Full Definition
A content audit is a structured inventory and evaluation of every piece of content on your website. It's how you move from 'we have 200 blog posts' to 'we have 50 strong posts, 80 that need updating, and 70 that are diluting our SEO.' A basic content audit process: 1. **Crawl your site**: Use Screaming Frog or Google Search Console to extract every URL 2. **Pull performance data**: For each URL, collect organic traffic (GA4), search impressions (Search Console), backlinks (Ahrefs/Semrush), and conversion data 3. **Categorise each page**: Using four buckets: - **Keep**: Performing well, up to date, accurate - **Improve**: Getting some traffic but outdated, thin, or missing opportunities - **Consolidate**: Multiple thin pages on the same topic that should merge into one stronger page - **Remove/Noindex**: Zero traffic, irrelevant, or duplicate content that dilutes your site quality The consolidate and remove decisions are where most SMBs gain the most. Sites with hundreds of low-quality posts often see significant ranking improvements simply from deleting or redirecting thin content — because Google's overall quality assessment of the site improves. A content audit should be done every 6–12 months, or after any major Google algorithm update. Actionable tip: Start your audit by filtering your Google Search Console pages to show those with more than 100 impressions but fewer than 10 clicks (very low CTR). These high-impression/low-click pages have the most quick-win improvement potential — they're visible but not attracting clicks.