🔎 Focus: Content Upgrades
🔴 Impact: High (Content Invisibility)
🟢 Difficulty: Low
Sponsored By Ahrefs
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Dear Tech SEO 👋
Today I am sharing my 3-Point Content Audit, using:
Citation data
Top keyword per page
Top prompt per page
We are using Ahrefs for this process.
Full 30-min over-the-shoulder video
Rather video?
3-Point AI Search Content Audit
Use this Google Sheet
I made a sample sheet you can use:
Step 1: Establish Citation Benchmarks with Ahrefs Brand Radar
The first step is to see where you currently stand. Ahrefs' Brand Radar tool provides a "Share of Voice" for specific tracked queries across different LLMs.
Add your brand: Ahrefs will automatically detect your domain.
Add competitors: You can use the auto-suggestions or manually add specific rivals.
Explore the Share of Voice: This gives you an immediate overview of how often your brand is cited compared to others.
I am auditing https://www.beehiiv.com/ by the way (where I am building my own newsletter):
Ahrefs Brand Radar tracking setup
Step 2: Export Your Cited Pages
While the overview is great, we need to go deeper. Navigate to the Cited Pages section in Ahrefs.
Filter by URL: Set the filter to your specific domain URL (e.g.,
beehiiv.com/blog). I am analyzing the blog performance btw.Identify the Winners: See which pages are already performing well.
Export the Data: Download this list into a Google Sheet. This is your "Benchmark of Success."
Ahrefs cited pages dashboard
Ahrefs cited pages filter
Ahrefs cited pages export
Step 3: Content Citation Gap
Now, we need to find the pages that aren't being cited. Since sitemaps can sometimes be unreliable or broken, use Screaming Frog to get a clean crawl of your site. The Beehivv sitemap is incomplete so I had to pull a crawle out of the Screaming Frog. I’d rather use the sitemap.
Take the cited pages report from the previous step, we will map it against all crawled pages from the blog.
Crawl the Blog: Extract every live URL.
Do a VLOOKUP: In Google Sheets, compare your full list of URLs against the "Cited Pages" list from Ahrefs.
Identify Gaps: The look up will tell you which pages are NOT being cited. Next step will be to verify if we indeed do not have visibility or is just a tracking gap.
Step 4: Set The Data Benchmarks For Content Planning
For the pages that aren't being cited, we need to understand why. Is it a lack of search volume, or a mismatch in intent? Or is just that the basic prompt report for Ahrefs has not analyze specific prompts yet? Lucky us, we can add our own prompt library to Ahrefs tracking.
Search Volume as a Proxy
Since we don't have "Prompt Volume" yet, use Ahrefs Site Explorer to find the Top Keyword and Search Volume for your non-cited pages. This helps you prioritize high-value pages.
Get the top query per page from the Ahrefs “Top Pages“ report. I filtered the blog only:
Get top query per page
Once you have the data, import it all in the same sheet and to a VLOOKUP to match pages, top queries and search volume:
Data setup for content planning: Pages, Citation Level, Top Keyword, Search Volume
Build Up The Prompt Library To Be Tracked
Usually coming up with prompts is not a trivial nor easy as we think. One easy way to set at least a core prompt library is to get the prompt based on the content itself.
Use the Gemini integration in Google Sheets (the AI formula) to transform my URLs into a potential user prompt.
The Formula Idea: =AI("transform this URL into a potential simple prompt that might be used to get the very same URL cited. The prompt has to be practical and do not mention the brand Beehiiv as the premise is that the user is in the discovery phase.",A2)
Generating a core prompt library
Step 5: Analyze And Setup The Content Upgrade Plan
Import those prompts to Ahrefs so you have a good benchmark KPIs on AI search visibility.
Adding prompts to be tracked to Ahrefs Brand Radar
Reply to this email with “AI Search content auditing is my jam“ if you learned something new about content optimization.
Note: if you reply to this email it also helps emails systems to understand I’m legit and not spam.
Recommended Reads
Until next time 👋
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