Content Audit Template

Here’s the uncomfortable truth I open with every time I run a content workshop: most of the growth hiding in your website isn’t in the posts you haven’t written yet. It’s in the ones you already published and forgot about. A content audit is how you find it. I’ve run audits that turned up fifty pages competing with each other, a dozen “zombie” posts pulling the whole domain down, and three quiet winners one tweak away from page one. None of that showed up in a brainstorm for new topics — it only showed up when we looked at what was already there.

This is the template and the process I actually use. It lives under the content strategy hub because an audit isn’t a one-off chore — it’s the first move in any serious strategy, the thing you do before you commission a single new piece.

What a content audit actually is

A content audit is a full inventory of everything you’ve published, scored against how it performs and whether it still earns its place. That’s it. It’s not a vanity exercise and it’s not about deleting things for the sake of a tidy sitemap. The goal is a decision for every URL. By the end you should be able to point at any page and say exactly what happens to it and why.

Most teams never do this because it feels like going backward. Writing new content feels like progress; auditing old content feels like admitting the old stuff wasn’t perfect. But the math is lopsided. Improving a page that already has history, links and some ranking signal is far faster than earning all of that from zero on a brand-new URL. The audit is where you find those pages.

The columns your audit template needs

You can run this in a spreadsheet — a tab in Google Sheets is genuinely all you need. The discipline isn’t in the tool, it’s in the columns. Here’s the set I use, and what each one is for.

Identity and context

URL, title, primary keyword, content type, publish date, last-updated date. This is the boring half, and it’s the half everyone skips. You cannot spot cannibalization until you can see two URLs sitting next to each other targeting the same primary keyword. You cannot spot staleness until the “last updated” column is staring at you with a date from three years ago.

Performance signals

Organic sessions (last 90 days), average position, impressions, conversions or assisted conversions, and backlinks. Pull sessions and conversions from your analytics, position and impressions from Search Console, and links from whatever tool you have. You don’t need perfect data — you need enough to sort a page into a bucket.

The verdict

One column, four possible values: keep, improve, merge, kill. This is the only column that matters at the end, and every other column exists to help you fill it in honestly.

The scoring system that makes verdicts obvious

Judgment calls stall audits. Halfway down the list you start second-guessing, and by page thirty you’re rationalizing keeping everything. A simple score fixes that. I score two axes from 1 to 3 and let the combination decide.

Performance (traffic, rankings, conversions, links) and strategic relevance (does this topic still matter to the business and the audience you decided to serve). A high-performance, high-relevance page is a keep. High relevance but low performance is an improve — the demand is there, the execution isn’t. Low relevance but somehow decent traffic is a merge candidate or a careful keep. Low on both is a kill. The two-axis read turns a wall of 200 URLs into four clean piles in an afternoon.

Running the audit, step by step

Here’s the sequence I follow so nothing gets skipped and the thing actually gets finished rather than abandoned at 60%.

1. Inventory everythingCrawl the site or export your sitemap into the template. Every URL gets a row — no cherry-picking the ones you remember.
2. Pull the dataDrop in sessions, position, conversions and links from analytics, Search Console and your link tool. Good enough beats perfect.
3. Score & decideRate performance and relevance 1–3, assign a verdict to every row, and leave a one-line note on why.
4. Build the backlogSort by verdict and impact. The improves closest to page one go first; merges and kills get scheduled, not forgotten.

That fourth step is the one that separates an audit that changes anything from an audit that becomes a spreadsheet nobody opens again. The output isn’t the scored sheet — it’s a prioritized backlog your content calendar can actually consume.

What the numbers usually look like

Every site is different, but the shape of the result is remarkably consistent across the audits I’ve run. It’s worth knowing going in, because it reframes the exercise from “cleanup” to “opportunity.”

That 40% in the middle is the whole reason to do this. Those are pages with history and intent already proven, sitting just off the pace. Refreshing them is the highest-return content work most teams can do, and it’s invisible until the audit surfaces it.

The mistakes that wreck an audit

A few traps catch people every time, so I’ll name them plainly.

• Auditing only the posts you remember. The forgotten pages are exactly where cannibalization and zombies hide. Inventory everything or don’t bother.
• Treating “kill” as failure. Removing or redirecting deadweight can lift how search engines judge the whole domain. Pruning is gardening, not surgery.
• Refreshing without re-optimizing. An “improve” isn’t just fixing a typo and bumping the date. Re-check the intent, the keyword, the structure, the internal links.
• Doing it once. An audit is a quarterly or twice-yearly rhythm. Content decays; the audit is how you catch the decay before it costs you.

Once the audit tells you what to build and fix, the next question is how to brief it so a writer nails it the first time. That’s what the content brief template is for, and the two tools are meant to run back to back. If you want the wider picture the audit feeds into, start with the content marketing strategy framework.

Frequently asked questions

How often should I run a content audit?

Twice a year for most sites, quarterly if you publish a lot or compete in a fast-moving space. Content decays — rankings slip, facts go stale, new internal pages start cannibalizing old ones — and the audit is how you catch that decay before it compounds. A big first audit, then lighter maintenance passes, is the rhythm that sticks.

What tools do I need for a content audit?

Less than you’d think. A spreadsheet for the template, your analytics for traffic and conversions, Search Console for positions and impressions, and any crawler or link tool to round out the inventory. The scoring and the decisions are human work; the tools just feed the sheet. Don’t let tool-shopping become the reason you never start.

Should I delete or redirect pages I kill?

If a page has any backlinks or ever earned traffic, 301-redirect it to the closest relevant page so that equity isn’t thrown away. If it’s genuinely orphaned — no links, no traffic, no relevance — removing it cleanly is fine. The guiding question is whether anything of value points at that URL; if so, redirect, don’t delete.

What’s the difference between a content audit and a content strategy?

The audit is the diagnosis; the strategy is the treatment plan. The audit tells you what you have and what state it’s in. The strategy decides what you’ll own going forward and how new work ladders up to it. You run the audit first because you can’t plan intelligently around an inventory you’ve never actually looked at.