Content Audit
A content audit is a systematic review of every page on a site, judging quality, accuracy, search performance and business value. The output is a decision for each URL: keep as is, update, consolidate with another page, or remove entirely.
Why it matters for your rankings
Most sites accumulate content without ever removing any. After a few years a meaningful share of pages earn no traffic, no links and no revenue, while still consuming crawl budget and diluting the site's overall quality assessment.
That last point is what makes audits worth doing. Google evaluates sites partly in aggregate, so a large volume of weak pages can hold back the strong ones. Removing or merging dead weight frequently lifts rankings for pages that were never touched. Audits also surface the cheapest wins available: posts ranking on page two that need an hour of updating, and pairs of articles competing for the same query that should be one authoritative page instead of two mediocre ones.
How to check it on your site
Build one inventory
Crawl the site with Screaming Frog and export every indexable URL. Join it to Search Console clicks and impressions, and to Ahrefs referring domains, so each row shows performance and authority together.
Add a business value column
Mark whether each page drives revenue, supports a sales conversation, or exists only to rank. This prevents deleting low-traffic pages that close deals.
Segment into four decisions
Keep, update, consolidate, remove. Anything with zero clicks and zero links over twelve months is a removal or consolidation candidate by default.
Handle removals properly
Redirect removed URLs to the closest relevant page with a 301. Only use 410 when nothing relevant exists.