Fix What Is Broken Before You Publish Anything New

I get asked for content strategies by businesses whose existing pages cannot be crawled properly. It is like being asked to plan an extension by someone standing in a flooded kitchen.

The list, roughly in order

• Indexation. Find out how many of your pages are actually indexed versus how many you think exist. The gap is usually the whole problem.
• Duplicate entry points. The same page reachable on four URLs splits every signal it has.
• Internal linking. Pages three clicks from anywhere get treated accordingly.
• Titles that describe the page. Not the company. The page.
• Speed on the pages that earn. Not the homepage nobody converts on.
• Redirect chains left over from the last two site rebuilds.

Why this order

Publishing into a site with these problems is pouring water into a bucket with a hole in it. You will see some return, because volume does something, and you will conclude that you need more volume. Six months later you have three times the content and the same problem.

None of this is difficult. It is just unrewarding to sell, which is why agencies would often rather talk about content. When I work with a team like TopSeoMasters the first month is almost always audit and repair, and the honest version of that pitch is that month one will feel like nothing happened.