Content Audit Guide: Deciding What to Keep, Update, Merge or Remove
After a few years of publishing, most sites carry dead weight. Posts written for a trend that ended, three articles on the same topic, product pages for items you no longer sell, a 2019 guide with prices that are badly wrong.
A content audit is a structured look at every page so you can decide what to do with each one. It isn't glamorous work, and it's one of the most reliable ways to improve an established site.
When to do one
- The site has more than about 50 pages and has never been reviewed
- Traffic has been flat or declining for several months
- You suspect pages competing with each other
- You're redesigning or migrating the site
- After a Google core update hit you and you want to assess quality honestly
Small sites can do this in an afternoon. Large sites may need to split it by section.
Step 1: Build the URL list
Get every indexable URL into a spreadsheet. Sources:
- Your XML sitemap
- A site crawler (Screaming Frog has a free tier for smaller sites, and there are other options)
- Search Console's Pages report
- Your CMS export
Combine them and remove duplicates. You'll often find pages you forgot existed.
Step 2: Add the data
For each URL, add columns for:
- Clicks and impressions over the last 12 months (Search Console)
- Average position for the page's main query
- Sessions and conversions (your analytics tool)
- Referring domains pointing to the page (your backlink tool)
- Word count and last updated date
- Main topic or target keyword
Twelve months smooths out seasonality. A Diwali gifts page will look dead in March otherwise.
Step 3: Check quality by hand
Data tells you what's performing. It can't tell you whether a page is accurate or helpful. Skim each page (or a sample, on large sites) and note:
- Is the information still correct?
- Does it answer the query it targets?
- Is it thin, generic or duplicated elsewhere on the site?
- Are there broken links, missing images or formatting problems?
Step 4: Decide an action for every page
Every URL gets one of these:
| Action | When |
|---|---|
| Keep | Performing well, accurate, nothing urgent to fix |
| Update | Has impressions or links but weak clicks, outdated facts or missing subtopics |
| Merge | Two or more pages cover the same intent |
| Redirect | Page has links or traffic but no reason to exist on its own |
| Remove (410/404) | No traffic, no links, no value, nothing to merge into |
| Noindex | Useful to users but shouldn't appear in search (thank-you pages, some filtered views) |
Be careful with removal. A page with no traffic can still be useful to visitors or have backlinks. Check before deleting. If it has any referring domains, redirect it to the most relevant page instead.
Step 5: Prioritise the work
You'll likely have far more "update" pages than you can handle at once. Prioritise:
- Pages ranking in positions 5 to 20 for valuable queries. Small improvements here can lift clicks noticeably.
- Pages with links but poor content. The links are already earned; make the page deserve them.
- Merges that fix keyword cannibalization on important topics.
- Removals and redirects, which are quick to execute.
Step 6: Execute properly
For updates: follow the approach in updating old content. Fix facts, add missing sections, improve the intro, refresh images, update internal links. Change the published or updated date only when the changes are meaningful.
For merges: combine the best content into the strongest URL, 301 redirect the others, update internal links.
For removals: return a 404 or 410, remove the page from your sitemap, and remove internal links to it. Fix any links that now point to dead URLs.
Step 7: Measure
Note the date of each change in your spreadsheet. Check Search Console after four to eight weeks. Compare clicks and impressions for updated pages against the period before. Merged and redirected URLs should show their traffic moving to the target page.
An example
A Pune travel agency's blog had 180 posts. After an audit:
- 40 were kept as they were
- 55 were updated with current prices, routes and photos
- 30 were merged into 12 stronger guides
- 45 thin "top 5 things to do" posts with no traffic were removed or redirected
- 10 old offer pages were noindexed or removed
That's an illustration of how the decisions typically split, not a promise of results. What changes after an audit varies a lot by site. The real gain is that every remaining page has a clear purpose.
Mistakes to avoid
- Deleting pages purely because of low word count
- Removing pages with backlinks instead of redirecting them
- Auditing once and never again. A light review every six to twelve months keeps things tidy.
- Changing dates without changing content
Your to-do list
Export last year's page data from Search Console and sort by impressions. Highlight every page with impressions but a click-through rate well below the site's average. Those are your first update candidates, and you can start on the top five this week.