Topical Depth Audits — SEO in 2025 — A Better Approach
As long as I have been auditing web sites for SEO, one of the most consistently seen weaknesses I find is the lack of proper topical depth.
Most of my audits, as a result, have entire sections devoted to the need to “Answer All The Important Questions” potential clients, customers or members have along their varying buyer / fan / member decision journey.
As long as I have been involved in the search marketing professional community, I have emphasized this concept.
Some sites try to meet this need, yet do so in less than ideal ways, or based on common misconceptions propagated by SEO myths and half-understanding.
Some sites fail at this need entirely.
Content Gap Analysis
What most SEO agencies that specialize in content offer, as a solution to this need, is what’s commonly referred to as a “Content Gap Analysis”.
Different agencies attribute variations of what that means, what it looks like, what the exact steps are you need to take to perform one.
Yet generally speaking the concept is to evaluate your competitive landscape along with your own site, to see where you are missing important content, or where existing content may need work.
A Topical Depth Audit is similar in some ways.
For topical depth needs, we also look at where your site is weak from a content perspective.
Advanced Refined Focus
We don’t focus on the content itself. Like our Sustainable Site Audits, our topical audits focus on what matters most — ensuring you provide enough depth of content around your most important topics to reach more people who are on their decision journey.
As such, these specific audits are more beneficial for those who already have content teams confident enough in their overall work, and who just need insight on how to go even further. Or those who have some confidence that they can write the content based on quality best practices, yet just need a topical road map.
This being a truly strategic evaluation, we look at what people already want, or need, & the questions they have when they’re looking for answers.
We look at how you currently communicate the information people want or need, from an overall signal-strength & signal-reinforcement perspective.
We focus on ensuring you have diversity of content around the most valuable opportunities available in your market.
And provide you with a road map for how to further build-out, or where needed, also, reorganize, your existing content to meet the needs of those looking for your offerings.
GAI / Answer Engine Alignment
One of the best aspects of our work is that it already helps ensure your site/brand/offerings, are better communicated in ways that GAI / AI Answer Engine / Agentic Researcher services already have shown to be worthy of inclusion in their answer output.
In fact, we have not had to change any aspect of our topical focused audit work and consulting, in order to adapt to helping position our clients for visibility in these new channels. And that’s because our understanding of true Information Retrieval, going all the way back to the earliest days of the Internet, and ever since, has been central to our success.
To win at SEO, you need to understand that Search Engines, and now GAI offerings, attempt to emulate human experience through formulaic methods.
You need to recognize that search engines, and LLM driven businesses, are users of your content just like humans, but different.
And knowing that helps unlock serious growth potential.
That’s where, whether you’ve gotten a Sustainable SEO Audit from us or not, if you want to take your site/brand/business to a whole new level, we can help. And we do so with one of our Strategic SEO Topical Depth Audits.
Evaluate up to 30 Topics
Our topical depth audits are available for up to 10, 20 or 30 topics and/or sub-topics in combination,
10 Topic Pack
1 Main topic & up to 9 Sub-topics
or
Up to 10 Main Topics
Or
A combination of main topics & sub-topics, up to ten combined total.
20 Topic Pack
1 Main topic & up to 19 Sub-topics
or
Up to 20 Main Topics
Or
A combination of main topics & sub-topics, up to twenty combined total.
30 Topic Pack
1 Main topic & up to 29 Sub-topics
or
Up to 30 Main Topics
Or
A combination of main topics & sub-topics, up to thirty combined total.
Automated Research + Human Expert Evaluations
Unlike many agencies that claim to offer content gap analysis or topical audits, we don’t rely entirely or even mostly on automated tools. Whether that’s an existing industry tool or some new AI variant, tools absolutely have their place in SEO and even in our work. Yet if you rely on such tools as your only or your primary evaluation/decision process provider, you’re taking massive risks.
Automated industry tools are great at broad research & evaluations.
They’re not very good at understanding human thinking that’s processed through human emotion.
They’re not very good at filtering out the wheat from the chaff when it comes to human linguistic nuance. Just ask one “How many US Presidents have the letter “r” in their name. ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini & others get that wrong more often than any logical reasoning can explain.
That, however, is where we bring 24 years of SEO and 30 years of overall Internet marketing to the table.
We take raw data and we refine it. We reorganize it. We sort it out based on real-world human understanding of the psychology of how people search for answers/solutions. And after that, we group it by same-intent relevance.
We then present it to your team and then we’ll provide at least a few hours of after-deliverable consultation time as part of our service package to you.
Up to 1,500 Phrases Per Topic
In our topical audit work, we evaluate up to 1,500 individual phrase variations for every topic we audit. This is where human experience and skill come into play. Automated tools could generate countless phrases their systems “think” are relevant to your business.
Then, when a human reviews that output, they’ll find a lot of shiny object semi-relevant or wholly irrelevant phrases mixed in with the data. When we do that work, we weed out entirely irrelevant phrases or variations. We do tag potentially valuable “second tier” opportunities, and when it makes sense, third tier as well.
We limit our evaluations to up to 1,500 phrases per topic, because we found that’s more than sufficient at identifying the most valuable opportunities, and even some somewhat valuable additional opportunities. Enough to keep your content team busy for quite a while.
Every audit we do, across each industry, varies in how many phrases we identify as primary opportunities. Generally speaking, we find that after reviewing a typical 1,000 phrases, (some topics have less diversity of search than others), we’ll end up with fifty primary target phrases.
We then group those, so that if there are five different phrases people use most often searching for something, we know that the sum total combined search volume is worth striving for even if any one or more of those phrases has lower search volume.
Separate Additional Page Matching Audit
If you need us to, once we have performed the topical depth audit, we can then also determine exactly which pages on your site that already exist, you can further enhance with this new topical understanding. Or, if we find your site doesn’t currently cover a topical aspect we tag as a strong opportunity, we’ll recommend that for inclusion in your editorial calendar.
We don’t do that last step sequence for all clients.
Many of our clients have very capable, seasoned content experts. They just sometimes can’t see the forest for the trees when they’re in up to their necks in the content work every day, day after day, all year long.
Some clients prefer the whole package. The Topical Depth Audit and the subsequent page-specific recommendations.
Whatever you prefer, we are here to work with you, not force you into paying for work you don’t need us to provide.
Topical Audit Pricing
Our topical audits vary in scale, from ten topics up to thirty. Each package includes after-audit consulting support, and if you want, can be combined with a page-matching audit. Prices vary by package.
So, if you’re in need of, or at least seriously curious to find out about how deep your existing content goes in needing to “answer all the important questions”, reach out to us and let us know how we can help.