A content audit is your roadmap to a leaner, more effective website. It’s not about churning out more content—it’s about making sure every page earns its keep in search rankings, user engagement, and conversions. Low-quality, outdated, or irrelevant pages can tank your SEO, waste crawl budget, and drive visitors away. This guide walks you through a step-by-step content audit process, leveraging tools like Screaming Frog, Google Analytics, Ahrefs, and Semrush to evaluate organic traffic, backlinks, onsite elements, and more. We’ll also cover advanced strategies to make your audit stand out, ensuring your site dominates search results.
Search engines like Google prioritize fresh, relevant, and authoritative content. Cluttered sites with thin blog posts, outdated product pages, or irrelevant tags hurt your performance in three big ways:
A content audit identifies these issues and gives you a clear action plan—keep, update, redirect, delete, or noindex. Plus, it uncovers opportunities to boost topical authority, target new keywords, and improve user journeys. Let’s get started.
The goal is to evaluate every URL on your site and assign an action: keep (200), update (QR), redirect (301), delete (404), or noindex/canonical. You’ll combine automated data collection with manual review, focusing on organic traffic, backlinks, and onsite elements to make data-driven decisions. Here’s the process in four steps, inspired by Ahrefs and Semrush, with added depth.
Start by cataloging every URL on your site, from blog posts to product pages, category tags, and subdomains. This inventory is the foundation of your audit.
Use Screaming Frog SEO Spider or Semrush’s Site Audit Tool to crawl your site. Alternatively, export your XML sitemap from your CMS (e.g., WordPress). Aim to capture:
Pro Tip (from Ahrefs): Check for orphaned pages (not linked in your site structure) using Screaming Frog’s “Orphaned URLs” report. These often slip through sitemaps and need attention.
Pull data from Google Analytics or Semrush to assess:
Semrush Tip: Use the “Organic Research” tool to see which pages drive the most traffic and their top-ranking keywords. This helps prioritize high-value pages.
Use Ahrefs to check backlinks for each URL. Pages with quality inbound links (e.g., from high-DR domains) should be redirected rather than deleted to preserve link equity, which boosts domain authority.
Ahrefs Insight: Look at the “Referring Domains” metric in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer. Even pages with low traffic but 4+ referring domains are worth redirecting to maintain SEO value.
Server logs, accessible via Semrush’s Log File Analyzer, show how often search engines crawl each page. Low-quality pages that eat up crawl budget should be redirected or noindexed to optimize bot efficiency.
While crawling with Screaming Frog, gather onsite SEO elements to assess content quality and optimization. These help determine if a page is worth keeping, updating, or removing:
Pro Tip: Export these elements as a CSV from Screaming Frog and integrate them into your audit spreadsheet to streamline analysis.
Now, analyze each URL based on organic traffic, backlinks, engagement metrics, and onsite elements. Use this decision tree, inspired by Ahrefs’ process and Semrush’s prioritization logic, to flag pages for action:
| If the Page… | Then Categorize It As… |
| Gets >100 organic visits/year, low bounce rate (<50%), high conversions (>2%), optimized onsite elements (e.g., title, H1, schema) | Keep (200) – High-performing, leave as is. |
| Gets >100 organic visits/year, high bounce rate (>70%), low conversions (<1%), or poor onsite optimization (e.g., thin content, missing alt text) | Update (QR) – Needs quality review for relevance and optimization. |
| Gets <100 organic visits/year, no backlinks (<2 referring domains), no business value | Delete (404) – Low-value, safe to remove. |
| Gets <100 organic visits/year, has backlinks (≥2 referring domains) | Redirect (301) – Preserve link equity by redirecting to a relevant page. |
| Gets <100 organic visits/year, no backlinks, but has business value (e.g., internal use) | Noindex/Canonical – Keep for non-SEO purposes. |
Ahrefs Automation Tip: Use Ahrefs’ Content Audit template to automate this logic. It flags pages based on traffic and backlink thresholds, reducing manual reviews.
Semrush Prioritization Tip: Sort pages by organic traffic and conversion impact in Semrush’s Organic Research to focus on high-ROI fixes first.
Enter your email to get our free Google Sheets template. It automates URL categorization and spits out action recommendations for every page.
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To make sense of your inventory, consolidate data into a structured spreadsheet. This organizes URLs, traffic, backlinks, onsite elements, and engagement metrics, enabling efficient analysis and action planning. Here’s how to set it up in Google Sheets or Excel:
Start with a new spreadsheet and use multiple tabs:
Include these columns to capture all relevant data:
Use a formula to assign actions based on the decision tree:
=IFS(
AND(B2=”200″, C2>100, E2<50, F2>2), “Keep (200)”,
AND(B2=”200″, C2>100, OR(E2>70, F2<1)), “Update (QR)”,
AND(C2<100, I2<2), “Delete (404)”,
AND(C2<100, I2>=2), “Redirect (301)”,
AND(C2<100, I2<2, Z2=”Yes”), “Noindex/Canonical”,
TRUE, “Manual Review”
)
Pro Tip: Use add-ons like Supermetrics to pull GSC/GA4 data directly into Google Sheets, saving time on exports.
Automation flags pages, but human judgment is crucial for quality and relevance. Here’s how to handle each category, with added depth from Ahrefs and Semrush.
Semrush Tip: Use the “SEO Writing Assistant” to ensure updated content aligns with keyword intent and readability standards.
To make your content audit page the definitive resource, we’ve added these unique topics beyond what Ahrefs and Semrush cover:
Identify topics your competitors rank for but you don’t. Use Ahrefs’ “Content Gap” tool or Semrush’s “Keyword Gap” to find missing keywords and create new content to fill these gaps. This strengthens topical authority and drives traffic.
Ensure each page matches the search intent (informational, navigational, transactional, or commercial investigation) of its target keywords. Misaligned intent can hurt rankings and engagement.
Audit how content guides users through the funnel (awareness, consideration, conversion, retention). Low-conversion pages may need stronger CTAs or better internal linking.
Analyze the top 10 SERP results for your target keywords to identify what makes competitors’ pages rank higher (e.g., better titles, richer content, or schema markup).
Regularly update high-performing pages to maintain rankings, as Google favors fresh content.
After implementing your audit, keep your site in top shape:
Ready to transform your site? Our Google Sheets template automates data analysis, categorizes URLs, and provides action recommendations, including onsite elements. Drop your email to get it now.
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Questions about your content audit? Drop them in the comments, and let’s supercharge your SEO strategy together!
