Content guide
How to audit your existing content
Most sites have more to gain from fixing what exists than from publishing anything new. A content audit finds out which pages are worth the effort.
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Four outcomes, not one
Every page ends in one of four buckets. Keep as is, improve, merge into another page, or delete and redirect.
Audits that only produce an improve list miss most of the available value, because the biggest wins are usually merges and deletions.
Deletion is an optimisation
Pages that attract nothing still consume crawl budget, dilute internal linking and drag on the site's overall quality signals. Removing them genuinely helps the pages that remain.
This is counter-intuitive enough that most teams resist it, usually on the grounds that the page took effort to write. That is a sunk cost, not an argument.
Finding the merge candidates
Pull your Search Console query data and look for one search returning different pages of yours on different days. That flip-flopping is Google being unable to decide which of your pages should own the intent, and it means neither is ranking as well as one merged page would.
What to improve first
Pages ranking between positions five and fifteen are the best return. They already have enough credibility to rank; the gap to the top is usually smaller than the gap from nowhere.
Common questions
Will deleting pages hurt my traffic?
Not if the pages had none, and that is precisely which ones to delete. Redirect anything with links or history to the closest relevant page rather than removing it outright.
How often should we audit content?
Annually for most sites, or after any large publishing push. More often than that and you are measuring noise.
Where to next
If you would rather have someone do this than read about it, the commercial page for this work is SEO copywriting.
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