Content audit template: decide what to keep, update, merge or remove

A content audit is a review of every page on your site that ends with one decision per URL: keep, update, expand, merge with another page, noindex or remove. You are not looking at code or page speed. You are checking whether each piece of content deserves its place and whether it answers your customers' questions well.

A content audit runs on data, not gut feeling. For every URL you collect clicks and positions from Google Search Console, leads from GA4, links from other sites and your own quality score. Only when you put those side by side can you see which pages work for the business and which just take up space and blur what the site is about.

Content audit vs SEO audit

A full SEO audit covers three areas: technical SEO and Core Web Vitals, content and semantics, and the backlink profile. A content audit takes the second area down to the level of individual pages. If your site has technical problems, for example pages that are not indexed or text that only appears after JavaScript runs, fix those first, because they distort the data you audit. You can check up to 25 pages in our free SEO audit.

Content audit vs content gap analysis

An audit looks at what you already have. A content gap analysis looks for topics your competitors cover and you don't. Do them in that order: clean up existing content first, then plan new topics in your content calendar. Otherwise a new piece can easily target a keyword that an old, forgotten page already covers, and the two start competing.

When to run a content audit

• Every quarter for content older than 12 months and for pages losing clicks year over year. This is a maintenance review and takes less time than the first full audit.
• Before a migration or redesign. The audit tells you which URLs to move, which to merge and which not to move at all. The result feeds straight into the redirect map in our website migration checklist.
• After a drop in Google traffic. Compare year over year first to rule out seasonality, then review the pages that lost the most.
• Before a new content plan. You will know which topics you already cover and which pages only need a refresh instead of a rewrite.

The template has six parts: scope and thresholds, a URL inventory with data, a quality score, decisions, a redirect map, and measurement with a quarterly review. The inventory takes the most work. Here are its columns, where to get the data and what to look for.

The steps match the parts of the PDF template. Run the first audit for the whole site. In later quarters, review only content older than 12 months, pages with falling clicks and anything published since the last review.

1. Set the scope and date range. Write down which sections of the site you are reviewing, who signs off on removing or merging pages, and which pages are off limits without approval. Use clicks from the last 12 months and measure the year-over-year change for the last 3 months.
2. List every URL. Combine your sitemap, a CMS export or a crawl, and the Pages tab of the Search Console Performance report. List each URL once, without parameters, and tag the page type: service, article, guide, category or other.
3. Add data to each URL. From Search Console: clicks, year-over-year change, average position, indexing status and links from other sites. From GA4: key events from sessions that started on the page. From your CMS or crawler: word count and the date of the last substantial update.
4. Assign a primary keyword. Give every page one primary keyword, usually its top query in Search Console. Flag two pages with the same keyword or intent as cannibalization. A page that answers no query gets a keyword, or goes to a noindex or removal decision.
5. Score quality on 5 criteria. Intent match, freshness, added value, trust, and structure and links, each scored 0–2. A total of 8–10 means keep, 5–7 means update or expand, and 0–4 means rewrite, merge or remove.
6. Make one decision per row. Keep, update, expand, merge (301), noindex or remove (404/410), following the decision table. For merges and redirects, enter the target URL. Give every decision an owner and a due date.
7. Implement and measure at 30 and 90 days. Do merges and redirects first, together with internal link and sitemap fixes, then updates. Log clicks and average position before the change and 30 and 90 days after. Repeat the review every quarter.

Where to get the data

• URL list: your sitemap (sitemap.xml), a CMS export or a crawl. Add any URLs from the Pages tab of the Search Console Performance report that are missing from the sitemap.
• Clicks, impressions and positions: Search Console Performance report, Pages tab. Search Console keeps data for the last 16 months, so compare the last 3 months year over year rather than a full year.
• Indexing status: the Page indexing report or the URL Inspection tool. Review URLs marked "Crawled - currently not indexed", "Duplicate without user-selected canonical" or "Soft 404" first: Google knows these pages, but does not show them in results, treats them as a copy of another URL, or sees them as an error page.
• Links from other sites: the Search Console Links report, Top linked pages table.
• Leads: GA4 key events (for example a submitted form or a click on your phone number) from sessions that started on the page.
• Word count and basic issues: a crawler or our free SEO audit. It flags pages with fewer than 250 words in the HTML, duplicate titles and meta descriptions, titles longer than 60 characters and missing H1 headings.

Numbers alone are not enough. A page with little traffic can be good and simply poorly linked, while a page with plenty of traffic can show last year's prices. So you score every page on five criteria, 0–2 points each, for a total of 0–10. It is the same scale as in our SEO competitor analysis template, so you can compare your pages with your competitors' pages.

Read the score together with the inventory data. As a rule of thumb, 8–10 points means keep, 5–7 means update or expand, and 0–4 means rewrite, merge or remove. Traffic, links and leads decide which of those paths to take, not the score alone.

Word count is a signal, not a rule

Google says plainly that it has no preferred word count. A short pricing or contact page can be complete. Our free audit flags pages with fewer than 250 words in the HTML for a different reason: it is a common sign of text added by JavaScript, which AI bots usually do not see. In our own work, pages under 500 words go on a review list to decide whether to expand them or merge them with a closely related page. On a review list, not straight to deletion.

Quality score and AI answers

The added value and structure criteria also cover visibility in AI answers: a short answer under a heading and figures with a source are easy to cite. Google says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, but a page must be indexed and eligible to show in Google Search with a snippet. A page you remove from the index stops being a source for AI Overviews too. To see whether ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity mention your business, use our free AI visibility check.

Every row in the audit ends with one decision. The table links the inventory data and the quality score to a decision and how to carry it out. Our content calendar template uses the same decision names, so you can move audit results into your publishing plan without translating them.

Treat service pages and pages that bring in leads more carefully than blog posts. Low traffic on a service page usually means it needs work and better internal links, not removal. "Keep" is a perfectly valid audit result: in a good audit, many rows stay as they are.

Content pruning is the part of the audit where you remove, merge or noindex pages that help neither readers nor the business. There are plenty of myths around pruning, so it helps to know what Google actually says.

• Deleting is a last resort. In its guidance on core updates, Google says deleting content should only be considered if you think it cannot be salvaged. If you are thinking about deleting whole sections of your site, that is likely a sign they were created for search engines first. In that case, removing the unhelpful content can help the good content perform better.
• "Freshness" is not a reason. Google says that adding or removing a lot of content mainly to make your site seem fresh will not help your rankings.
• Improve first, merge second, remove last. The order of decisions in the template follows this rule.

Before you remove a page, check five things

1. Do other sites link to it (Search Console Links report)?
2. Does it bring in leads or sales (GA4 key events)?
3. Does it get traffic from sources other than Google, such as your newsletter or social media?
4. Do important pages on your site link to it?
5. Is there a closely related page you could redirect it to?

301, 404, 410, noindex or canonical?

• Use a 301 redirect when the content has a successor on the same topic. Google treats a permanent redirect as a strong signal that the target should replace the old URL in results. Do not redirect many old URLs to one unrelated page, such as your home page: Google may treat that as a soft 404.
• Use 404 or 410 when the page has no successor. Google treats both codes the same way: an indexed URL that returns either one is removed from the index. In our audits we use 410, because it tells your team and your tools that the removal was intentional.
• Use noindex when users need the page but it should not appear in results. Do not block it in robots.txt at the same time: a crawler that cannot access the page never sees the noindex rule.
• Use rel="canonical" when two very similar versions have to stay at separate URLs. Our canonical tag guide explains how.

After every change, update internal links so they point straight to the new URL, and remove old URLs from your sitemap. Do not expect instant results. Google says some changes take effect in a few days, but it can take several months for its systems to reassess the site as a whole.

An illustrative example for the same fictional heat pump installer we use in our content calendar template. It shows how data and the quality score lead to a decision in seven typical situations.

Look at row 7. Google's spam policies describe pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page as doorway abuse. Either give a page like this real local content (projects, team, service area, questions from local customers) or merge it into the service page.

• Removing pages just because they are short. Google has no preferred word count. A short page that answers the question stays.
• Removing pages with external links without a redirect. The links from other sites stop supporting your site. Redirect to the closest topic with a 301.
• Redirecting everything to the home page. Users do not find what they were looking for, and Google may treat these redirects as soft 404s.
• noindex plus a robots.txt block. The crawler cannot open the page, so it never sees the noindex rule, and the URL can still appear in results.
• Changing the date without changing the content. Google's guidance asks directly whether you change dates to make pages seem fresh.
• Deciding on one month of data. Without a year-over-year comparison, it is easy to mistake a seasonal dip for a content problem.
• Judging by traffic alone. A service page with little traffic but steady leads is worth more to the business than a popular post that sells nothing.
• Redirect chains. After a merge, internal links should point straight to the new URL, not through one redirect after another.
• An audit with no owner or deadline. A spreadsheet of decisions that nobody implements changes nothing. Every row needs a person and a date.

If you would rather hand the audit to specialists, content is one of the three areas of our SEO audit. It is included in every SEO package (from €450 net per month) and is where we start every engagement in our SEO services. As a standalone service, the SEO audit starts at €350 net.