Page Performance Audits

Owned by Kyle Sharrer
Last updated: Jul 03, 2023
4 min read

Top Performing Page Audit: One of the biggest culprits for low rankings for some of Dealer Spike’s older, 12 month+ clients is that there are two (or more) pages that share the same and/or similar information or inventory, like a New Toy Hauler page and an All Toy Hauler page. These two pages are competing for the same keyword, meaning the authority for both pages is low. This is also known as keyword cannibalization. The fix for this: a top-performing page audit.

What you will need:

  • SEOMonitor

  • Admin Config Tool (Snippets)

  • Admin Snippet Manager

  • Google Search Console

  • In-line Editor


Figure out what needs auditing

First and foremost, figure out what needs auditing (or if you need auditing). One way to see if there are cannibalization issues is by looking to SEO Monitor’s SEO Campaign:

Next to some toy hauler keywords (in this example), there is an under the Page column of SEO Monitor. If you hover over this icon, you will see the warning: There could be a cannibalization problem, as the landing page changed several times in the last 30 days. You can use the advanced filters to get the entire list of keywords affected.

The URL at the top of this box is the page that is at risk of cannibalization. In this case, this URL leads to the ‘all’ toy hauler page.


Another way to see if you need to complete a link audit is if you run across a set of pages that look like this:

As you can see underlined in blue on this ‘New’ Keystone RV page, there is a link to the ‘All’ Keystone RV page and a link to the ‘Used Keystone RV’ page. These are the kinds of pages that are spreading authority too thinly. So that then leads to the question...


Which page has more authority?

Now, we have to figure out which page (out of the set of competing pages) is ranking the highest. In this example, we will be looking at toy hauler pages.

For this client, we see there are two toy hauler pages competing for toy hauler related keywords: one for all toy hauler units, and another for new toy haulers. Now, we must see which page is ranking for related keywords (even if it’s only a little bit).


1. Head on over to your dealer’s GSC account in the SEO/SEM/SEO Marketing Chrome profile! Make sure it’s the secure https:// version of the site’s URL! On the sidebar, click performance.


2. Then, click on the Pages tab under the graph. This tab will show the clicks and impressions of specific pages. This tab will display only 10 pages by default. Show 250 rows per page. Then, click the ↓Impressions button at the top of the list to filter by most to least impressions.

Ctl + F and start to type the page you want to rank for. In this example, one will search “toy” to find the “toy hauler” URL. For this demonstration, the only page that showed any impressions in the first 250 rows is the URL that led to the ‘new’ toy hauler page.


3. Seeing that this page is sorted before the ‘all’ toy hauler page, this means that the ‘new’ toy hauler page is getting more impressions than the ‘all’ page. The page with the most impressions is the page that you will want to keep.


Snipping snippets

Now we know which page we want to keep, it’s time to eliminate the weak link. Open up the admin panel for your site. Click on DS Admin, and then click on “Manage Snippets.” Click on the “Select Page Content” drop down and scroll to find the snippet you wish to delete. In this example, we will want to delete the ‘all’ toy hauler page, because it is not ranking as well.  

Follow the steps in this doc to delete snippets! /wiki/spaces/DMSRV/pages/3925344671


Submitting a New Sitemap

Now that we have made these changes to the site, we need Google to notice the site’s makeover! To do that, we will need to submit a sitemap. This will help point Google to our site for crawling and indexing. Doing this will not guarantee that it will be crawled and indexed. It’s just a request for the search engine to do so. For more info on sitemaps, check out this doc.

  1. Go to your dealer’s GSC account on the SEO Chrome profile and click on Sitemaps on the sidebar on the left side of the screen.  

  2. In the blank area, you will type in sitemap.xml and then click the Submit button. This last part of the URL will take you to the INDEX of the XML sitemap (the most commonly used sitemap). You can use this URL to see the index of your dealer’s XML.

    1. Here is an example URL: https://www.allandale.com/sitemap.xml

  3. Then, type in the sitemap XML itself, which is content/sitemap.xml and click submit.

    1. An example of the XML: https://www.allandale.com/content/sitemap.xml


Requesting to Remove URL

And finally, you will want to request to remove the URL from Google! The main reason to do this is to make sure it is no longer showing up in Google search results. If you notice and URLs from your clients’ sites that still rank, this usually means the page description of cache is outdated.

To remove the audited or outdated URL, go here, copy and paste the URL that you still have saved in your Notepad++, and click “Request Removal.”

Another way to get to this URL removal tool is to Google search “Remove Outdated Content,” select the first result, and click on the hyperlink that says “Remove outdated content.”

And that’s it! If you ended up needing to create a new link structure and buttons for your pages, remember to link those in the dealer’s client sheet!