Sitemap and site audit
Ballad maps your whole site daily and reads it against your positioning: nine checks, each finding carrying the fix — write it, refresh it, or close it.
Most of your website was written before Ballad arrived, and it's the part buyers read first. Content → Website is where Ballad keeps a map of it and tells you what to write, refresh or fix.
This is a marketing audit, not a technical one. It reads your pages against what you now say you do.
The sitemap
Ballad crawls your site daily and keeps every page it can find as a tree: your product and pricing pages, your docs, and everything it has published itself.
That map does more work than it looks:
- Articles link to your real pages — the actual pricing and docs URLs — instead of inventing plausible ones.
- Posts and pages have somewhere to point when they need a next step.
- The audit has something to read.
Page collections expand in the tree rather than folding into one row, since each landing page is a destination of its own.
The nine checks
The audit runs over that map and your positioning, plus your Search Console data and the AI answer monitor where they're relevant:
| Check | What it looks for |
|---|---|
| Coverage | Pages the positioning promises and the site doesn't have |
| Message drift | Pages still saying what the positioning no longer says |
| Search | Pages slipping, within reach, or competing with each other |
| Leaks | Readers with no next step, and next steps nobody reaches |
| AI answers | Pages an answer engine can't quote |
| Links | Orphans, dead ends, and articles that never send readers on |
| Metadata | Titles, descriptions, social images and canonicals |
| Freshness | Years and phrases that have gone stale |
| Dead weight | Pages nobody visits, finds or links to |
Drift is treated as serious only where being wrong costs you something — a price, an offer, a claim about your beta. A vague product page is not drift.
A finding, and its fix
Each finding says what's wrong, which page, and how bad it is — and carries the fix rather than leaving you to do it:
- Write it — a coverage gap becomes a brief, or a landing page of the right type.
- Refresh it — a slipping article is rewritten in place, at the same URL.
- Copy — the detail, for a page Ballad doesn't own.
- Fixed / Dismiss — closes it. A dismissed finding doesn't come back in the same words.
Anything high-severity also appears in your Inbox, so the things worth acting on reach you without opening this page.
When it runs
Weekly, and never on a stale map: the crawl refreshes first, then the audit reads it. Run audit does the same on demand.
Model reads are sticky — a page that hasn't changed since it was last read isn't read again, so a weekly audit on a stable site costs almost nothing and a page you rewrite gets looked at afresh.
Linking your articles to your site
A common first finding on a young site is that nothing you've published ever links to your product. Ballad can fix that in a pass across your back catalogue: it proposes the links first, and applies them only when you say so, republishing each article at the same URL.
What it deliberately doesn't check
Page speed, accessibility and broken links. Plenty of tools do those well, and a marketing audit that buries "your positioning changed and four pages didn't" under a list of unoptimised images isn't worth reading.
Next
- Landing pages — what a coverage gap becomes.
- Content marketing — refreshes and the back catalogue.
- Connect Google Search Console — the search half of the audit.