Audit: Content and Speed
Two categories that most often turn out to be the real reason for weak positions: the content of the page and its loading speed. There are not many checks — eight — but each one indicates something significant.
Content
| Finding | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Thin content (less than 150 words) | The page has nothing to answer the query | Expand the topic or close the page from indexing if it is a service page |
| Content duplicate | The text matches another page on the site | Merge, make unique, or specify a canonical address |
| Keyword stuffing | The phrase is repeated unnaturally often | Reduce — see keyword density |
Thin pages are the most common mass finding among online stores: cards with one sentence of description. This is not a reason to write a thousand characters for each, but a reason to decide whether all of them need to be indexed.
Speed
- Slow response (more than three seconds) — a server problem, not a layout issue: optimizing images won't help here.
- Heavy page (more than 2 MB of HTML) — usually a consequence of embedded data or a giant menu.
- Response without compression — enabled by one server setting and immediately reduces traffic significantly.
- Blocking scripts in head — delay rendering: move them down or mark them as deferred.
- No meta viewport — the page does not adapt to mobile devices, and search evaluates the mobile version.
- Images without width/height — layout jumps during loading, see Core Web Vitals.
How to distinguish a duplicate from a similar page
An audit marks pages with nearly identical text as duplicates. But there is a trickier case: pages that are different in text but identical in meaning — cards of the same product in different colors, cities in a service template. Formally, there is no duplicate, but they compete just the same. This is not resolved by an audit, but by cannibalization checking and grouping queries.
Where to look next
Detailed analyses: page load speed, text coherence, article optimization for queries. If the pages are technically fine but there is no traffic — diagnostic checklist.