What is a content audit and when do you need one?
A content audit is a systematic inventory and assessment of everything published on a site, evaluating each page against performance data and business purpose, then deciding what to keep, improve, consolidate or remove.
Why it is necessary. Content accumulates. Over years a site acquires pages that are outdated, duplicative, never performed, or were written for a business that has since changed. Nobody removes them, because removal requires a decision and publishing does not. The result is a large body of material diluting the site's focus and, in some cases, actively competing with itself.
What you gather per page: organic traffic and its trend, rankings and impressions, conversions or goal completions, backlinks, internal links, engagement, last updated date, and whether it still reflects current facts and offerings.
The four outcomes:
Keep — performing and accurate, leave alone.
Improve — has potential but is thin, outdated or poorly matched to search intent. Usually the largest and most valuable group, because improving an existing page that already has some authority is faster than publishing a new one.
Consolidate — several pages covering the same ground. Merge into one stronger page and redirect the others. This directly addresses keyword cannibalisation.
Remove — no traffic, no links, no purpose. Redirect to a relevant page if it has any links, or return 410 if genuinely nothing.
Why pruning can help. Removing genuinely worthless pages has been associated with improvements in how the rest of a site performs, on the reasoning that crawl budget and topical focus are finite. Be careful: removing pages with low traffic but valuable backlinks, or that serve users without ranking, does harm. Audit before deleting.
When to do one: after a significant traffic decline, before a redesign or migration, after a business or product change, or as a periodic exercise every year or two.
Update dates honestly — changing a date without changing content is a poor practice.