You run a small business with a blog of about 150 posts, written over six years by three different people, and nobody can say which ones still earn their place. A content audit answers that. It is a page-by-page review of what you’ve published, ending in a decision for each page: keep it, update it, merge it, redirect it or remove it. This guide lists what to include in a content audit, the columns to track, how to score quality, and how to turn the scores into actions.
What a content audit is, and where it starts
Two terms get mixed up. An inventory is the list of what exists. The Iowa state government’s content training site defines a content audit as “an analysis of your content inventory”, meaning a complete list of the URLs and content on your site. So you build the list first, then you judge what’s on it.
The audit exists to support a decision. The same Iowa page frames the question as which content should be kept, deleted or merged, and gives the final actions as keep, edit, delete or consolidate. That’s why every row needs a decision column. An audit that ends in observations (“lots of old posts”) has produced a report nobody can act on.
What to include in a content audit spreadsheet
A spreadsheet is enough. Start with facts you can collect without judgement, then add the scores and the decision. The columns below work for a blog or a small site of up to a few hundred pages.
| Column | What goes in it | Why it’s there |
|---|---|---|
| URL and title | The full address and the current headline | One row per page, so nothing is counted twice |
| Topic and content type | For example “how-to”, “news”, “product page” | Shows where you have several pages on one topic |
| Published and last updated | Two dates | Finds pages that haven’t been touched in years |
| Owner | One named person or role | Someone has to act on the decision |
| Clicks and impressions | From Google Search Console, for one fixed date range | Shows which pages search engines show and readers choose |
| Other usage data | Page views, conversions or sign-ups | Shows value that search data misses |
| Quality score | 1 to 5 on a few criteria (see below) | Makes the judgement visible and comparable |
| Decision | Keep, update, merge, redirect or remove | The point of the whole exercise |
| Target page | Where a merged or redirected page should point | Stops redirects being improvised later |
| Notes | What exactly needs fixing | Turns a decision into a task |
The Iowa page suggests reviewing page views, last update date and reading level where available. Google’s Search Console documentation says the performance report shows how much traffic you’re getting from Google Search, with breakdowns by queries, pages and countries, plus trends for impressions and clicks. Choose one date range, such as the last 12 months, and use it for every row. Mixing a three-month window for some pages and a year for others makes the numbers useless.
Add the data that isn’t a number
Two more columns pay for themselves. One is “primary reader”: who this page was written for. The other is “reader need”: what that person came to do. GOV.UK’s content guidance holds that every piece of published content should meet a valid user need. If you can’t fill those two cells for a page, that’s already a sign about its future.
How to judge quality without arguing about taste
Opinion drifts by the fortieth post, so a short rubric keeps the scoring steady. The New South Wales government’s content audit guide rates content against criteria that each come with a question, including:
- Useful: does the content help the user?
- Accurate: is the content up to date?
- Readable: is the content easy to scan?
- Findable: is it easy to find in navigation and search?
- Accessible: does it meet WCAG 2.2 Level AA?
- Audience: who do you most want to reach with it?
Most of these use a 1 to 5 scale on that page. For accuracy, it describes a top score as content that has been updated in the past couple of months and is entirely accurate, and a score of 2 as content that needs major work to bring it up to date.
Google’s own questions work as a second lens. Its guidance on creating helpful, reliable, people-first content asks whether a page provides original information, reporting, research or analysis, and whether it provides substantial value when compared with other pages in search results. A post that just restates the first three search results scores low on both.
For a small site, four criteria are enough: useful, accurate, readable and distinct from your other pages. Score each from 1 to 5 and add them up.
Example (illustrative figures): a 2019 post called “10 email tips” is out of date (accuracy 2), vague (useful 2), formatted as one long block (readable 2) and overlaps two newer posts (distinct 1). The total is 7 out of 20. A 2024 post with a clear answer, current figures and its own angle might score 17.
Choosing an action for each page
The decision is where an audit earns its time. Each action has a trigger, so the choice isn’t a mood.
| Action | Use it when | What to do next |
|---|---|---|
| Keep | High scores, current, meeting a real need | Set a review date and move on |
| Update | Right topic, weak or stale content | Rewrite or refresh substantially; log what changed |
| Merge | Two or more pages answer the same question | Fold the best parts into one page, then redirect the others |
| Redirect | A page has moved or been replaced | Send the old URL to the closest relevant page |
| Remove | No reader need, no traffic, nothing worth merging | Take it down and let the address return a “gone” response |
Merging and redirecting
Google’s documentation on consolidating duplicate URLs says redirects are a strong signal that the target of the redirect should become the canonical page, and recommends them when you want to get rid of existing duplicate pages. Its page on redirects says 301 and 308 status codes mean a page has permanently moved, and recommends a permanent server-side redirect whenever possible. Point each retired address to a page that answers the same question, not to the homepage.
Removing pages
Removal is the least-used option and the most feared one. Google’s page on HTTP status codes says that URLs already indexed that return a 4xx status are removed from the index, and that Google systems will stop using the URL over time. For a page with no readers and no links, that’s the right outcome.
Where a page has a reader need that is better met elsewhere, GOV.UK’s guidance on retiring content points the same way: unpublishing is not the normal approach, but suits cases where the user need is better met elsewhere, and it lets you set up a redirect to current content.
An audit is finished when every row has a decision and a name beside it, not when the spreadsheet looks tidy.
A worked example: 120 pages
Example (illustrative figures): a small publisher audits 120 pages and records these decisions.
| Decision | Pages | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Keep | 30 | Stay as they are, review in 12 months |
| Update | 45 | Queued for rewrite, oldest and highest-traffic first |
| Merge | 20 | Combined into 7 stronger pages, 13 addresses redirected |
| Redirect | 10 | Pointed to the closest replacement |
| Remove | 15 | Taken down, no replacement |
| Total | 120 | 82 pages left live (30 kept + 45 updated + 7 merged); 23 addresses survive only as redirects |
The arithmetic is worth checking before you present it: 30 kept, 45 updated and 7 merged pages make 82 live pages. The 13 merged addresses and the 10 redirected ones (23 in all) stay alive only as redirects, and the 15 removed pages are gone. Seeing 120 turn into 82 pages to maintain shows how much upkeep the team has taken off its plate.
A step-by-step plan for your first audit
- Set the scope. Pick a slice: one section, one topic or one content type. The GOV.UK team that began with an inventory of 7,396 transport content items said, in its lessons from that audit, that it would have been better to pick smaller chunks to audit and improve.
- Export the inventory. Pull every URL from your CMS or sitemap into the spreadsheet, one row each.
- Add the dates, owner and topic. These take minutes and cost nothing.
- Add one date range of search data. Clicks and impressions from Search Console for every URL.
- Ask the removal question first. The same GOV.UK team said the question of whether to remove a page has a big influence on the answers to its other questions, so it saves effort to settle it before you polish anything.
- Score the rest. Four criteria, 1 to 5.
- Record the decision and the target page. Merge and redirect decisions need a destination.
- Assign owners and dates. Put the top ten pages into a calendar and leave the rest in the backlog.
Mistakes that waste an audit
Auditing everything at once. On a large site the work never finishes, and the same GOV.UK post recommends dedicating someone to auditing exclusively.
Refreshing dates instead of content. Google’s helpful-content guidance lists, among its questions, whether you are changing the date of pages to make them seem fresh when the content has not substantially changed. Update the date when the page changes in a way a reader would notice, and not otherwise.
Judging by traffic alone. A page with 12 visits a month can be the one that closes a sale. Check conversions and the reader need before you remove anything.
Redirecting everything to the homepage. A redirect should land on a page that answers the same question. Otherwise the reader arrives somewhere unrelated and leaves.
Content audit checklist
- Scope chosen (a section, topic or content type, not the whole site)
- One row per URL, with title, topic, type, owner, published date and updated date
- One date range of Search Console data applied to every row
- Primary reader and reader need written for each page
- Four quality criteria scored from 1 to 5
- A decision chosen from keep, update, merge, redirect or remove
- A target page named for every merge and redirect
- Owners and due dates assigned to the first batch of fixes
- A date set for the next, smaller audit
The takeaway
A content audit is a list, a score and a decision for each page. Build the inventory, add one consistent set of data, judge quality against a short rubric, and write a clear action next to every row. Start with a slice you can finish, settle the removal question early, and put the next review in the calendar before you close the spreadsheet.
