Most SEO content audits end as a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet is accurate, the priorities are defensible, and the rewriting is where the budget runs out.
That gap is the operational problem. An agency can identify fifty thin pages before lunch. Actually replacing them takes a writer, a brief, a round of edits, and a client approval cycle for each one. At some point the spreadsheet gets filed and the engagement moves on.
What the scan actually returns
When you point Ghosts at a client URL, it reads the full site and classifies every page by type: home page, service pages, city or service-area pages, and supporting content. That classification step matters because the work to fix a thin city page looks nothing like the work to fix a thin home page. Most audit tools lump them together.
Beyond the existing pages, the scan surfaces gaps. A roofing contractor covering twelve counties might have service pages for four of them. A med spa might have a page for Botox and nothing for filler, even though both terms drive comparable search volume in their market. Those missing pages are the ones the client often does not know they need, and they are frequently the faster wins because there is no existing page to redirect or rewrite.
What a measured band is and why it beats a word-count rule
The phrase "thin content" is not a specification. Telling a writer to add three hundred words gets you three hundred words of padding. Ghosts uses bands measured from the pages that currently rank, held separately for home, service, and city page types. Each band describes what pages ranking for a given query in a given industry actually look like: structural patterns, topical coverage, internal linking, and the presence or absence of specific content elements.
Those bands describe what exists at the top of results. They are not a prescription that causes rankings. Links, authority, and domain age all factor in. What a band gives you is a concrete target derived from observed data, not a word-count heuristic someone published in 2019 and never updated.
What does a ranking page actually contain?
That is the question the bands answer. A ranking home page in a service-area business category looks different from a ranking city page for the same business. Page length varies by type and industry, but the structural signals matter more than raw word count: whether the page addresses the geographic service area explicitly, whether it covers the core service and adjacent services or only the single term it was built around, how it connects to other pages on the site.
Service pages that rank tend to be more specific about process and outcome than service pages that do not. City pages that rank tend to include more than a paragraph of swapped-in location text. These are not surprising findings, but they are specific enough to brief against. A general "add more content" instruction is not.
The two gaps almost nobody fills
The typical ranking page cites no authority at all. No study, no government data, no trade publication. Almost none of them name a real author with a linked profile either.
Both gaps are cheap to close relative to every other content investment. A page that cites a relevant source from the CDC, a state licensing board, or an industry association costs a few minutes to update. A named author with a linked bio and a real credential costs an afternoon to set up across a site. Whether those additions directly influence rankings is an open question, but they demonstrably affect how a reader evaluates the page. They are also signals that almost no competitor has bothered with, which is why we built citation checks into the drafting step. Leaving them out meant producing pages that matched the exact gaps we were trying to close.
How Ghosts runs the audit and drafts the output
The process is a single system. You submit a client URL. Ghosts classifies the site, identifies thin pages and content gaps, and drafts replacements written to the measured bands for that page type and industry. Citation checks run against the draft before it surfaces. A human reviewer on your team sees the draft, approves or edits it, and it clears into the CMS.
Approval sits between the draft and the client's site by default. Ghosts runs on your behalf, and you are still accountable for what goes live, so the draft waits for a decision rather than assuming one. Holding output behind a human read is also the thing that makes it defensible when a client asks what your review process looks like, which is why most teams keep it that way even where they could hand the last step to a schedule.
The output is a page draft your team can copy and paste into whatever CMS the client runs. The audit, the gap analysis, the drafts, and the approval queue are one system because the gap between an audit and a published page is exactly where agencies lose time and margin.
Run a free scan on any client URL at ghosts.app. No card required.