Content King SEO tool review: tracking on-page changes
Search Engine Optimisation

Content King SEO tool review: tracking on-page changes

29th June 2017

We’ve tons of SEO tools out there. For backlinks, content, technical audits, crawl, keywords. Countless features to make your life better and rock the SERPs. ContentKing is a new one on the list, and this post is for those considering adding it to your arsenal of tools.

Content King is a SaaS presenting themselves as “a real-time SEO auditing” tool. It allows you to crawl a website, keep track of on-page changes and the overall technical health of a website for SEO and social. They give a page score based on the best-practices and allows users to find out about errors on a page level.

One of the most prominent features is the ability to save historical data of on-page changes, so you know what has changed over time.

The main features reviewed by Content King are:

  • Titles & Descriptions (Meta robots)
  • Headers
  • (Google/Adobe) Analytics trackings
  • Canonical links
  • (If page is on) Sitemap
  • Twitter cards
  • (Facebook) Open graph cards
  • Links
  • Alt tags

You can start crawling a website (cost is accordingly to the number of pages, starting on 12.50€ for a 100 pages website) and all this data above is extracted quickly. Then, one screen shows the issues per page and another shows an overview of the issues. You can then dig into each problem and see where it is and how to fix them.

Both by page and domain they give a health score between 0-4000. You can then filter pages according to the current score and relevance and see the issues only for a certain group of pages. This scoring seems confusing to me, but according to them they tested a 0-100 score and found this to the most optimum option.

Cases when Content King can make your life easier

Apart from the basic items such as titles, descriptions, broken links, redirects and the usual checklist, I found a few scenarios where Content King could have helped me in the past.

I recommended a client to add a 301 from the old to the new version of a page. They instead just removed the old one, which was ranking well and had historical signals. It took a few weeks until I touched the website again to find out that rankings (and business) were lost. Content King is releasing by the end of July an alert feature that would alert me quickly about this new 404 and I would have easily found the problem.

Some large companies have so many stakeholders that simple changes (e.g. remove a line on robots.txt, redirects, canonicals) take a while to be completed. Rather than going back to my checklist and testing if things were done, it’s much easier to see on one screen if some improvement was done. It saves time.

A third case is websites managed by a lot of people. Another client of mine has different teams managing certain products/sections on their website. As SEO changes are just a small part of their work, sometimes takes a while until these updates are done. There is a new feature coming in July that will allow users to create page segments. This would allow me to work together with stakeholders in each section and track if work has been done.

Overall, you can see if any changes were made and this can help you to find out why results when up or down.

Issues

Every tool has a few issues here and there. These are the ones I had while using Content King:

There is an option to re-crawl a specific page instead of waiting until the next crawl happens (which varies between hours or days, depending on the depth level in the structure). I made on-page changes just to see if the tool would track the change. I had this problem with a few pages but, in most cases, this request works.

A warning that a whole website had no analytics tracking whatsoever where in fact there is one in place, added with Google Tag Manager. The answer I received from Content King is that depending on how the tracking is done the tool have difficulties in tracking it, but they are working on a solution.

Suggestions

While Content King is definitively a useful tool, there are a few things I would like to see there to make the tool more useful. I had a chat with Steven van Vessum from their support team and in fact, some of these suggestions are being worked on.

Make it easier to identify if a problem is a “one fix fits all”. For instance, in the links section, I found an issue that “98% of pages contains links to redirects”. At first, this seems to be a big problem, but it’s just one menu link with a redirect.

Links to internal guides under each one of the issues explaining how to identify and fix them. There is already a well though short paragraph explaining each issue and they have an academy section on the website, so would just be a matter of adding links from the tool.

My last suggestion would be the option to ignore certain changes on a page level. Let’s say if a page has dynamically generated links and these links are under a header, every time Content King crawls the page, new changes are found, even though you have not taken action to make a change (and they are not relevant). The option to filter changes is on their roadmap, but the ability to ignore headers after [x] appearances could also work.

In this case of Learn Inbound, every time you reload a page there are new suggested posts. You will then end up with a huge list of h2 changes, but these changes do not really matter.

New Features

Between June and July there a few new features coming up. Those are:

  • Identify AMP, hreflang, mobile and pagination
  • Calendar filtering for tracked changes
  • WP Plugin
  • Email reports

Conclusions

Overall Content King is a tool with potential and they are frequently adding new features, some already mentioned in this post. Websites managed by non-technical people, large groups, agencies or dealing with frequent testing can benefit from this tool.

Besides the real-time updates which are really valid, most of the features can be found manually. The advantage here is to make workflow quicker. You can give it a try for free to find out if the tool is interesting for you before deciding if you need an extra hand or not.

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Written By
Enthusiastic SEO, fanatic blogger and graduated journalist. Gustavo Pelogia lives in Dublin and is an SEO Specialist at Wolfgang Digital. He can talk about Seinfeld all day long.
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