than others.
In this post, I’ll share how I’d go from zero to SEO pro if I had to do it all over again.
Understanding what search engine optimization really is and how it works is the first state of affairs. While you can do this by reading endless blog posts or watching YouTube videos, I wouldn’t recommend that approach for a few reasons:
- It’s hard to know where to start
- It’s hard to join the dots
- It’s hard to know who to trust
You can solve all of these problems by taking a structured course like our SEO course for beginners. It’s completely free (no signup required), consists of 14 short video lessons (2 hours total length), and covers:
- What SEO is and why it’s important
- How to do keyword research
- How to optimize pages for keywords
- How to build links (and why you need them)
- Technical SEO best practices
Here’s the first lesson to get you started:
It doesn’t matter how many books you read about golf, you’re never going to win a tournament without picking up a set of clubs and practicing. It’s the same with SEO. The theory is important, but there’s no substitute for getting your hands dirty and trying to rank a site.
If you don’t have a site already, you can get up and running fairly quickly with any major website platform. Some will set you back a few bucks, but they handle SEO basics out of the box. This saves you time sweating the small stuff.
As for what kind of site you should create, I recommend a simple hobby blog.
Here’s a simple food blog I set up in <10 minutes:
Once you’re set-up, you’re ready to start practicing and honing your SEO skills. Specifically, doing keyword research to find topics, writing and optimizing content about them, and (possibly) building a few backlinks.
For example, according to Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer, the keyword “neopolitan pizza dough recipe” has a monthly traffic potential of 4.4K as well as a relatively low Keyword Difficulty (KD) score:
Even better, there’s a weak website (DR 16) in the top three positions—so this should definitely be quite an easy topic to rank for.
Given that most of the top-ranking posts have at least a few backlinks, a page about this topic would also likely need at least a few backlinks to compete. Check out the resources below to learn how to build these.
It’s unlikely that your hobby blog is going to pay the bills, so it’s time to use the work you’ve done so far to get a job in SEO. Here are a few benefits of doing this:
- Get paid to learn. This isn’t the case when you’re home alone reading blog posts and watching videos or working on your own site.
- Get deeper hands-on experience. Agencies work with all kinds of businesses, which means you’ll get to build experience with all kinds of sites, from blogs to ecommerce.
- Build your reputation. Future clients or employers are more likely to take you seriously if you’ve worked for a reputable SEO agency.
To find job opportunities, start by signing up for SEO newsletters like SEO Jobs and SEOFOMO. Both of these send weekly emails and feature remote job opportunities:
You can also go the traditional route and search job sites for entry-level positions. The kinds of jobs you’re looking for will usually have “Junior” in their titles or at least mention that it’s a junior position in their description.
Beyond that, you can search for SEO agencies in your local area and check their careers pages.
Even if there are no entry-level positions listed here, it’s still worth emailing and asking if there are any upcoming openings. Make sure to mention any SEO success you’ve had with your website and where you’re at in your journey so far.
This might seem pushy, but many agencies actually encourage this—such as Rise at Seven:
Here’s a quick email template to get you started:
Subject: Junior SEO position?
Hey folks,
Do you have any upcoming openings for junior SEOs?
I’ve been learning SEO for [number] months, but I’m looking to take my knowledge to the next level. So far, I’ve taken Ahrefs’ Beginner SEO course and started my own blog about [topic]—which I’ve had some success with. It’s only [number] months old but already ranks for [number] keywords and gets an estimated [number] monthly search visits according to Ahrefs.
[Ahrefs screenshot]
I checked your careers page and didn’t see any junior positions there, but I was hoping you might consider me for any upcoming positions? I’m super enthusiastic, hard-working, and eager to learn.
Let me know.
[Name]
You can pull all the numbers and screenshots you need by creating a free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools account and verifying your website.
SEO is a broad industry. It’s impossible to be an expert at every aspect of it, so you should niche down and hone your skills in the area that interests you the most. You should have a reasonable idea of what this is from working on your own site and in an agency.
For example, link building was the area that interested me the most, so that’s where I focused on deepening my knowledge. As a result, I became what’s known as a “t-shaped SEO”—someone with broad skills across all things SEO but deep knowledge in one area.
Marie Haynes is another great example of a t-shaped SEO. She specializes in Google penalty recovery. She doesn’t build links or do on-page SEO. She audits websites with traffic drops and helps their owners recover.
In terms of how to build your knowledge in your chosen area, here are a few ideas:
Here are a few SEOs I’d recommend following and their (rough) specialties:
Final thoughts
K Anders Ericsson famously theorized that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to master a new skill. Can it take less? Possibly. But the point is this: becoming an SEO expert is not an overnight process.
I’d even argue that it’s a somewhat unattainable goal because no matter how much you know, there’s always more to learn. That’s part of the fun, though. SEO is a fast-moving industry that keeps you on your toes, but it’s a very rewarding one, too.
Here are a few stats to prove it:
- 74.1% of SEOs charge clients upwards of $500 per month for their services (source)
- $49,211 median annual salary (source)
- ~$74k average salary for self-employed SEOs (source)
Got questions? Ping me on Twitter X.
SEO
A Year Of AI Developments From OpenAI
Today, ChatGPT celebrates one year since its launch in research preview.
Try talking with ChatGPT, our new AI system which is optimized for dialogue. Your feedback will help us improve it. https://t.co/sHDm57g3Kr
— OpenAI (@OpenAI) November 30, 2022
From its humble beginnings, ChatGPT has continually pushed the boundaries of what we perceive as possible with generative AI for almost any task.
a year ago tonight we were probably just sitting around the office putting the finishing touches on chatgpt before the next morning’s launch.
what a year it’s been…
— Sam Altman (@sama) November 30, 2023
In this article, we take a journey through the past year, highlighting the significant milestones and updates that have shaped ChatGPT into the versatile and powerful tool it is today.
a year ago tonight we were placing bets on how many total users we’d get by sunday
20k, 80k, 250k… i jokingly said “8B”.
little did we know… https://t.co/8YtO8GbLPy— rapha gontijo lopes (@rapha_gl) November 30, 2023
ChatGPT: From Research Preview To Customizable GPTs
This story unfolds over the course of nearly a year, beginning on November 30, when OpenAI announced the launch of its research preview of ChatGPT.
As users began to offer feedback, improvements began to arrive.
Before the holiday, on December 15, 2022, ChatGPT received general performance enhancements and new features for managing conversation history.
As the calendar turned to January 9, 2023, ChatGPT saw improvements in factuality, and a notable feature was added to halt response generation mid-conversation, addressing user feedback and enhancing control.
Just a few weeks later, on January 30, the model was further upgraded for enhanced factuality and mathematical capabilities, broadening its scope of expertise.
February 2023 was a landmark month. On February 9, ChatGPT Plus was introduced, bringing new features and a faster ‘Turbo’ version to Plus users.
This was followed closely on February 13 with updates to the free plan’s performance and the international availability of ChatGPT Plus, featuring a faster version for Plus users.
March 14, 2023, marked a pivotal moment with the introduction of GPT-4 to ChatGPT Plus subscribers.
Screenshot from ChatGPT, March 2023This new model featured advanced reasoning, complex instruction handling, and increased creativity.
Less than ten days later, on March 23, experimental AI plugins, including browsing and Code Interpreter capabilities, were made available to selected users.
On May 3, users gained the ability to turn off chat history and export data.
Plus users received early access to experimental web browsing and third-party plugins on May 12.
On May 24, the iOS app expanded to more countries with new features like shared links, Bing web browsing, and the option to turn off chat history on iOS.
June and July 2023 were filled with updates enhancing mobile app experiences and introducing new features.
The mobile app was updated with browsing features on June 22, and the browsing feature itself underwent temporary removal for improvements on July 3.
The Code Interpreter feature rolled out in beta to Plus users on July 6.
Plus customers enjoyed increased message limits for GPT-4 from July 19, and custom instructions became available in beta to Plus users the next day.
July 25 saw the Android version of the ChatGPT app launch in selected countries.
As summer progressed, August 3 brought several small updates enhancing the user experience.
Custom instructions were extended to free users in most regions by August 21.
The month concluded with the launch of ChatGPT Enterprise on August 28, offering advanced features and security for enterprise users.
Entering autumn, September 11 witnessed limited language support in the web interface.
Voice and image input capabilities in beta were introduced on September 25, further expanding ChatGPT’s interactive abilities.
An updated version of web browsing rolled out to Plus users on September 27.
The fourth quarter of 2023 began with integrating DALL·E 3 in beta on October 16, allowing for image generation from text prompts.
The browsing feature moved out of beta for Plus and Enterprise users on October 17.
Customizable versions of ChatGPT, called GPTs, were introduced for specific tasks on November 6 at OpenAI’s DevDay.
Screenshot from ChatGPT, November 2023On November 21, the voice feature in ChatGPT was made available to all users, rounding off a year of significant advancements and broadening the horizons of AI interaction.
And here, we have ChatGPT today, with a sidebar full of GPTs.
Screenshot from ChatGPT, November 2023Looking Ahead: What’s Next For ChatGPT
The past year has been a testament to continuous innovation, but it is merely the prologue to a future rich with potential.
The upcoming year promises incremental improvements and leaps in AI capabilities, user experience, and integrative technologies that could redefine our interaction with digital assistants.
With a community of users and developers growing stronger and more diverse, the evolution of ChatGPT is poised to surpass expectations and challenge the boundaries of today’s AI landscape.
As we step into this next chapter, the possibilities are as limitless as generative AI continues to advance.
Featured image: photosince/Shutterstock
SEO
Is AI Going To E-E-A-T Your Experience For Breakfast? The LinkedIn Example
Are LinkedIn’s collaborative articles part of SEO strategies nowadays?
More to the point, should they be?
The search landscape has changed dramatically in recent years, blurring the lines between search engines and where searches occur.
Following the explosive adoption of AI in content marketing and the most recent Google HCU, core, and spam updates, we’re looking at a very different picture now in search versus 12 months ago.
User-generated and community-led content seems to be met with renewed favourability by the algorithm (theoretically, mirroring what people reward, too).
LinkedIn’s freshly launched “collaborative articles” seem to be a perfect sign of our times: content that combines authority (thanks to LinkedIn’s authority), AI-generated content, and user-generated content.
What could go wrong?
In this article, we’ll cover:
- What are “collaborative articles” on LinkedIn?
- Why am I discussing them in the context of SEO?
- The main issues with collaborative articles.
- How is Google treating them?
- How they can impact your organic performance.
What Are LinkedIn Collaborative Articles?
First launched in March 2023, LinkedIn says about collaborative articles:
“These articles begin as AI-powered conversation starters, developed with our editorial team, but they aren’t complete without insights from our members. A select group of experts have been invited to contribute their own ideas, examples and experiences within the articles.“
Essentially, each of these articles starts as a collection of AI-generated answers to FAQs/prompts around any given topic. Under each of these sections, community members can add their own perspectives, insights, and advice.
What’s in it for contributors? To earn, ultimately, a “Top Voice” badge on their profile.
The articles are indexable and are all placed under the same folder (https://www.linkedin.com/advice/).
They look like this:
On the left-hand side, there are always FAQs relevant to the topic answered by AI.
On the right-hand side is where the contributions by community members get posted. Users can react to each contribution in the same way as to any LinkedIn post on their feed.
How Easy Is It To Contribute And Earn A Badge For Your Insights?
Pretty easy.
I first got invited to contribute on September 19, 2023 – though I had already found a way to contribute a few weeks before this.
Screenshot from LinkedIn, November 2023My notifications included updates from connections who had contributed to an article.
By clicking on these, I was transferred to the article and was able to contribute to it, too (as well as additional articles, linked at the bottom).
I wanted to test how hard it was to earn a Top SEO Voice badge. Eight article contributions later (around three to four hours of my time), I had earned three.
Screenshots from LinkedIn, November 2023How? Apparently, simply by earning likes for my contributions.
A Mix Of Brilliance, Fuzzy Editorial Rules, And Weird Uncle Bob
Collaborative articles sound great in principle – a win-win for both sides.
- LinkedIn struck a bullseye: creating and scaling content (theoretically) oozing with E-E-A-T, with minimal investment.
- Users benefit from building their personal brand (and their company’s) for a fragment of the effort and cost this usually takes. The smartest ones complement their on-site content strategy with this off-site golden ticket.
What isn’t clear from LinkedIn’s Help Center is what this editorial mix of AI and human input looks like.
Things like:
- How much involvement do the editors have before the topic is put to the community?
- Are they only determining and refining the prompts?
- Are they editing the AI-generated responses?
- More importantly, what involvement (if any) do they have after they unleash the original AI-generated piece into the world?
- And more.
I think of this content like weird Uncle Bob, always joining the family gatherings with his usual, unoriginal conversation starters. Only, this time, he’s come bearing gifts.
Do you engage? Or do you proceed to consume as many canapés as possible, pretending you haven’t seen him yet?
Why Am I Talking About LinkedIn Articles And SEO?
When I first posted about LinkedIn’s articles, it was the end of September. Semrush showed clear evidence of their impact and potential in Search. (Disclosure: I work for Semrush.)
Only six months after their launch, LinkedIn articles were on a visible, consistent upward trend.
- They were already driving 792.5K organic visits a month. (This was a 75% jump in August.)
- They ranked for 811,700 keywords.
- Their pages were ranking in the top 10 for 78,000 of them.
- For 123,700 of them, they appeared in a SERP feature, such as People Also Ask and Featured Snippets.
- Almost 72% of the keywords had informational intent, followed by commercial keywords (22%).
Here’s a screenshot with some of the top keywords for which these pages ranked at the top:
Screenshot from Semrush US database, desktop, September 2023Now, take the page that held the Featured Snippet for competitive queries like “how to enter bios” (monthly search volume of 5,400 and keyword difficulty of 84, based on Semrush data).
It came in ahead of pages on Tom’s Hardware, Hewlett-Packard, or Reddit.
Screenshots from LinkedIn, November 2023See anything weird? Even at the time of writing this post, this collaborative article had precisely zero (0) contributions.
This means a page with 100% AI-generated content (and unclear interference of human editors) was rewarded with the Featured Snippet against highly authoritative and relevant domains and pages.
A Sea Of Opportunity Or A Storm Ready To Break Out?
Let’s consider these articles in the context of Google’s guidelines for creating helpful, reliable, people-first content and its Search Quality Rater Guidelines.
Of particular importance here, I believe, is the most recently added “E” in “E-E-A-T,” which takes experience into account, alongside expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
For so many of these articles to have been ranking so well must mean that they were meeting the guidelines and proving helpful and reliable for content consumers.
After all, they rely on “a select group of experts to contribute their own ideas, examples and experiences within the articles,” so they must be worthy of strong organic performances, right?
Possibly. (I’ve yet to see such an example, but I want to believe somewhere in the thousands of pages these do exist).
But, based on what I’ve seen, there are too many examples of poor-quality content to justify such big rewards in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
The common issues I’ve spotted:
1. Misinformation
I can’t tell how much vetting or editing there is going on behind the scenes, but the amount of misinformation in some collaborative articles is alarming. This goes for AI-generated content and community contributions alike.
I don’t really envy the task of fact-checking what LinkedIn describes as “thousands of collaborative articles on 2,500+ skills.” Still, if it’s quality and helpfulness we’re concerned with here, I’d start brewing my coffee a little stronger if I were LinkedIn.
At the moment, it feels a little too much like a free-for-all.
Here are some examples of topics like SEO or content marketing.
Screenshots from LinkedIn, November 20232. Thin Content
To a degree, some contributions seem to do nothing more than mirror the points made in the original AI-generated piece.
For example, are these contributions enough to warrant a high level of “experience” in these articles?
Screenshots from LinkedIn, November 2023The irony to think that some of these contributions may have also been generated by AI…
3. Missing Information
While many examples don’t provide new or unique perspectives, some articles simply don’t provide…any perspectives at all.
This piece about analytical reasoning ranked in the top 10 for 128 keywords when I first looked into it last September (down to 80 in October).
Screenshot from LinkedIn, November 2023It even held the Featured Snippet for competitive keywords like “inductive reasoning examples” for a while (5.4K monthly searches in the US), although it had no contributions on this subsection.
Most of its sections remain empty, so we’re talking about mainly AI-generated content.
Does this mean that Google really doesn’t care whether your content comes from humans or AI?
I’m not convinced.
How Have The Recent Google Updates Impacted This Content?
After August and October 2023 Google core updates (at the time of writing, the November 2023 Google core update is rolling out), the September 2023 helpful content update, and the October 2023 spam update, the performance of this section seems to be declining.
According to Semrush data:
Screenshot from Semrush, November 2023- Organic traffic to these pages was down to 453,000 (a 43% drop from September, bringing their performance close to August levels).
- They ranked for 465,100 keywords (down by 43% MoM).
- Keywords in the Top 10 dropped by 33% (51,900 vs 78,000 in September).
- Keywords in the top 10 accounted for 161,800 visits (vs 287,200 in September, down by 44% MoM).
The LinkedIn domain doesn’t seem to have been impacted negatively overall.
Screenshot from Semrush, November 2023Is this a sign that Google has already picked up the weaknesses in this content and has started balancing actual usefulness versus the overall domain authority that might have propelled it originally?
Will we see it declining further in the coming months? Or are there better things to come for this feature?
Should You Already Be On The Bandwagon If You’re In SEO?
I was on the side of caution before the Google algorithm updates of the past couple of months.
Now, I’d be even more hesitant to invest a substantial part of my resources towards baking this content into my strategy.
As with any other new, third-party feature (or platform – does anyone remember Threads?), it’s always a case of balancing being an early adopter with avoiding over-investment. At least while being unclear on the benefits.
Collaborative articles are a relatively fresh, experimental, external feature you have minimal control over as part of your SEO strategy.
Now, we also have signs from Google that this content may not be as “cool” as we initially thought.
This Is What I’d Do
That’s not to say it’s not worth trying some small-scale experiments.
Or, maybe, use it as part of promoting your own personal brand (but I’ve yet to see any data around the impact of the “Top Voice” badges on perceived value).
Treat this content as you would any other owned content.
- Follow Google’s guidelines.
- Add genuine value for your audience.
- Add your own unique perspective.
- Highlight gaps and misinformation.
Experience shows us that when tactics get abused, and the user experience suffers, Google eventually steps in (from guest blogging to parasite SEO, most recently).
It might make algorithmic tweaks when launching updates, launch a new system, or hand out manual actions – the point is that you don’t know how things will progress. Only LinkedIn and Google have control over that.
As things stand, I can easily see any of the below potential outcomes:
- This content becomes the AI equivalent of the content farms of the pre-Panda age, leading to Google clamping down on its search performance.
- LinkedIn’s editors stepping in more for quality control (provided LinkedIn deems the investment worthwhile).
- LinkedIn starts pushing its initiative much more to encourage participation and engagement. (This could be what makes the difference between a dead content farm and Reddit-like value.)
Anything could happen. I believe the next few months will give us a clearer picture.
What’s Next For AI And Its Role In SEO And Social Media?
When it comes to content creation, I think it’s safe to say that AI isn’t quite ready to E-E-A-T your experience for breakfast. Yet.
We can probably expect more of these kinds of movements from social media platforms and forums in the coming months, moving more toward mixing AI with human experience.
What do you think is next for LinkedIn’s collaborative articles? Let me know on LinkedIn!
More resources:
Featured Image: BestForBest/Shutterstock
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