SEO content audit

What an SEO content audit is

An SEO content audit is a page-by-page scoring of a website against one question: what is this page doing in search? Every address ends up in one of three states. It earns, meaning people arrive on it from a search and some of them become inquiries. It decays, meaning it used to earn and the line has been going down for a year or more. Or it drags, meaning it earns nothing and makes the pages that do earn harder to find.

Each scored page then gets exactly one treatment: keep, refresh, merge or remove. The output is a spreadsheet and a short list of decisions, not a report about content quality in general.

Which audit you actually want

This is not the general content audit, and most businesses need one of the two rather than both. The general audit judges whether a page is any good: accurate, readable, honest, aimed at a real buyer, saying what you would want a buyer to read. It works on a site with no search history at all, and it covers material that is not on the website, such as brochures and the newsletter archive.

This one judges whether a page works in search, and it needs data to do it. Choose it if you have been publishing for two years or more, have search and analytics records going back at least a year, and the question in your head is why the inquiries from search have fallen. Choose the general audit if the site is young, if the traffic is mostly direct or from referrals, or if the question in your head is whether the writing is any good. If you genuinely cannot tell, say so on the call and I will tell you which one is the better spend. Neither is a technical crawl of the site; server speed, hosting and redirect plumbing sit with your developer.

What gets scored

• What it earns. Visits from search over twelve months or more, which searches brought them, and whether those visits do anything afterwards. A page with visits and no inquiries is recorded honestly as such.
• The direction of travel. Rising, flat, or sliding. A sliding page that still earns is the most valuable thing an audit finds, because a refresh usually rescues it and a new page would cost several times as much.
• What it competes with. Whether another page of yours is built for the same search, which is the most common reason a good page underperforms.
• Whether it is in the catalogue at all. Pages that are not indexed, pages whose canonical points somewhere else, and pages nothing on your site links to, which is often why they were never crawled.
• How stale it is. The oldest checkable fact on the page, the last date it was touched, and whether the search it targets now expects something the page does not contain.

What you get

The score sheet. One spreadsheet, one row per address, sortable, with the columns above, the state, and the treatment. It is yours, and it is the thing every later decision about the site gets made from.

The treatment list. Three to six pages of writing. It opens with the five decisions that matter most, in order, each with the reason. Then the pattern: what the site is consistently good at in search, what it consistently misses, and which searches it should own and does not.

The walkthrough. Forty-five minutes on video with whoever will act on it. Both documents arrive the day before so you can read them cold first.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A commercial cleaning company in Winnipeg has 210 addresses: 18 service pages, 24 location pages and 168 posts going back eight years. The audit finds that four service pages bring nearly every search visit that turns into a quote request. Nine posts still earn and six of those nine are sliding, all of them written around a certification standard that has since been revised. Twelve location pages are the same page with the district name changed. The remaining 150 posts have had no search visits in a year.

The treatment list is short. Refresh the six sliding posts and the four service pages with current standards and dates. Merge the twelve templated location pages into three that cover real catchments. Remove or de-index 150 posts with redirects. Write nothing new until that is done, because the company already ranks for its two best searches with pages it was about to bury under more posts. Four decisions out of 210 rows.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What you sell, which searches matter to you, how long the site has been running, and what prompted the question. No charge.
2. Access. Read-only access to your search and analytics data, plus a full list of addresses from the platform.
3. The scoring. Seven to ten working days for a site under 200 addresses. Larger sites are quoted after the call. Every row is looked at; the states are assigned by hand, not by a threshold.
4. The walkthrough. The score sheet and the treatment list, then the call.

What it costs

Quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call and fixed in writing before anything starts. It depends on the number of addresses and on whether usable search data exists, since without it the scoring is guesswork and I will say so rather than charge for it. The pricing page shows the four ways of working here, including the published fixed price for the general audit, which is the better buy for a small site.

What happens next

The list divides into three kinds of work, and most sites need all three. The decaying pages go to content refreshes. The dragging pages go to pruning and de-indexing, which handles the redirects. The gaps the audit exposes become an SEO content strategy so the writing happens in an order rather than all at once. Nothing beyond the audit is assumed. It is complete on its own, and plenty of owners run the list themselves, which is why it is written in plain language.