A step-by-step guide to auditing your website and content library

How many pages do you have on your website? How about the number of blogs, white papers, videos, and other pieces in your content library? And, more importantly, are they any good?

When you’re stacking months or even years of content plans on top of one another, it’s easy to lose sight of what you’ve got in your back catalogue. Good ideas can get lost on page 40 of your archive while outdated topics clog up your search appearances.

An audit helps you lay out everything in a digestible, analytical way, so you can see exactly what’s worth keeping, what’s not working hard enough, and what’s destined for the recycling bin. There are many ways to structure an audit – here’s a look at how we do it.

The shape of your audit depends on what you want to achieve

There’s never a bad time to take stock of what you’re producing, so there doesn’t need to be a particular trigger for an audit. But it’s important to set a goal to keep your scope focused and make sure your final outputs are useful. You might be:

• Building next quarter’s content strategy, and need to see where your gaps are
• Working with a new agency or freelancer, and want fresh eyes on your content
• Updating your messaging or refreshing your tone of voice, so old content doesn’t represent your brand anymore
• Reaching out to new audiences, which could mean talking about different pain points and priorities
• Operating in a fast-moving industry where topics, stats, and best practices go out of date quickly
• Seeing unexpected drops in traffic, or some of your pages, posts, and downloads aren’t performing as well as you’d hoped
• Reviewing your pages and content for SEO and GEO-friendliness
• Looking for ways to refresh or reuse existing content, instead of starting from scratch every time
• Taking on a new role and inheriting someone else’s content
• Realising there’s simply too much stuff and it’s time to streamline

How do you prepare for a web or content audit?

When you’re planning an audit, you need to do three things:

1. Decide how much content you’ll look at

Tracking back to the dawn of time on your blog might be tempting, but it can also turn an audit into an insurmountable task – so clearly define the edges. (You could even choose to automatically retire anything over a certain age, which is what we did with our own ancient content.)

Think carefully about what’s most important to your strategy. For example, you might prioritise high-traffic web pages or high-value gated assets before working through other areas of your catalogue. If it’s necessary to audit a lot of content, split it into individual content types or phases to keep the workload manageable.

2. Define your criteria for assessing the content

So, you’ve defined the quantity. Now you need to look at how to judge the quality. This can vary a lot – gap analysis and messaging overhauls demand very different styles of dissection – but the criteria often cover factors such as:

• How the page performs
• Whether the topics are accurate and relevant
• How well the content delivers brand messaging
• If it’s hitting all the right keywords

Now’s also the time to collect up some reference materials. Content plans, messaging houses, GTM strategies, style guides, and even competitor research all provide vital context for the audit.

3. Determine what the most useful output looks like

Unless you’re only looking at a small handful of content, there’s almost guaranteed to be a spreadsheet involved in this project. It’s the neatest way to keep track of what you’re auditing and the criteria you’re reviewing against.

Simple identifying information (the URL, content type, audience, funnel stage, etc.) helps you categorise your audit. Then, create a column for each thing you need to assess. Standardising how you fill these out – I’m partial to tick boxes – speeds up the process and makes it easy to compare your results.

My audits also always include a ‘traffic light’ system that provides an at-a-glance view of my assessment for each row. The exact phrasing depends on what the client needs, but it’s usually along the lines of:

• Green: This is a good example of what we’re looking for; keep it as-is or make small edits to make it really sparkle.
• Orange: This one needs to work harder; make chunky edits or rewrite to increase its value.
• Red: This isn’t worth keeping; remove this page or piece and consider banking the topic or theme for the future.

However, not everyone will find a vast array of cells and filters useful. When our team runs an audit, we often write a report to sit alongside the spreadsheet, summarising our conclusions and explaining any outliers or particularly interesting findings.

So, what comes after the audit?

It’s vital to follow all the data entry, comparisons, and colour-coding with a list of practical actions – otherwise it’s just busywork. So, that report should come complete with ideas around:

• Underserved audience groups: Are there personas that you can directly target with new or adapted content?
• Hidden messages: Are there strong use cases, benefits, or results that are trapped in low-level subpages or underperforming blogs?
• Neglected (or overstuffed) funnel stages: Does the customer journey feel balanced as they move through your TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU content?
• Chances to optimise: Are you doing enough to encourage your audience to convert? Can you improve your SEO, GEO, and AI search readiness?
• Underused formats: Can you introduce more variety into the types of content you’re putting out?
• Missing topics: Are there conversations in the industry that you should offer a perspective on?
• Evergreen gems: Do you have any pieces that are ready for a return to the spotlight with some fresh promo?
• Refresh-ready content: Are there older pieces that you can update for a quick win?
• The pieces of a great story: Is there a narrative thread that you can pull together for a campaign or hero piece?

We always organise our recommendations based on what will deliver the most value, whether it’s small tweaks that you can implement quickly or a new campaign that will fill a significant hole in your messaging.

Use yesterday’s content to shape tomorrow’s strategy

An audit may be a retrospective activity, but it’s really an opportunity to think about the future. Rather than get caught up digging into the quality of every single piece, it’s best to focus on what the gaps and trends can tell you.

The trick is to keep things structured and dispassionate during the audit itself, and then let the creativity out when you reach the final stage. It’s one of the reasons many people like to work with teams like ours for these kinds of projects. A fresh, neutral perspective from another expert can do wonders for helping you see the true effectiveness of your website and content – and what you can do to make them work even harder.

Want to discover what your existing content can tell you about what to do next? Let’s talk about your audit.