You're creating new content every week, but is your old content helping or hurting you? A content audit reveals what's working, what's broken, and what's wasting your time.
Here's how to do it right.
Why Conduct a Content Audit?
Content audits help you:
- Identify high-performing pages to replicate
- Find outdated content dragging down your SEO
- Discover content gaps where competitors are winning
- Improve site structure and user experience
Step 1: Create a Content Inventory
Use a tool like Screaming Frog or a Google Sheets template to list every piece of content on your site. For each URL, track:
- Page title
- URL
- Content type (blog, landing page, product page)
- Publish date
- Last updated date
Step 2: Pull Performance Data
Use Google Analytics and Google Search Console to gather metrics for each page:
- Organic traffic: How many visitors from search?
- Pageviews: Total views (organic + direct + referral)
- Average time on page: Are people reading?
- Bounce rate: Are they leaving immediately?
- Conversions: Is it generating leads/sales?
Step 3: Categorize Your Content
Label each piece of content with one of these actions:
- Keep: High traffic, good engagement, drives conversions
- Update: Decent traffic but outdated info or poor SEO
- Merge: Thin content that should be combined with related pages
- Delete/Redirect: Zero traffic, outdated, or off-brand
Step 4: Prioritize Updates
Don't try to fix everything at once. Focus on:
- High-impact, low-effort: Pages ranking #5-#15 that need minor updates
- Top traffic: Your most visited pages deserve fresh content
- Commercial pages: Product/service pages that drive revenue
Step 5: Execute and Track
Start updating based on your priorities. For each updated page:
- Refresh outdated statistics and examples
- Improve SEO (title tags, meta descriptions, headers)
- Add internal links to/from related content
- Update the publish date to signal freshness
Track changes in Google Analytics over the next 30-60 days.
Conclusion
A content audit isn't a one-time task�it's a quarterly habit. Clean up your content library, boost your SEO, and stop wasting time on content that doesn't perform.
Next step: Build a content marketing strategy based on your audit findings.