Content audit template: decide what to keep, fix or cut

An audit is a decision exercise, not a research exercise

The reason most content audits never lead to anything is that they end with a spreadsheet of observations. Rows get colour-coded, a summary deck gets made, and nothing changes on the site. The fix is to make the decision column mandatory: every row leaves the audit marked keep, update, consolidate, rewrite, redirect or delete, with a person's name and a date next to it. If a row cannot be decided, it is nearly always an update or a consolidate — those two buckets absorb almost all genuine uncertainty.

Agree the decision rules before you look at any individual page. Once you are reading a post you spent a week writing, your judgement about whether it deserves to exist is no longer neutral. Writing the rules first turns an emotional argument into an application of an agreed standard, which is also what makes the audit defensible when someone asks why their favourite article is being redirected.

Which data actually decides things

Four numbers do most of the work: clicks, impressions, average position and conversions. Impressions with almost no clicks usually points at a title and description problem rather than a content problem — the page is being shown and rejected, which is a cheap fix. Clicks with no conversions on a page that was supposed to sell something means the intent was misjudged, not that the writing was bad. Positions roughly between five and twenty are your update bucket: real demand, real eligibility, and a gap small enough to close.

Two more columns earn their place. Internal links in tells you which pages your own site treats as important, and a valuable page with zero internal links is usually underperforming for that reason alone. Last updated tells you whether a page has ever been maintained, which matters most on topics where the correct answer changes — pricing, tooling, platform behaviour, anything with a year in the title.

Leave the metric cells blank until you have the exports open. Filling them from memory produces an audit that feels rigorous and decides things wrongly. The starter rows in the table above deliberately show dashes in the metric columns for the same reason: they demonstrate the structure without pretending to be data.

Consolidation is where the biggest wins hide

On most sites older than a couple of years, several pages are quietly competing for the same query. Each one holds a fraction of the relevance, a fraction of the internal links and a fraction of the impressions, and none of them ranks as well as one strong page would. Finding those clusters is the highest-value part of an audit, and the inventory's primary keyword column is what makes them visible: sort by it and the duplicates line up next to each other.

When you consolidate, pick the URL with the strongest existing signals — usually the one with the best position, the most inbound internal links, or the longest history — and move the genuinely useful material from the others into it. Then redirect the retired URLs to the survivor and update the internal links that pointed at them. Skipping that last step leaves your own navigation pointing through redirects, which is untidy at best and a broken trail at worst.

Deleting content without regretting it

Deletion is the right answer less often than the internet suggests. It is correct when a page has no traffic, no conversions, no referring links, no strategic role and nothing sensible to redirect to — an event announcement from four years ago, a duplicate created by a CMS import, a placeholder that was never finished. Removing genuine dead weight makes a site easier to crawl and easier to navigate.

Where a page has any accumulated value — an inbound link, a small stream of traffic, a topic close to something you still publish — redirect rather than delete. A redirect preserves whatever signals the URL had and keeps anyone who follows an old link from landing on a 404. Redirect to the closest genuinely relevant page, not to the homepage, because irrelevant redirects are treated as soft 404s anyway and are worse for the visitor.

Whatever you do, record the date the changes went live and set a recheck for six to twelve weeks out. Content audits create a lot of simultaneous change, and without a recorded go-live date you will not be able to tell your own improvements apart from seasonality, a competitor's launch or an algorithm update. The notes field is there for the same reason: the next audit is much faster when you have written down what made this one slow.