97FL (00:00)
Hi, welcome. In this podcast, we talk B2B marketing and what it takes to know your customer, innovate and profit. We're glad you made it. This is the campaign by 97th floor.

Pax (00:20)
Hello everyone. Happy Friday. am Paxton Gray, CEO here of 97th floor. 97th floor is a performance marketing agency focused on generating leads and revenue for mid-level enterprise organizations through both organic and paid channels. Thank you for joining us today. This is the campaign, a B2B marketing podcast about better knowing your audience, innovating beyond best practice and converting visitors into customers. In today's episode, we're going to be using some visuals.

including a decision-making framework and a walkthrough via screen share. So if you happen to be listening to the audio version, you can check those out at 97floor.com. ⁓ Today, we're going to be sharing something that we've been doing internally for our clients, and it's extremely effective for both our clients and ourselves in terms of traffic growth and revenue growth. We've never shared this before, but it's just too relevant right now to not make this available. Content production has just absolutely exploded over the last year.

⁓ primarily fueled by AI and in my opinion some bad SEO advice. And there was no perceived downside to this at the beginning, but now penalties have started to hit these sites and these are like massive reputable sites. The quality rating guidelines now ding content that is written by AI. So these are coming from the guidelines that are actually given to humans like quality raters. If it can be perceived as AI, they're being told to mark it down.

And there are sites that are losing literally millions of sessions per month from this. Google is also being more strict with their crawl budgets. It's been stated that their goal is to reduce crawl budgets and make them more effective. So using this budget wisely is going to be a top priority in 2025 and moving forward. Really, anyone who's running a site that has been affected by recent Google updates or whose SEO efforts just aren't delivering results, they're going to want to hear this. So today we're joined by one of our own Mike Witham.

Mike is the head of SEO here at 97th floor. He has spent years refining SEO strategies that move the needle for businesses. And one of his most impactful innovations is the content consolidation strategy. This is a process that's helped our clients cut waste, improve rankings, and see real ROI from their content. This is what we're going to show you today, exactly how to run this audit for your own site. So Mike, thank you for joining us today.

Mike Witham (02:39)
Hey Pax, thanks for having me.

Pax (02:41)
Super glad to have you on. ⁓ So Mike, let's maybe start off. What is the console content consolidation audit?

Mike Witham (02:49)
Yeah. So the content consolidation audit came from, uh, having some clients that were, uh, very massive sites had very massive sites that had been around since the beginning of the internet, right? Like two and a half decades. And they, um, had passed through a lot of different marketing teams, a lot of different web managers had, uh, uh, been in charge of publishing content on the site. And so there was just so much content, so many indexable pages and there were.

Only a small percentage of those indexable pages actually mattered yet. Google was crawling all of them consistently. And we wanted to ensure that Google was spending its time in the right places and for pages on unknown pages that mattered and that were important. So what we did is we built this content consolidation audit that turned into more of a strategy, right? So at first it was just like, let's take inventory of all of the pages on a site and identify what pages have the.

⁓ value that we're looking for, that we want from, for our SEO strategy and what pages don't and the pages that don't have that value we're going to get rid of. ⁓ but now it's more of a strategy where we're, where we're using this methodology, ⁓ to evaluate our content and our content production, to ensure that Google's only spending time on pages that matter and only spend, and we're only publishing content that are actually going to be useful to Google. And we're going to make those indexable and Google's

able to see and crawl those ones.

Pax (04:19)
Yeah. So this runs counter to a lot of advice that's been going around for maybe the past year or two, ⁓ which is like just produce as much as you can. And there's probably some people who maybe they don't feel strongly one way or the other who might say, you know, there's a bunch of content on my site and yeah, it's not really relevant, but, and no one's visiting it, but it's not hurting anything. It's just sitting there doing nothing. Like, what would you say to that person?

Mike Witham (04:47)
Yeah, that's a great question. And that's a, it's interesting that you, gave that timeline of like the last year or two, because that's really when Google's really started to crack down on this is when they've started releasing the helpful content updates. Part of the helpful content updates is a, is a, ⁓ means for Google to conserve what it's crawling and what it's storing. And if Google keeps crawling pages on a site,

And continues to crawl pages on a site that have no value that are thin content or duplicate content that are, ⁓ not getting any sort of user engagement. It's going to identify that site as having a pattern of publishing useless content and indexing useless content. And so what it's going to do is going to say, okay, this, this domain keeps feeding me useless pages. I'm going to stop crawling it all together.

And so let's say you have a hundred pages on your site and 20 of them are the best optimized best, the most magnificent con content you've ever created. And it's so helpful. It's unique and it's great for users. That's 20 pages that are that in that way. And then the rest, the 80 other pages that are indexable to Google are just thin content or duplicate or just completely useless. Google's going to identify that domain as a, not a

helpful source of information and those 20 other pages are actually going to be pulled down ⁓ with the 80 other poor quality pages.

Pax (06:24)
Right. I think Google has talked about establishing patterns, right? Where it says, you know, if we detect that, you know, this series of web pages have low engagement, people hit the back button, bad user metrics, you know, we can identify that's not what people are looking for. They have stated that we'll find other pages that match the same pattern. And we're not exactly sure what that pattern is, but it could be things like

Mike Witham (06:28)
Mm-hmm.

Pax (06:51)
other pages that have the same depth, other pages that have a similar URL structure. And so you're going to start being at risk of penalizing pages that are high value quality pages because these low quality pages have established this pattern in Google's eyes of kind of low quality pages across the site. ⁓ really, you're just exposing yourself to a lot of risk here, right? ⁓

Mike Witham (07:09)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, absolutely.

Pax (07:19)
This isn't just coming out of nowhere. ⁓ This isn't just a good idea. We've actually put this into play and done this for clients. So Mike, what would you say to somebody? What are some of the benefits that they can expect to see if they run this ⁓ content consolidation, not just audit, but practice and consistent effort on their site?

Mike Witham (07:39)
Yeah.

Well, there's a couple of scenarios where this is going to be really helpful and really beneficial for a, uh, site manager to conduct one of these audits and implement this strategy. And the first one is when you have, if you have already established a pattern to Google, like we've been talking about of producing and publishing and indexing poor quality content, then, um, running this audit is going to amplify your SEO efforts.

because you're showing Google, hey, I'm getting rid of it. I'm trimming out the poor quality content and I'm only going to be showing you high quality, useful, helpful content. ⁓ and I'm also going to make it very easy and clear for Google to understand what it is we do and who we are serving. We don't want to make Google's life any harder than it has to be. And Google actually is a lazy.

It's kind of weird to think of it like that, but it's looking for the easiest answer. And so it's going to go try and find that. So we want to make it easy for them. ⁓ and if you have, had trouble getting results with your SEO efforts, ⁓ because of that poor quality content and that pattern that you've established running this audit is going to help finally start to see some movement in keywords and finally start to show Google like,

This we are committed to indexing high quality content. That's going to be helpful and useful to users. ⁓ the way to, to identify if that might be you is if you go into search console, Google search console, and you look at that, ⁓ vaunted, crawled and not indexed folder and search console. And if it's kind of an eye popping number in the, in the thousands pages that are indexable, but not, ⁓ indexed, so crawled, but not indexed.

⁓ that might be your first sign that you need to take a look at, ⁓ the content on your site and take inventory with this content consolidation audit and strategy.

Pax (09:46)
That's a, that's a great point. ⁓ and then the drive home, maybe one other benefit. This is coming from conversations that you and I have been having, ⁓ just day to day about AI. So we've been doing a lot of work in AI search and helping brands show up more in, ⁓ both like citations as well as like getting their brand recommended for certain topics. And what impact does this have when it comes to AI search, particularly around.

teaching Google and other LLMs what your brand is about versus what it's not about.

Mike Witham (10:20)
Yeah.

Yeah. This is like such a timely audit, honestly, like because of the benefits it has for LLMs crawling your site and trying to understand what you do, because the more content you produce, like, like you said at the beginning, like the strategy of the last decade or so has been just like pump out as much content as you can think of like, ⁓ a massive publication site that just.

writes on every topic possible, right? If it like somehow relates to your audience, they're going to write an article about it, right? And the more content that you produce, the more you're going to stray from your core topic. And the harder it's going to be for crawlers for these LLMs to understand what it is you do and what you're good at and what you're what you should be showing up for and what you should be cited in and in prompts, in responses to prompts.

And so, ⁓ like I said before, you're just making it harder for the LLM to understand what you do and who you serve. And you're not going to, you're not going to see the results that you want to see, ⁓ with your exposure and AI because the LLM doesn't know what to do with you. does it, like I said before, it wants to find the easiest answer and you're making it hard for them to understand.

Pax (11:39)
Yeah, yeah, I love this. So obviously if you're listening and you ⁓ want help cleaning this up and working through consolidating your content and making your SEO more effective, we would love to work with you. ⁓ However, if you're looking and watching this because you want to do this yourself, that's exactly the purpose of this call. So ⁓ Mike, do you want to share your screen and walk us through a little bit of how this content consolidation works?

Mike Witham (12:03)
Yeah, absolutely. Let's go there. So this, first off, just want to show, give a sneak peek at what a finished audit looks like before we jump into what to do with all this data. Because the first step in running this audit is collecting so much data. You're pulling in data from so many different places.

and putting it into one sheet so that you can analyze the data in a efficient way. Because sometimes you're looking at sites that have been around forever, right? And they have tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of pages. So you need an efficient way of looking at the site and assigning the page's value. And that's really what we're doing here is we're trying to identify what value do these pages have and what should we do with them, right? So.

there's a couple of different places that we pull data in from. can really pull this data with any of your tools that you have. chose Ahrefs to pull in, ⁓ data around estimated traffic and total keywords, as well as the URL rating. We chose Search Console and Google Analytics to identify traffic trends and, ⁓ user engagement metrics. And then we crawled the site using Screaming Frog. I was going to show you like you just how you crawl a site, but that's

takes too long. I just imported the data. already ran the crawl, imported the data into here, into this sheet. ⁓ And with Screaming Frog, what we're going to do primarily is we're trying to identify all the indexable pages on a site. then because that's the ones we're showing Google, like, hey, look at these pages. These are the ones we want you to show for keywords, right? ⁓ And then

We're also looking at some of the content side of things. What's the word count look like? Is there any thin content pages? Is there any duplicate title tags that we can identify quickly to duplicate content with? And then, ⁓ in links is important for business alignment, which we're going to get into in just a minute. But yeah, so first things first is compile as much data as you can, ⁓ about the pages on your site. And we're actually going to provide you this, this spreadsheet as a template.

⁓ for anybody that wants to run one of these and it's very easy, ⁓ using this to, analyze the data. So this is, this is the sneak peek at what we're looking at. at like the finished data poll. but before we jump into recommendations, I want to show you something that we put together, which is this content consolidation decision matrix. So we put in some criteria for a page. So we're going to go through some mock example pages. ⁓ and.

and analyze the mock example pages using this criteria. The first one being, does it have substantial existing traffic? Does it actually get traffic to the site, whether organic or otherwise? What kind of user metrics does it have? What kind of business alignment is there with this page? Does it actually, like we were talking about, does it stay on topic? Is it a part of the core topic of what you do, what your business serves and who you serve? And then is the content duplicate or redundant?

This is the first example page. ⁓ So let's say page A, it does have good existing traffic. It does have good user metrics. It does have business alignment. It's not a redundant or duplicate content. That page, we're just going to leave as is. We're not going to touch that page or worry about it for this audit. ⁓ And we're going to move on to another tactic, which is

Uh, consolidate or three or one redirect. So I'm going to give you a couple of examples of pages that we would consider consolidating or, or redirect through a three Oh one, um, to consolidate, uh, uh, those pages and not have Google be crawling too many pages that are useless. So the first one, let's say you have a page that doesn't get substantial traffic, does not have good user metrics, but it does have.

some kind of business alignment and it is a duplicate content piece. So there is some other page out there that does have the same type of business alignment, same type of value. We're going to get rid of that because we're just confusing Google with what we want them to see. And so we're going to we're going to consolidate that with that other page that we found that does that is a duplicate. Now, let's say you have all these great metrics. You have great substantial existing traffic, business alignment and user metrics. However, it is a duplicate content piece.

That also we're going to get rid of through a consolidation effort through a 3-1 redirect.

Pax (16:42)
Now, Mike, is it better to get rid of that, that page and redirect to something else, or is it better to take the lower performing pages that are the duplicate and have those redirect into this page?

Mike Witham (16:52)
Great question. The lower performing duplicate, we're going to redirect into this page. That's why I say consolidate because that's the decision you're going to make after you've decided what to do with that page is, we redirect this to the other duplicate page or do we redirect the duplicated pages to this one? Yeah, great question. And then substantial existing traffic, these pages that ⁓ have substantial existing traffic, but none of the other metrics.

Pax (17:08)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Witham (17:21)
are good, like no great user metrics and no business alignment. That one, we still want to consolidate actually, because it's ⁓ actually harmful to your site to have a page that gets a lot of traffic and no good user metrics. If people are just bouncing right after that page and there's no engagement, it's obvious to Google, like this is an irrelevant page and you published it to increase organic traffic solely.

Pax (17:49)
What's

an example of something ⁓ like a site that might have a page that has a lot of traffic but it's not aligned with their business, it doesn't have good user metrics?

Mike Witham (17:59)
Yeah, that's a, that's a great question. We have, we've had clients all over, from, from many different industries in the past. One that comes to mind in particular is a, company that, ⁓ sold water softeners and other kinds of water filter type, ⁓ products. And one of their highest, ⁓ traffic pages was a blog post about the water cycle.

Pax (18:28)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Witham (18:29)
You know, like

the sun comes out, pulls the water up from the earth and then goes in the clouds and then it rains like like the people who are searching that are in eighth grade and not in the market for a water softener. And that page got. Yeah, exactly. So maybe if their parents are helping them and then they happen to be in the market for a water, I don't know, maybe it'll work out. But.

Pax (18:42)
They're doing their science homework. Yeah.

Mike Witham (18:56)
That that's the type of page we're talking about here where it's like that that page is going to be bounced every time. There's not going to be any extra engagement. There's like, yeah, I guess it's about water and you sell products about water. That's not really the business alignment and that's not really aligned with your audience. So we're just going to duplicate. Sorry, we're going to redirect that page, consolidate it because.

The fact that it did get it substantial existing traffic probably means there's some sort of authority behind it because it's probably referenced somewhere else. So let's maintain some of that authority through three one redirect and, and maintain it. But we don't really care about the rankings or the traffic for that keyword because it's useless and it's actually probably going to harm us in the end. Yeah. ⁓ and then the last tactic, that we're going to talk about this optimized and promote, a couple of examples here would be.

Pax (19:39)
Okay. Yeah. Great example.

Mike Witham (19:50)
A page that ⁓ does get substantial traffic does have business alignment. However, the user metrics are poor on it. want to get as much value from that page as possible. So we're going to run some CRO tests, do what we can to improve the user metrics there and get it to a place where we feel good about keeping it. The next one, the last one that we're going to talk about just this example is ⁓ one that maybe doesn't get substantial existing traffic.

but it does have potential to get traffic, right? So maybe it is a great page. It's just not optimized for the keyword that it's intended for. And we need to take a second look at that and optimize it and get it in a better ranking position and start getting some substantial traffic from it. And then it turns into this page that's perfect and we don't want to touch it for a little while, right? So ⁓ these are just a few examples.

⁓ Any other questions, packs, that you feel like the audience might want to know before we jump back to the sheet?

Pax (20:49)
No, I think that's great. ⁓ Yeah, let's get into the sheet and walk through a little bit how this works.

Mike Witham (20:55)
Cool, awesome. using these examples from this decision matrix, let's go into the sheet and I'll show you how we filter through the data to identify pages that fall within one of these categories that would call for one of these tactics to be deployed. So the first one, let's find all the pages that work well, that are performing well.

⁓ and for matters of, Ease for this podcast, I made some, ⁓ filter views here. ⁓ and I'll walk you through what I filtered, but let's just go to this one that I made for maintain. ⁓ this one, what I did was I found all the pages that had more than 500 words on them. So these aren't thin content pages. I found the pages that have.

10 or more internal links pointing to them, that shows business alignment. So we're looking for pages with business alignment in links show that because it's saying like there's a ton of other pages that relate back to this page enough to the point where we can put in a internal link and point back here. So that's a great metric to identify business alignment. And then when we're looking for user metrics and substantial traffic, let's look at

GA sessions. I looked for any page that had more than 500 sessions. User engagement that was over ⁓ like the 50 percentile ⁓ for this whole row. And then ⁓ we run that filter and take a look at these pages. You can do a manual check of the pages to see if you agree. But these are all pages that are great. They're they're doing what they're supposed to for our strategy. We want to continue using them.

⁓ and so we come over here and this is how we start building our recommendations, building our, ⁓ strategy for the content consolidation. And for these ones, since they're great, we're just going to choose this initial step. That's keep and copy that down.

I did not mean to copy both rows.

Pax (23:10)
Okay.

Mike Witham (23:14)
There we go. And then we're going to go in and look at something else. Now let's look at pages that we potentially would want to redirect. And so for this example, I have a filter view that I'll walk you through that is finding pages that are ⁓ not getting great traffic, right? And they don't get good user metrics. So these are

⁓ under a certain percentile for, for key events. And then they're also under a certain of it's percentile for, ⁓ sessions. ⁓ I think I did under, ⁓ under a thousand sessions here. And then, ⁓ these, these are all pages that we feel like, okay, they do have some kind of value. They have some kind of rankings.

They have some in links and we can add an in link filter here too. and they, so they have some kind of value. However, they're really not doing much for us. And so this, these are pages that we're going to consider consolidating. ⁓ so we're going to say redirect and the secondary step is, ⁓ removed from XML site maps. So just want to get rid of those, get them out of Google's site, ⁓ and get, ⁓

⁓ start consolidating what Google's seeing.

Pax (24:44)
So I'd imagine that ⁓ in the last category, we were able to just say all of these that match this are gonna have these applied. I'd imagine that in this section, we may not wanna be like it's gonna require more time and nuance. Like I know you just copied and pasted it, but we wouldn't really wanna be doing that in practice because theoretically we may have a page that it just is never gonna get a lot of traffic because of the theme that it hits. And perhaps engagement rate isn't what it should be, but it could be optimized.

Mike Witham (24:56)
As well, ⁓

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Pax (25:15)
Right. Am I thinking about that correctly?

Mike Witham (25:17)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. First for matter for sake of demonstration, I did copy and paste this down, but this this is a category that would be like, let's review this. Let's see what what's actually happening here and see like if our assumptions are correct. Like I like you said, packs like maybe there's not good engagement rate for some reason, but it could have good engagement rate if we optimized it. So that's that's a great point. Glad you brought it up. A lot of this. This is a.

Pax (25:39)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Witham (25:45)
Like we were talking about at beginning, this is a very important audit, but it is not a short or it is a very time consuming audit because there are a lot of manual review that you're going to have to do and try and identify what is worth keeping and what you need to consolidate. Thanks for bringing that up. And then the last one that's kind of leads us into this one, the optimizer promote.

Pax (25:56)
Yes.

Mike Witham (26:14)
And I there, sorry, there was actually one other one that I failed to go over, which is this removed through a four or four that has no value at all and never will have any value. We're going to talk about that one too. But first the optimize and promote for this one, I'm looking at pages that, do you have a lot of inlinks? So these are pages that obviously are important enough to the point where we're pointing to them a lot from all over the site in different places in the site.

they do get, some traffic, substantial traffic. The user engagement isn't great. and the, and the sessions, could be better. ⁓ and then this is another one where you could look at the keywords too and identify, okay, it looks like they're not getting a ton of traffic, but they do rank for keywords. Let's see what we can do to push those keywords into more visible positions and, ⁓ make, make recommendations that way.

And you can see like there's some that fell into the other category. Those are ones you can either evaluate or you can just take them out with your filter and, ⁓ keep the previous recommendations and just use these ones. But basically what I'm trying to do here, packs is I'm trying to, ⁓ go through this as efficiently as possible. Right. So, there's like I said before, there's a ton of pages depending on how big your site is. Right.

Pax (27:33)
Mm-hmm.

Yep.

Mike Witham (27:42)
And you're going to need to do this in kind of an efficient way and categorizing ⁓ content like this is ⁓ the best way to do that, I think.

Pax (27:52)
Yeah.

So the analytics data shows us how people are interacting with the pages. The crawl data shows us the data about like the page itself. Ahrefs data is showing us here are the opportunities for this. Like maybe you're not getting a lot of traffic, but there's a lot that it could be getting. ⁓ Tell me about the search console. What does, what does that showing us? How do we use that as we evaluate these pages?

Mike Witham (28:00)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's it's a great question. Search console is another way of backing up your GA four data. also shows kind of like this click through rate is, is a, is a really good metric to identify. if there's like as a user metric, because if Google's showing your pages a lot and showing your links a lot in search results and you're not getting clicks.

but you're getting impressions. That's a, that's a red flag for Google. It shows that Google's like, you're not, you're not getting the users, not, ⁓ clicking on it because it's actually. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So I think that's a really important part. And then just impressions, like anytime you have an impression from search console, means that Google's crawled that page. So it's a good identifier of saying like, Hey, what a, ⁓

Pax (28:57)
You're not meeting the need. Yeah.

Mike Witham (29:16)
where is Google spending its time the most, right? Like this page 480 impressions and zero clicks in the last six months. Like what's the deal with this page? How are we going to, what are we going to do with this page? And can we get it to a position where it gets clicks? If not, maybe we should get rid of it.

Pax (29:34)
Great. I love that example. And then can you walk us through the, ⁓ 404, like how would we identify a page? should just be totally white.

Mike Witham (29:43)
Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. That's the that's the last one. The last example that I was going to give, which is where I'm at right now. ⁓ So this is a ⁓ interesting category, too, because like we're looking at this through an SEO lens, right? Like we're looking at this like, hey, I don't care about this page because it's not doing anything for my objectives. But maybe there's something here that

like some reason this exists that we need to take into consideration. And so a couple of the metrics that I look at here to identify pages that we could consider getting rid of are pages that have very little or no inlinks and as well as no sessions. And then the other piece too is the word count. So ⁓ I would put in here like has less than 150 words. ⁓

Pax (30:18)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Witham (30:44)
And just see what comes up. Like there's a good chance none of these pages need to be indexable to Google. And we can get rid of all of them and save so much crawl budget that way so that Google's spending its time where we want it to.

Pax (30:58)
Yeah. Now there are, there are going to be pages that have very little traffic. Um, maybe even, you know, like I'm thinking a privacy policy page, um, that does meet the definition of business alignment, right? There is a business purpose. Maybe it's not an SEO purpose, but there is a business alignment. So I think it's, that's again, the reason why this is such a difficult process. It's still worth going through.

Mike Witham (31:09)
Yeah.

me.

Pax (31:27)
but you're going to have to evaluate these pages a little bit with the fine tooth comb as you're looking to completely wipe them from your site. you definitely don't want to go be wiping your privacy policy page for sure.

Mike Witham (31:35)
Yeah.

Yeah,

yeah. And then that's a that brings up a good point, too, of wiping it from the site. Like if you end up redirecting any pages or 404 in any pages, you're going to want to go through your site and find all of the links, the internal links to those pages we're going to get rid of. We're going to replace them with a new link if we redirected them, delete the hyperlink if we're 404 in them and then go through the XML sitemap and do the same thing. Make sure.

I mean, most people have dynamic XML site maps these days, right? But you still are going to want to go in and make sure that it's refreshed, that it's updated and that those are out of Google's site.

Pax (32:17)
Yeah. So this is ⁓ obviously a big lift, especially if you have a big site. Once you go through this process, how should people be thinking about this as they continue to develop more content for their site?

Mike Witham (32:31)
Yeah. ⁓ my rule of thumb is that if you can, if you're considering creating an article, ⁓ you should be able to relate that keyword back to something on the homepage, either who you're talking to on the homepage or what service or product you're providing on the homepage. Make it so like you, you have a reason for, for publishing this content piece, ⁓ that

that is very clear and obvious and highlights your value as a brand, like what you do well. And there's ⁓ a really interesting piece to this two packs where there's oftentimes the need to stray from your core topic when you're doing demand gen, you're building a brand new company and it's a new product or a new service or a new idea, like you're pioneering something new.

There's not a lot of keywords to optimize your site for because nobody knows it exists, but it is solving a problem. And I think that problem is okay to write about, right? Like write about what problem you're solving. What problem does your product or service help with? And the audience that's facing that problem, write about them, write about that problem. And then that's really going to still keep you on topic and show Google and show the LLMS.

what you are and what you do well.

Pax (34:02)
Right. Yep. I love that. thank you, Mike, for putting out these resources, for everybody. It's going to be, ⁓ I think impactful for companies, especially as we move forward and AI starts changing the game. These sites, you know, are continuing to see negative results from just this massive amount of content. ⁓ really we're seeing sites win as they consolidate. So, ⁓ thank you for putting this together. I did want to ask how, how long would you expect?

somebody to spend going through like how long should this process take in practice for let's say an average website.

Mike Witham (34:36)
Um, an average website, meaning like around 5,000 pages. Um, I w I would say it would, it would take at least 10 to 15 hours by the time you have your complete recommendations for a site with a hundred thousand pages, 200,000 plus pages. It's going to take around 30 to 40 by the time. But again, there's things that you can do to speed up the process, like finding sub folders, finding entire sub folders, maybe they don't need to be indexed or finding entire.

category of pages that maybe need a no index tag. There's things that you can do to, to speed up the process, but it is like we talked about fairly manual and fairly extensive, but very worth it, especially right now as we move into this ⁓ AI search age.

Pax (35:21)
Yep. I love that. ⁓ Mike, thank you so much for joining us and walking us through that. ⁓ super helpful. ⁓ if you, ⁓ are registered and you're watching this live today, ⁓ you're going to receive this decision, matrix, matrix, as well as the template sheet and a recording of how to do this audit in your inbox on Monday. ⁓ for everyone else listening after the fact, you can get all of that and more at 97th floor.com.

If you're interested in having this audit run for your site, or if you're interested in learning what else 97th floor can do to make your organic search strategy more profitable, you can reach out to me or Mike, or you can contact us at 97th floor.com to be connected with one of our account reps. thank you so much for, for joining us today. ⁓ tune in next week. We're going to be joined by Carl Vandenberg,

97FL (36:09)
Thanks for listening. The campaign is produced by 97th Floor, a 20-year-old marketing agency that helps companies like McKinsey, Pluralsight, and Checkpoint know their customers, execute innovative campaigns, and drive profitable growth. If you have an allocated growth budget and product market fit, we'd love to do research and build a proposal for you. Visit us at 97thFloor.com. And if you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe. See you next time.