Content audit
A content audit is a review of every page of a site against its figures, ending in one decision per page: keep, refresh, merge, redirect or remove. It is the exercise that turns a growing library into a maintained one. On a small site it is an afternoon with a spreadsheet.
By Théophile Louvart, founder of Porteur · Updated 15 September 2026 · Markdown
The table
| Column | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| URL | A crawl of the site, or the sitemap |
| Clicks and impressions, 12 months | The Performance report in Search Console, exported |
| Inbound links | The Links report in Search Console, or a link index |
| Last updated | Your CMS or the page itself |
| The search it was written for | Your keyword map, or the Performance report filtered to the page |
| Purpose | One line: what this page is for |
| Decision | Keep, refresh, merge, redirect, remove |
The five decisions
- Keep: it earns clicks or links and is accurate. Do nothing.
- Refresh: it has impressions and falling clicks, or facts that have aged. Same URL, updated content and date.
- Merge: it competes with another page of yours. Fold the better parts into the stronger URL and redirect this one.
- Redirect: it has no purpose but an equivalent page exists. A 301 to that page.
- Remove: no clicks, no impressions, no links, no purpose for a year. Return 410, or 404.
The rhythm
Run it when you have forgotten pages
Below fifty pages you know them all. Past a hundred, the audit tells you things you did not know.
Do the decisions in one pass
Decide every row before you change anything. Mixing deciding and editing turns an afternoon into a month.
Ship the removals and redirects first
They are quick, they clean the index, and they make the refresh list shorter.
Repeat quarterly and judge on the figures
Compare the quarter after with the quarter before, by page. That is how you learn which decisions were right.
Questions
A review of every page against its figures, ending in one decision per page: keep, refresh, merge, redirect or remove. The output is a table, not a report nobody acts on.
Once the site is past about a hundred pages, then quarterly. A small site can review the pages that lost clicks monthly and do the full table twice a year.
Only if they also have no links and no purpose after a year. A page that supports a sale or answers a support question earns its place without search clicks.
Not by itself. It removes pages that dilute a site and waste crawling. The gain shows up as the remaining pages being crawled and assessed more often.
A list of URLs, twelve months of clicks and impressions from Search Console, and whatever link data you have. Everything else is judgement you already hold.
Check my site, free
The free check reads your pages and the searches around them, and names the ones that earn nothing, in about thirty seconds.
- Free check, no card
- Read-only, your own accounts
- Readable by your agent
Read next
- GuideA content audit for a small site: one table, one decision a row
- GuideHow to refresh a page that lost its traffic
- GlossaryContent pruning
- GlossaryContent decay
- GuideWhen to merge two pages, and how to do it without losing the ranking
- GuideDelete or redirect an old page: 301, 404 or 410
- GuideHow to find declining pages in Search Console before the traffic is gone
- GlossaryIndex bloat