A year-end content audit for a local site

Two days before Thanksgiving is the last quiet hour most owners get before the year closes, so this is the one we use for the unglamorous job: reading your own website the way Google reads it.

There is a reason to do it now rather than in February. Google started another core update on the 11th and has not called it finished. A week later it widened the enforcement of one of the spam policies it published back in March. And whatever you fix this week has five or six weeks to settle before January, when dental benefits have reset, the first hard freeze puts a phone in every homeowner’s hand, and everyone who postponed something in December finally deals with it.

Here is the audit, in the order we run it.

What moved this month

The November core update began on the 11th. Same as the last three, it is a broad quality assessment rather than a penalty aimed at anything in particular, and it takes weeks to settle. If your traffic moved on the 12th, note it and wait. Rewriting a site in the middle of a rolling update teaches you nothing, because you cannot tell your change from Google’s.

The more concrete news came on the 19th, when Google updated its site reputation abuse policy. The original version in March was aimed at third-party content published on a strong domain to borrow its ranking, the coupon sections and the “sponsored” subfolders on news sites. The update says the policy applies whether or not the site owner was involved in producing that content or oversaw it. Oversight is no longer a defense.

Most local businesses have never rented out a subfolder on purpose. Plenty have inherited one. Which brings us to the first step.

Get the full page list, not the pages you remember

Nobody knows their own site. Open Search Console, go to the pages report, and export every URL Google has indexed. If you can run a crawler over the site, do that too and compare the lists.

You are looking for things you did not expect:

• Blog posts published in bulk by an old marketing vendor, usually three a month, usually about nothing.
• A /blog, /deals, /partners or /resources section someone else was allowed to fill.
• Location pages for towns you do not serve, or for towns you do, written by swapping one place name for another.
• Duplicate service pages left behind by a redesign, still indexed, still competing with the real one.
• Staff bios for people who left, and pages for services you stopped offering.
• A second copy of the whole site on a staging address or an old domain nobody turned off.
• Anything on a subdomain you do not recognize.

That last group is the site reputation question in practice. If an outside company publishes on your domain and you are not editing it, it is your problem now regardless of what the contract says.

Judge the money pages honestly

Sort what is left into three piles: pages that make you money, pages that support them, and everything else.

For each money page, one test. Could the practice or the contractor across town publish this word for word and have it be equally true? If yes, it is not earning anything. Specifics that fix it:

1. Photos of your building, your team and your actual work. Not a model in a chair.
2. What the visit involves, step by step, including how long it takes and what it costs you in time off work.
3. Who it is not right for, and what you would suggest instead.
4. The questions your front desk answers ten times a week, written in the words callers use, not the words a brochure uses.
5. One clear next step at the top and at the bottom, with the phone number as a tap target.

That last point about questions is doing double duty this year. Since AI Overviews turned on in May, a plain answer written under a plain heading is the kind of passage that gets pulled into a summary. We have seen no way to make that happen on purpose, but the pages that get cited in the accounts we run are the ones that answer a question in the first two sentences instead of warming up for a paragraph.

Decide, then act, on everything else

Every remaining page gets one of three decisions, and the decision goes in a spreadsheet so you do not do it twice.

• Keep and improve. It is real, it is thin, it deserves an afternoon.
• Merge and redirect. Three weak pages about the same service become one good one, with 301s from the other two.
• Remove. Bulk vendor content, town pages you cannot write honestly, dead services. Let them 404 or 410, or redirect them somewhere genuinely relevant. Do not redirect fifty junk pages to the homepage.

Removing pages feels wrong to most owners. It should not. A site is judged as a whole, and a hundred pages nobody reads make the ten you care about look worse.

The parts that are not the website

While you are in there, half an hour on the things that surround it:

• Holiday hours on the site and on your Google Business Profile, including the awkward ones between Christmas and New Year.
• The contact form, submitted by you, on your own phone, on cellular. Then the number, called after 7pm, to hear what a caller hears.
• The answer to “do you take my insurance” or “do you do emergencies”, findable in under ten seconds.
• Anything advertising an offer that expires on 31 December, with a note in your calendar to take it down.

What to do this month

• Export the indexed page list this week and read it. Most of the audit is in that file.
• Find any section of your site that someone outside your business publishes into, and either take it over or take it down.
• Pick your two highest value services and rewrite those pages with real photos, real steps and real answers.
• Merge or remove the thin pages, with redirects where a sensible destination exists, and leave the rest alone until the update finishes.
• Set holiday hours everywhere and test your own form and phone from the parking lot.
• Write the January offer now, while you have an hour, instead of on 2 January when you do not.

None of this is a redesign, and none of it needs to wait for Google to finish rolling anything out. It is a list, a spreadsheet and two afternoons. If you would rather hand it over, auditing and rebuilding local business websites is most of what we do in December, and what the audit finds almost always sits in the overlap between the site and how you show up in local search.