Content audit

What a content audit is

A content audit is a systematic review of everything a business has published, judged against one question: what is this page doing for us? It produces two things. A spreadsheet with one row per page, scored. And a short written report that says, in order, what to do about it.

It is not a design review, a technical SEO crawl or a rewrite. Those come after, and an audit usually tells you which of them you need.

When you need one

The audit is the right first step in three situations. You have been publishing for a while and cannot say which pages matter. You are about to rebuild the site and do not want to carry the dead weight across. Or inquiries have dropped and you suspect the content but cannot point at a page.

If you already know exactly which page is the problem, you do not need an audit. Ask about a page rewrite instead.

What gets looked at

Every URL on the site, plus anything you send me that is not on the site: brochures, sales decks, the email newsletter archive. For each one I record what it is, when it was last touched, what it is for, whether it is accurate now, whether it reads well, whether it answers a real buyer question, and what it is earning. That last column comes from your analytics and search data, which you give me read access to for the duration.

The scoring is deliberately simple. Each page ends up in one of four columns.

• Keep. It is accurate, it reads well and it is doing a job. Leave it alone.
• Fix. The subject is right but the page is not: out of date, badly structured, or missing the one thing a buyer needs. The report says what to change.
• Merge. Two or more pages say the same thing to the same reader. One stronger page replaces them, with redirects from the old addresses.
• Delete. It earns nothing, answers nothing, and its presence makes the good pages harder to find. It goes, with a redirect if anything links to it.

What you get

Three things, delivered together.

The inventory. One spreadsheet, one row per page, with the columns above and the score. Sortable. It is yours, and it is the starting point for every later decision about the site.

The report. Four to eight pages. It opens with the five things that matter most, in the order to do them, and each one says why. Then the pattern across the site: what the content is good at, what it consistently misses, and what your competitors are covering that you are not. It ends with what to stop doing, which is usually the most valuable page in it.

The call. Forty-five minutes on video, walking through the report. You bring the person who will act on it. By the end you both know what to do first and why.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A regional accounting firm has 140 pages: 30 service pages, 95 blog posts going back nine years, and 15 odds and ends. The audit finds that six service pages bring in nearly every inquiry, eleven blog posts still earn search visits, and the other 84 posts have had no visits in a year and are mostly commentary on tax changes that have since changed again. Four service pages describe the same bookkeeping offer under different names because different partners wrote them.

The report says: merge the four bookkeeping pages into one; refresh the eleven earning posts with current figures; delete 70 posts and redirect the rest; and write the two service pages that the inquiry emails keep asking about. That is four decisions. The firm did not need 140 pages judged one at a time. It needed to know which four decisions to make.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What you sell, who buys it, and what prompted the audit. No charge.
2. Access. You give me read-only access to analytics and search data, and send anything that is not on the site.
3. The work. Seven to ten working days for a site under 200 pages. Larger sites are quoted after the call.
4. The walkthrough. The report and the spreadsheet arrive the day before the call, so you can read them cold first.

What it costs

The published price on the pricing page is $450 CAD for a site of up to about 200 pages, fixed, agreed before the work starts. It does not change without you agreeing first. A larger site, or one with a lot of off-site material, is quoted after the first call.

What happens next

Most people do one of three things with the audit. They act on the list themselves, which is the point of writing it in plain language. They ask for a content strategy plan so the fixes become a programme rather than a one-off. Or they hand the fix-and-delete list to me to run as content operations. None of that is assumed. The audit is complete on its own.