You built an agency you’re proud of. So why does your website still feature that glowing tribute to someone you wouldn’t recommend today, or explain services you stopped offering three years ago?

In this episode, Chip and Gini tackle the unsexy but critical task of auditing your agency’s website content. They share practical approaches for identifying what needs updating, what deserves deletion, and how to prioritize your efforts when you’re staring down hundreds (or thousands) of outdated pages.

The conversation covers everything from quick wins—like updating your homepage and key pages—to strategic decisions about high-traffic content that no longer serves your business. Gini shares her process for using tools like Screaming Frog to audit content systematically, while Chip emphasizes the importance of focusing on human users rather than chasing every algorithm change.

They also dive into the balance between refreshing old content and creating new material, with specific guidance on when each approach makes sense. The episode wraps with a reminder that consistency matters more than perfection—especially when AI is increasingly using your bio and content to determine whether to recommend you.

If your website is starting to feel like a liability rather than an asset, this episode offers a manageable roadmap to get it back on track without turning it into a year-long project.

Audit your homepage today. Open your website and read your homepage copy with fresh eyes—does it accurately reflect who you serve, what you do, and where your agency stands today? If not, block two hours this week to rewrite it. This is your most important page and the fastest way to stop misrepresenting your business.

Check Google Analytics for your top 20 pages. Identify which pages drive the most traffic, then ask yourself if each one still serves your business or if you’re just attracting irrelevant visitors. Kill off pages that generate traffic but don’t support your current positioning—inflated vanity metrics aren’t worth the confusion.

Ensure bio consistency across platforms. Compare your bio on your website, LinkedIn, and other platforms where you appear. Make them consistent (accounting for character limits) so AI can confidently present you as an option when people search for expertise in your area.

The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy.

Chip Griffin: Hello and welcome to the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And Gini, I’m old.

Gini Dietrich: Yes, you are.

Chip Griffin: But you know what else is old?

Gini Dietrich: What else?

Chip Griffin: Some of the content on my website.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, sure. Mine too. Yeah.

Chip Griffin: It’s, it’s one of the perils of having been around for a while.

Gini Dietrich: Yes, indeed.

Chip Griffin: Both as a human, as a business.

And so we have a lot of content out there on the website that maybe isn’t as current as we’d like it to be. Some of it I haven’t looked at in many years, so I don’t even know if it’s up to date or not.

Gini Dietrich: Sure.

Chip Griffin: I’m sure that many of our listeners have content on their website or maybe entire websites that are old and out of date.

Gini Dietrich: Yes.

Chip Griffin: So my question to you is, how should we be thinking about this kind of, how do we deal with this problem? Or we, we can’t just spend, I mean, I, I don’t know about you, but my website’s got over a thousand different pieces of content on it. Oh yeah. Now I think most of our listeners probably don’t have websites with quite that much content on it, but some do, and even if you’ve only got a couple hundred, you know, that’s still a substantial body of content that you need to audit in some fashion. So what, what do you do about that?

Gini Dietrich: You know, it’s funny, this conversation is happening right now because about a week ago, right after the holidays, I got an email from a friend that said, Hey, uh, I don’t know if you know this or not, but you have a blog post from, from 13 years ago, literally 13 years ago, praising Elon Musk. And I was like, well, let’s delete that!

But like, I don’t know how she found that. She must have been searching on the site for something and found it. Right. So I think it’s important to do an audit and I did delete it. I moved it to the trash. But, I think it is important to do an audit.

We have a client that said to us, we don’t think we need new content. We have plenty. And we went in and we’re like, okay, great. Let’s do an audit and see. And we audited it and they do have plenty of content, but the most recent is two and a half years old. So one of the things that we’re working on with them right now, well, twofold.

One is going through the audit that we did to see what needs to stay with an update, a refresh, and what should be deleted. There are lots of, there’s lot, there’s lots of content on their site. And actually this will appeal to many of you listeners too. There’s content on their website that has some great SEO value.

You know, showing up first in Google results and things like that. So you don’t wanna get rid of that content, but it probably needs a good update. It probably needs to be refreshed. It probably needs new quotes, new experts, new expertise, new statistics, whatever it happens to be. So that’s what I would do.

It’s pretty easy. We use, Screaming Frog to do the audit, so it’ll, it will look at your entire website and then give you an Excel list of all of your links, and then you can go and you can tell it I want dates and topic and all that kind of stuff.

And you can go through that fairly easily to say, this is old, we don’t need that. Move that to a different tab. This is good stuff. We don’t wanna lose it. And then I would compare that to what you’re keep, I would compare what you’re keeping to do a Google search. Are you show, are those links showing up in Google? And I would also ask AI. Are you showing, is AI showing that content in its answers.

So you probably, I would venture to guess, like you and me, we, it would be a really big undertaking ’cause we have years and years of content. But for most agency owners, I would guess it’s probably a, I dunno… And you can use AI to help you, but it’s probably a two or three hour thing that you can split up over several weeks, right?

To get it done. But 100% you should be, you should have an up update up to date website overall, and you should be updating content so that it’s refreshed, not necessarily the URL, but updating the content inside the article or the blog post or the page or whatever it happens to be.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. And I, I think the advice to sort of just kind of, you know, go through a list of it is a really good starting point. Whether you use some third party tool, or frankly, if your website isn’t too huge, if you just go into WordPress and start scrolling back through the pages and posts. Mm-hmm. And just looking at the headlines, it at least, you know, things that are obviously in need of help will jump out at you. Yeah. Or you know, that you praise somebody that doesn’t make sense or whatever. And, and we have to keep in mind that, that sometimes that old content might be a year old, it might be 10 years old, right?

It might still need some sort of an updating. The other thing that’s, that’s often helpful is just to go into, you know, something simple like your Google Analytics and just look at, you know, the top 20, 30, 40 pages in terms of traffic and just ask, are all of these pages the way I still want to present myself in whatever the current year is that you’re listening to us?

Because, you know, that can be a really helpful way of prioritizing what you wanna address, what you wanna update. And particularly if you’re getting a lot of traffic to a page that either is not as relevant as it should be or not as accurate as it should be given the, the way the world has changed.

You know, those are ones that you want to address. I, to me, one of the interesting cases is, you know what, and I’ve seen this a lot, and I, some of the organizations I’ve worked with have had this issue where you’ve got a page that gets a ton of traffic, but it’s frankly totally irrelevant to what they do today.

Right. It’s still, it’s still an accurate bit of content, which is why it keeps getting traffic, you know, because it’s answering whatever question the searcher may have had, but it doesn’t really benefit the organization other than it does produce a fair amount of inbound traffic. So, to me, those are interesting cases.

Trying to figure out what you do with those. And, if you talk to different SEO experts, you sometimes hear different bits of advice on this, right? Because some are like, well, you know, you, you’re still getting people clicking over to your site, and that’s a good signal for the search engines, so that’s good.

The problem is if the signal is that you’re relevant for something that you really aren’t relevant for. Right. So, doesn’t really help you. My general inclination is if it’s completely irrelevant to what you do today, I would kill it off and sacrifice the traffic. But that’s, that’s my perspective on that.

No, I totally agree with that.

Either way you should make a conscious decision about it.

Gini Dietrich: I totally agree with that because I think you’re right. If it’s not some, if it’s irrelevant, if you’re bringing irrelevant traffic to your website, your numbers are inflated. So I would rather have accurate numbers so I know exactly what my pipeline looks like, my lead generation looks like, what my lead nurturing looks like, and be able to work it backwards.

Right. So I completely agree with you and like I said, I killed that article from 13 years ago. Because that’s not how I feel about that man anymore. So, yeah. At all.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. Well, for, for many years on my personal blog, the highest trafficked post was one, was sort of a throwaway post I did on a camera backpack, that I got like 20 years ago.

And it just, it scored, it turned out it was a popular model of the backpack, and so it got a ton of traffic from people who were considering buying it. Obviously that didn’t help me at all.

Gini Dietrich: Not at all. Right.

Chip Griffin: Because that, I mean, you know, I didn’t pitch camera backpacks or anything like that, you know, I didn’t sell ’em, I didn’t even have an affiliate link in or anything like that.

So what, you know, what was the value of it? Pretty much nothing. You know, it felt nice to see all the spikes in traffic that it generated. Sure. Of course. But yeah. But it wasn’t particularly useful, so, and those are the kinds of things that, that many of us may, you know, maybe we just had a comment on our blog about some story of the day. And it just took off and for whatever reason still sticks around. But it’s not really what our agency is about, so doesn’t really help.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I would really look at, I mean, some of your ideas, especially if you don’t have a ton of content like we do going, just going through WordPress and looking to see. I would start with the content on your website specifically, what’s on your homepage?

Does it represent who you are and what you stand for today? Does it accurately reflect where you are today? I would venture to guess the answer for most of us is no. I would start there at least with the homepage and your top three or four pages, so probably your services page, probably your about us page.

Maybe a resources page, depending on, again, look at your Google Analytics. Then once you’ve done that, then I would definitely go through WordPress and go through any content that you have, podcasts, recordings, videos, blog posts, whatever it happens to be. Go through all of those and then divide and conquer and say, yeah, we’re gonna have to update these.

It may take me all year, but I’m gonna do one a week and I’m gonna update one a week. And it suddenly, you’re taking small bites of the elephant and you can get it done by year’s end.

Chip Griffin: I love your advice to look at the homepage and other key pages before worrying about, you know, old blog posts and that kind of thing, because many, many agencies neglect their websites.

Until they decide all of a sudden, this is how I’m gonna get new business. And so then they over invest in time and money Yes. In their websites. Yes. So it, it, it does seem to be a story of extremes most of the time, but, but looking at that homepage of your website and making sure that it accurately reflects the business that you are: who you serve, what you do, and that it is very crystal clear about those things on your homepage.

Very first step. Do not pass go. Do not do anything else. Just get that done first.

Then I would say, look at the about page and make sure that it accurately reflects who you and your team are. Make sure that the right people are there. Make sure that your bio is accurate and up to date. Make sure that your photo is up to date and have a photo, by the way, because people like to deal with other people.

Yep. And as someone who does professional headshots for people on the side, I gotta tell you, you gotta have something that’s within the last five years at least. I mean, if I put up a photo on the website of me with hair, that’s just, that’s not, that doesn’t make any sense. And yet I see plenty of people,

Gini Dietrich: no,

Chip Griffin: who have photos on their websites.

And then I meet them and I’m like, this is not even in the ballpark.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, you’re right. The other thing I will say to that, and this is incredibly important, is that AI notices inconsistencies. So if you are inconsistent across different, the websites, social media, all the places that you are online, you are not going to show up in AI answers no matter how good your content is. So when you’re doing that audit, I would also audit your bio. Your bio that’s on the website compared to what it’s on LinkedIn compared to what it is on all the other social media platforms. If you have YouTube or a podcast platform, compare it to there. If you have a newsletter, compare it to there. Like ensure that it is the exact same bio, not, not, little changes based on the platform. I mean, you’ll have to make it smaller for Twitter than you would for LinkedIn, right?

But it has to be consistent because if it’s not, AI gets confused and doesn’t know what to do, and so it just doesn’t present you as an option. So as you’re doing that audit, I would ensure that the bio, your own bio and then the bios of your key leadership or key team members are consistent across every platform on the internet, because that’s incredibly important with AI today.

Chip Griffin: Yes. At the same time, what I would say to you is AI and SEO are very important. More important are the humans who actually visit your website.

Gini Dietrich: Yes.

Chip Griffin: And so there’s lots of advice out there, including what we’re talking about here that will help you from an AI and SEO standpoint. However, it should never, ever, ever be at the expense of the actual user’s experience.

Gini Dietrich: No, never. Right.

Chip Griffin: And increasingly, I’m seeing websites that are being tailored for how they think that AI will be reading and indexing their sites. And so, for example, they shift almost entirely to a Q&A format because AI, generally speaking, loves the Q&A format in order to stock the answers that it gives to people.

However, that’s not always the best user experience. Sometimes you need to present things in more of a compelling story like way. And trust me, the AI will figure it out. It may not be as great at it today. It may prefer the Q, but it’s going to improve over time.

And it’s the same thing as for years, people would chase the latest algorithm change at Google. And that’s fantastic until they change it in three months or six months. Right. And so what are you gonna do? Just keep updating your website? Well, if you’re an SEO agency, you love that, right? Because. You know, you can just tell the clients, well, you know the latest version, now you gotta do this.

So you remember all that work we did in January? It’s June now. I’ll do it again. We’re gonna redo all of that for you, right? I mean, it’s a great full employment act for SEO experts. However, it is not generally a good user experience, nor frankly, a particularly good use of resources. So first and foremost, focus on the end user’s experience.

And only after that, think about, okay. Are there tweaks or additions I could make in order to help the search engines or the AI spiders or that kind of thing?

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I think the point you make about how Google updated updates it algorithm like real often and that you are trying to keep up is, is ludicrous, but it’s something that we’ve always been aware of and I think the strategy has not changed.

If you always write, produce, not just write, but create content that’s compelling to a human. The algorithms and the AI are going to love it so that doesn’t matter. Are there things you can do to help it and AI find you? Sure you can do Q&A’s, you can do the, but that we do that stuff and this is gonna get techy, but we do that stuff on no follow sites, so it doesn’t show up in Google.

It doesn’t show up in our navigation. It’s only there for the AI bots, right? So there are things that you could do for sure. But if you always put the human beings first, it’s going to work no matter what happens with AI, and no matter what happens with the algorithms.

Google came out, gosh, several years ago now, and said, if you’re focused on expertise, experience, authority, and trust, those are the, those are how we’re using, that’s how we’re floating stuff to the top. So I think that’s really good advice because that is always going to A, make your content different, and B, make it valuable to humans. So if you’re always demonstrating your expertise that nobody else has and your experience that nobody else has, that will build authority and trust in both places.

Chip Griffin: Well, I mean, the irony is that all of the experts will help you to chase the algorithms and the technology, but the reality is that all of the search engines and all of the AI engines, they’re all chasing the user. All they’re trying to do is try to deliver what a real person wants.

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: And so it’s ironic that, that we set them aside, the humans aside to chase the technology when the technology is chasing the people. So it’s kind of a weird circle and I’ve consistently maintained for 20 plus years. If you focus on the user, you’ll get to the right place. You may not be there today.

And, and it, it’s gonna ebb and flow over time as algorithms and technology changes. But chase the user because that’s how you sell your business. That’s how you find new clients and that’s how you keep people happy.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s, yes. Focus on the humans first. That’s always been the advice.

That strategy has not changed. The tools change, the tactics change, the execution changes, but the strategy remains the same.

Chip Griffin: So let’s say, you know, you’re, you’ve gone through this audit on your website. You’ve chucked out the things like the praise of Elon Musk that you don’t want on there anymore.

You’ve gotten rid of the content that’s no longer relevant to the business that you are today. So now you’re left with some things that you could update, you know, maybe you could strengthen them. They’re not obviously wrong. They’re still pretty good. How do you decide where you want to invest your energy as far as which of these do you update?

Which of those do you flesh out and make bigger deals? Because I think that’s where the real challenge comes in. You know, do you, are you better off updating old content or are you better off creating new content?

Gini Dietrich: I think it depends, which is the tagline to this podcast, of course, but, it depends on a few things.

One, if you, if there’s older content that you can refresh and update with minimal resources, like it’s just a five or 10 minute, gosh, this needs to change, this needs to change, and then I republish it and it’s showing up in Google results. I think it’s probably worth doing it. Obviously if it doesn’t support or reflect where you are right now, I would not worry about it.

But if there are things where you have some SEO value or AI is using it to bring real humans to your website based on the questions they’re ans they’re asking and it’s accurate, then I would take a few minutes to update it. And like I said, maybe you, you create a list of things that you need to do and you just check one off a week.

Right? And then I would focus my efforts on new stuff. So where are we now? What are we thinking? How are we? How have we evolved? What kinds of things are we offering to the industry? That kind of stuff. So I would first focus on the stuff that you can repurpose because it’s easier and it’s a smaller lift, and you still have the value of SEO from that perspective, and then focus on the new.

But like I said, if your website in general, your homepage, your about us page are not updated, I would start there.

Chip Griffin: And I think it’s important that you, as you’re looking at the old content, that you’re thinking about refreshing that, that you don’t look at it through the lens of I could make this perfect if I spent some more time on it.

It really, you have to see that there’s some, that the outcome for the user, again, going back to the person on the other end, is meaningfully different because of the additional work that you’ve put in. I mean, if it’s just simply that it’s phrased better, it’s organized, neater. It’s, you know, a little bit clearer that that’s probably not enough for me.

Right. But if you’re able to, you know, things have changed between then and now as far as either what’s going on in the world, what’s out there, what your knowledge is, and you can, you can make it 50% better. Okay. Now you’re talking about something that, that may be worth the investment of time and energy, but if it’s, you know, if you’re just, you know, kind of polishing.

That generally isn’t gonna pay off.

Gini Dietrich: Totally agree with it. Yep. Totally agree. Yeah. If it’s new, like if it’s your thinking has evolved and it supports that and you just need to polish that piece or you know, like… We are constantly evolving the PESO model. And so I’m always looking at that content to say, oh gosh, that doesn’t represent where it is anymore.

Right? Do I wanna put a date on this or a year in the content so that anybody who visits it understands that this is three years old. Do I wanna delete it? Like, so I, you know, I’m constantly. Our marketing team and I are constantly looking at those kinds of things, so I totally agree. If it’s just a polish, I wouldn’t spend the time.

But if it’s evolved thinking, if it’s new services, if it’s new products, if it’s new IP, if it’s, you know, those kinds of things, then I would definitely include it.

Chip Griffin: Absolutely. Well, hopefully we’ve given people some good ideas so that they can take a fresh look at their website as we start the year. And figure out, you know, what they might wanna tweak, improve, get rid of, hide from, any of those things.

And it, it doesn’t have to be a giant project as you suggested. No. It can be the kind of thing where you chip away at one piece of content a week or something like that and you’ll see a meaningful difference over the course of time.

Gini Dietrich: Absolutely. Yep. Get it done. Get that homepage updated.

Chip Griffin: So with that, we will draw this episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast to a close.

I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich,

Chip Griffin: and it does depend.