A content audit is an inventory of all pages on a website with a decision on what will happen to each one. It is done by adding data to the list of URLs – traffic, impressions and click-through rate, conversions, number of inbound links, date of last update – and each page is placed into one of four groups: leave unchanged, update and expand, merge with another page and redirect, or remove. The most value comes from the second and third groups: content just below the performance threshold, and pages that are taking strength away from each other. It is worth doing an audit once a year and always before a redesign or migration, since the output is a list of which content must survive. Remove pages with care, and always with a redirect to the nearest relevant page.
See also: Content cannibalisation, Updating Existing Content, Website migration without losing rankings.
