When did you last actually read every page of your website? Not edit it, not skim it — read it like a visitor would. If the answer is “I can’t remember” or “never” — this episode is for you.

Hi, I’m Nikki Pilkington. My site is https://nikki-pilkington.com/ and in this episode of “SEO F**king What”, I’m walking you through one of the most unglamorous but genuinely useful things you can do for your SEO — a content audit. Not to make your life miserable, but because Google crawls every single page on your website, and right now some of those pages are actively working against you.

Here’s what I’m covering:

1. Why most website owners have no idea how many pages they actually have (and why that’s a problem)
2. How to build a simple URL spreadsheet without needing any fancy tools
3. The intent column — and why filling it in manually is the bit that actually matters
4. The four questions to ask about every single page: Is it helpful? Is it current? Did AI write it (properly)? Does it have a call to action?
5. Why re-dating old posts doesn’t fool Google — and what to actually do instead
6. Why unedited AI content is probably hurting your rankings more than helping them
7. The Keep / Fix / Kill framework — and the priority order for tackling each category
8. Why a smaller, tighter website often outperforms a sprawling one full of filler

I also give you a proper piece of homework. Not the “I’ll do it someday” kind. The start-your-spreadsheet-this-week kind.

If you know someone who hasn’t properly looked at their website in years, send them this. It might save them from a very unpleasant surprise.

Get found. Make money. Go look at your content.

Links mentioned:

Screaming Frog SEO Spider: https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/

Crawly: https://crawly.diffbot.com/

Non-Wanky SEO Course: https://nonwankyseo.com

Follow Nikki:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikkipilkington/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nikkipilkington/

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/nikkipilkington.bsky.social

Chapters:

00:00 — When did you last actually read your website?

00:15 — Welcome to SEO F**king What

00:26 — Why today builds on the last episode

00:38 — Why a content audit sounds boring but isn’t

00:58 — How many pages does your website actually have?

01:22 — Why Google crawls everything

01:40 — The content that actively hurts your rankings

02:20 — What a content audit reveals

02:32 — Step 1: The spreadsheet

03:13 — Step 2: The intent column

03:42 — Tools for bigger sites: Screaming Frog and Crawley

04:34 — Question 1: Is it helpful?

05:34 — Question 2: Is it current?

06:10 — Question 3: Did AI write it?

07:15 — Question 4: Does it have a call to action?

08:31 — You’ve got your spreadsheet. Now what?

09:04 — The Non-Wanky SEO course

09:27 — Keep / Fix / Kill: what to do with each page

09:36 — Leave your working pages alone

09:56 — Update helpful-but-outdated pages

10:28 — Rewrite pages with potential (keep the URL)

10:54 — Deal with unedited AI content properly

11:13 — Consider deleting purposeless pages

11:48 — Your homework

12:27 — Next episode: website structure and internal linking

Mentioned in this episode:

ICN Network

When did you last actually read every page of your website?

Not edit it, not skim it — read it like a visitor would.

If the answer is "I can't remember" or "never" —

this episode is for you.

This is SEO fucking what?

I'm Nikki, and I've been doing SEO for over 30 years —

before it was even called SEO.

In the last episode, we talked about keywords and phrases —

about thinking like the person searching rather than the business owner trying to rank.

If you haven't listened to it, go back and have a listen — because what we're doing today builds directly on it.

Today we're talking about content auditing, which sounds boring as fuck.

I know, but stay with me — because this is where the gold is.

This is where you find the stuff that's holding your website back,

and the stuff that's doing better than you realised.

And unlike most SEO tasks, you can do this one for nothing except your time.

Right. Let's start with the awkward question. How many pages does your website actually have?

The main navigation pages — all of them — including every blog post you've ever written since 2019,

including the service page you created for a package you no longer offer,

including the landing page from a campaign you ran three years ago that's just kind of sitting there.

Most website owners genuinely have no idea, and that's a problem —

because Google doesn't just look at your homepage or your service pages.

Google crawls everything. Every page counts.

And not all of those pages are helping you. Some of them will be actively working against you.

Thin pages with barely any content. Out-of-date blog posts

with broken links or stats from 2017.

Pages that say almost exactly the same thing as another page.

Blog posts written for you, not your potential clients. You know the ones —

"A message from our CEO." "Exciting news about our rebrand."

Nobody's searching for that. We speak to business owners all the time who wonder why their website isn't ranking.

And when I dig in, half the problem is the website is full of content that Google doesn't like —

not because of some technical mystery, but because it's genuinely not very useful.

The content audit is how you find that stuff. And it's also how you find the good stuff —

the pages already performing in the background that you could do more with.

And I'm not gonna make this complicated. You don't need a fancy tool to start.

Open a blank spreadsheet. Go through your website, page by page, and list every URL

and the title of every page. That's it for step one.

Now for most of you, your website will have a fairly obvious structure — your main navigation pages:

home, about, services, contact. There may be some sub-pages under services,

and then your blog posts. Work through them. Copy and paste — it doesn't have to be pretty.

The act of doing this manually is actually the point, because you will find pages you forgot existed.

I can pretty much guarantee it.

Once you've got that list, add one more column: intent.

What is this page actually for? Is it an information page? A sales page?

A bit of both? Is the blog post for potential clients to help them understand something?

To answer a question they're likely to have? Or is it for existing clients?

Or is it, well... what is it for? Be honest. Some pages won't have a clear answer.

And that in itself tells you something.

If you've got a huge website — I'm talking hundreds of pages — or you run an e-commerce site,

there are tools that can help. Screaming Frog is one I've used for years.

It crawls your site and gives you a list of every URL. It also does a lot more than that.

Don't get distracted by all the other shit it gives you. Right now, all you want

is your URL list and the name of your pages.

There's also a tool called Crawley that does something similar online, without downloading anything.

Both are fine. Both are free to a point.

But even if you use a tool to get your URL list, I want you to do the intent column manually —

because that means you have to actually look at each page. And that's the bit that matters.

Once you've got your list, you're gonna go back through it and ask some questions.

I want you to ask these questions about every single page.

First of all — is it helpful? This is the biggie.

Does this page actually help the person who lands on it?

Does it answer a question? Does it walk someone through something?

Does it give them the information they came for, or does it just exist?

Does it talk around a subject without really saying anything?

Is it full of corporate bollocks that tells a potential client absolutely nothing?

You know the stuff — "We're passionate about delivery and exceptional solutions."

Helpful content educates. It informs. It answers the actual question

the person was asking when they found it. It's written for a real person, not for Google.

It doesn't just repeat what every other website says on the same topic. It adds something.

And I want you to be brutally honest with yourself here —

because most people, when they read their own website, see what they intended to write

rather than what they actually wrote. Get someone else to read it if you can.

Secondly — is it current? Google's trying to get rid of out-of-date content from its results.

Not always successfully, but it's a direction of travel. If you've got a blog post from 2020

that references research from 2018 and links to a tool that no longer exists — that's not a great look.

Now, there's an important caveat here. Don't just go and change the date on old posts.

Google isn't stupid. Re-dating something doesn't make it current. If the content itself is out of date, update the fucking content.

If you can fix something quickly, fix it. Don't just slap a new date on it and hope for the best.

Third — did AI write it? I'm gonna say this once, clearly.

If you've been using AI to generate blog posts and pages, and you've not edited them properly —

not just a quick skim, actually edited them — those pages

are probably hurting you more than they're helping you.

AI-generated content is not inherently evil, but AI lies. It makes things up.

It uses phrasing that is instantly recognisable as machine-generated.

It doesn't sound like you, and it definitely doesn't demonstrate E-E-A-T —

Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness,

Trustworthiness — which is what Google increasingly cares about.

Use AI as a starting point, if you must, but put yourself into it.

Your opinion. Your experience. The thing that surprised you about a project. The example from a client call last week.

That's what makes content worth reading. That's what makes it worth ranking.

Fourth — does it have a call to action? This is the one that SEOs will sometimes say isn't their job.

And technically they're right — whether your page has a call to action isn't a ranking factor.

But I'm not just interested in getting you traffic. I'm interested in getting you new clients.

And a page with no call to action is traffic with nowhere to go.

Look — the internet has made us stupid. We have no attention span.

If you don't tell someone what to do next when they've finished reading your content — or in the middle of it —

or at an appropriate point — they won't fucking do it.

They'll just click back and go away to mindlessly scroll someone else's shit.

Call to action. Every page should tell the visitor what to do next.

Not necessarily "buy now" or "book a call." The call to action needs to match the intent of the page.

An informational blog post might end with: "If this was useful, you might also want to read..."

...and point to a related page. A services page should probably have a clearer next step.

When you add a CTA with a link, use that link wisely. The text you make into the link matters for SEO.

I'm gonna talk more about that later, but keep it in mind.

So now you've got a spreadsheet full of honest assessments of your website content.

Some of it's great, some of it's a bit shit,

some of it you'd rather nobody ever found.

In just a moment, I'm going to tell you exactly what to do with each category — what to keep, what to fix, what to kill,

and what order to tackle it in.

Don't go anywhere. If you're enjoying this but thinking: "Nikki, I don't wanna wait a week for the next episode, I just wanna know how to do it now" —

I've got you.

I've developed an on-page SEO course that shows you exactly how to get your pages ranking without hiring an SEO.

It's all the stuff I actually do for clients, broken down so you can do it yourself.

Video, audio, text — however you like to learn.

It's £200 — no upsells, no monthly fees. Just the course.

Go and have a look at nonwankyseo.com.

Right. You've done your audit, you've been honest, you've got a spreadsheet.

That's probably a bit depressing. Here's what to do with it.

Pages that are genuinely helpful and current — leave them alone. Seriously. Right now. Don't touch them.

I know you want to tinker. Don't. If something is working,

the most dangerous thing you can do is fix it. Make a note of them,

because later on I'm gonna talk about internal linking, and these are the pages you're gonna be pointing things at.

Then you've got pages that are helpful but out of date. Update them.

Prioritise the ones most relevant to your business right now — your main service pages, your most-visited blog posts.

Work through them systematically. Update the stats. Fix the broken links. Add anything that's changed.

It's not glamorous work, but it is effective work.

Updating a genuinely good piece of content that's gone a bit stale

is often faster and more impactful than writing something completely new.

Then you've got pages that have potential but need rewriting. Rewrite them.

These are the pages on the right topic but that don't quite deliver. Maybe you wrote them in a rush.

Maybe you wrote them for Google rather than people. Maybe they're just a bit thin.

Don't delete them — you might have links pointing to them, either internally or from other websites.

Rewrite in place. Keep the URL, keep the general topic, improve everything else.

Then you've got AI content that hasn't been properly edited. Edit it properly.

Go through it. Add your voice. Add real examples. Add your opinion. Remove anything that sounds like it was written by a robot.

If the whole thing is unsalvageable, rewrite it from scratch.

And then you've got pages that serve no purpose and never will.

And I want you to consider getting rid of them.

I say "consider" because deleting pages isn't always straightforward,

and I don't want you going on a rampage.

If a page has backlinks from other websites pointing at it, or if it's getting any traffic at all, you need to tread carefully.

I'm gonna talk about this when I talk about redirects.

But if there's a page that has no traffic, no backlinks, no useful content, and no obvious purpose — it's not fucking helping you.

A smaller, tighter website is often better than a sprawling one full of content that adds nothing.

And here's your homework. And I mean it. Don't just listen and nod and go back to whatever you were doing

before you started listening to this.

This week, start your spreadsheet. Even if you only do your main navigation pages and your five most recent blog posts —

that's a start.

Add the URL, the title, the intent, and your honest assessment of whether it's helpful.

And while you're reading through your pages, keep a note of any ideas that come up.

New blog posts you should write. Questions you keep getting asked that you haven't answered.

Gaps you can see. That's future content, right there.

Next episode, we're gonna talk about your website structure — how your pages connect to each other,

how Google navigates your site, and why getting this wrong means even your best content struggles to rank.

If this episode made you want to go and look at your website with fresh eyes,

make sure you're following SEO Fucking What wherever you're listening,

so you don't miss what's coming next. And if you know someone who hasn't looked at their website

properly in years, send them this. It might save them from a very unpleasant surprise.

Until next time —

get found. Make money. Go look at your content.