Running a content audit and pruning outdated or underperforming content is essential for maintaining a high-quality, SEO-friendly website. As your site grows, some pages may lose value, hurt user experience, or waste crawl budget. This guide provides a strategic, step-by-step approach to auditing and trimming content to boost rankings, engagement, and overall website health.
Why Content Audits Matter
- Improve crawl efficiency and site speed
- Remove low-quality or duplicate content
- Consolidate pages targeting the same keyword
- Enhance topical authority and user experience
- Recover from Google algorithm updates targeting thin or spammy content
Strategic Tip: Content pruning is not about deleting—it’s about improving content quality and relevance. Sometimes, merging or redirecting is better than outright deletion.
Step-by-Step: How to Run a Content Audit
1. Crawl Your Website
Use tools like Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, or Ahrefs to extract all URLs from your site. Export key data such as title tags, word count, traffic, status codes, and metadata.
2. Pull Performance Metrics
- Google Search Console: Impressions, clicks, CTR, and ranking data
- Google Analytics: Bounce rate, time on page, conversions
- Ahrefs / Semrush: Backlinks, keyword rankings, traffic value
3. Categorize Your Content
Segment your pages into categories like blog posts, service pages, product pages, landing pages, etc., to analyze performance by type.
4. Assess Content Value
- Is it getting organic traffic?
- Is it ranking for target keywords?
- Does it have backlinks?
- Is the content up to date and useful?
- Does it serve a unique purpose or audience need?
Decide What to Do With Each Page
After collecting and evaluating the data, assign actions for each page:
- Keep: High-performing or strategically important pages
- Update: Outdated but valuable content—refresh stats, examples, internal links, and add missing sections
- Merge: Combine multiple thin articles into a single comprehensive resource and 301 redirect old URLs
- Delete: Useless, outdated, or duplicate content with no traffic or backlinks; return a 410 or 404 status or redirect appropriately
Pro Tip: Prune carefully. If a page has backlinks or historical rankings, consider updating or redirecting instead of deleting to preserve link equity.
Consolidate for Topical Authority
Google rewards topical depth. Instead of having 5 weak blog posts on related subtopics, combine them into one authoritative piece. This reduces keyword cannibalization and improves content comprehensiveness.
Keep a Log of Changes
Document every change: URLs removed, merged, updated, or redirected. This helps with future audits and ensures you're not losing valuable traffic or link signals.
Use Tools to Track Progress
- Google Analytics: Monitor organic traffic trends post-pruning
- Google Search Console: Check crawl stats and coverage reports
- SEO crawlers: Re-audit after pruning to detect errors or broken redirects
Conclusion
A well-executed content audit is not about reducing the number of pages—it’s about improving quality and relevance. Pruning ineffective content can lead to better rankings, improved crawlability, and a stronger user experience. Make this a bi-annual or annual part of your SEO maintenance strategy.