SEO Projects for Code Freeze

Content & Product Page Work to Gear up for 2024

Last time, I looked at SEO work for Category pages, this time, it’s a deep dive into projects for content programs and product pages.

It’s slow season for SEO. Many sites are in a code freeze, lots of folks are traveling, and there isn’t a lot of on-site work getting done. I like to use this time to step back, dig deep into what’s working and what isn’t (for both us and competitors), develop business cases, then set the roadmap for 2024. 

Here are a few workflows and projects I tend to revisit this time of year. And if you’re the one who is busy and traveling for the holidays, these are great ones to hand off to your agencies:

Get Rid of Dead Pages

If your site is older than 5 years, then it’s likely that you have a lot of pages that aren’t getting any traffic. They’re usually one of two types:

1. Out of stock products

2. Old blog articles written “for social media” that have long since fizzled 

At this point, I’ve done this project a handful of times, and the results are always wild. Typically, it gets 15%+ growth to the affected folder structure or template after redirecting the dead pages. (When I forecast for project planning, I keep the estimate closer to 5% to be conservative.)

The process is pretty straightforward:

• Find old pages (site crawl, log files, analytics from a few years ago, etc.)

• Look for pages that have received 0 visits (or <5 visits) from ANY CHANNEL (you want to make sure you don’t accidentally delete something that’s important to social, email, etc.) in the past year.

• Review and setup redirect mapping for the “dead” pages. 

For out of stock products, I’ll typically point them at the most relevant category page. (Or brand page, depending on the site and circumstance.) 

For articles, I’ll do a manual review to see if there are any sections, images, tables, or assets worth preserving and repurposing. I’ll usually spend a little more time on these redirects and point them to the next-most-relevant article if I can, or a blog category page if there isn’t an article that makes sense.

Simple work, fast results.

It’s one of the best ROI projects I’ve found. A few days crawling and churning through a spreadsheet, then fast results.

Note: During this work you’ll likely identify a few articles that are old but performing really well. These are great candidates for refreshes or giving them more internal links (featured posts, highlighted in a nav or footer, etc.)

Slog through Google Search Console

I am a firm believer that the strongest content programs spend a good chunk of their time iterating and revising on existing articles. The best tool for this is Google Search Console. 

1. Filter the pages, so you’re looking only at your blog or content section

2. Choose the “Pages” view

3. Click into each and every article to view its actual search terms

My article evaluation looks something like this:

• Open the article on my site. What intent does it fulfill? Do I think it’s a good post?

• For every search term where we don’t rank #1, I google it and see what is ranking. Do we match the intent? Could we do something to make our article better than what’s ranking in the top 3? (This often includes pivoting the format, adding some visual assets, building out the content, adjusting the title or intro, etc.) 

• If it doesn’t make sense to pivot the existing article to rank better, the search term gets added to a list of new articles to create. I note the intent (how to, short or long form, visual, etc.), and provide some basic guidance that will eventually go into a content brief for the new article. I also log the article where I found the term, so I can remember to add a link to the new one from it. 

These types of edits often driver faster, more impactful growth than writing new articles from scratch. For example, last year, we added a simple HTML table and a one sentence summary to a top article, and, this year, it’s getting 125% more traffic. Do that for your 10 or 15 strongest articles, and you’ve got solid growth. (And a great set of keywords for new articles where you’re very likely to rank well and rank quickly.)

Slice & Segment Your Product Pages

This assumes you already have a solid reporting view in place for your product pages. If you don’t, here’s the type of chart I like to have for every major template type on a site:

Even if I only report out traffic on a monthly basis, with aggregate numbers and highlights/lowlights, having this type of view I check in on weekly allows me to identify changes (both problems and growth) as they happen and provides good seasonal context.

The Deep Dives

Once good on-going reporting is set up, you can do a one-off deeper analysis to look at product page performance. Here are some of the relationships I’d compare:

• Traffic by inlinks

• Traffic by words of content on the page

• Traffic by review count

• Traffic by depth

• Traffic by brand

• Traffic by category

If you have a premium crawling tool like Botify, it will have some of these answers at the ready. If not, you can extract most of them by using xpath extraction in Screaming Frog. (This will get you the review count, the brand, the category from the breadcrumb, etc.) Then you can create pivot tables to summarize your data.

The Projects to Queue Up

Some of the projects that have derived from this research in years past have included building out more robust product descriptions, incentivizing reviews, building related products widgets, and changing the global navigation. The data from the research feeds nicely into business cases, too.

Brush Up Your Analytics Knowledge

The last analytics course I took was circa 2011, when becoming Google Analytics certified was a thing. In the decade that followed, I’ve been in the weeds of Adobe Analytics and GA and have been very confident and effective building dashboards and doing advanced data analyses.

That being said, the rollout of GA4 had a lot of hiccups for the teams I’ve worked with, and I’ve found myself facing questions about why and how things are working. Serendipitously, I won a copy of KickPoint’s Analytics for Agencies course (via #SEOForLunch), and it’s been immensely helpful. I’ve only had time for part of the lessons so far, but they’ve already provided enough value to make the course worse it. (It was free to me, but the price is $1K.)

So if you have budget and time this winter, consider brushing up. If you are a video course person, you’ll love it. If you are not a video course person, you’ll be relieved (like I was) to find there’s a lovely transcript that plays along with each video so you can read, and Dana is great and easy to listen to.

(This is not sponsored in the slightest, it’s just the only digital marketing course I’ve found to be worth my time in the last 5 years, so I wanted to pass along my experience.)

About this Newsletter

My name is Stephanie Briggs, you may have seen me present at MozCon a few years ago. These days, I’m largely quiet on social media but you can find me in the SEO Slack.

I consult at Briggsby, primarily with e-commerce clients that also have content programs.

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I hope you and your loved ones have happy, cozy holidays.