Tool

Content Audit Framework

Score your content across traffic, engagement, SEO value, strategic relevance, and recency. Get instant recommendations to keep, update, consolidate, or cut. Free content audit tool, no signup required.

Most content strategies have a creation problem disguised as a volume problem. The instinct when content is not performing is to produce more of it. The reality is usually that the existing library is holding performance back. Thin content wastes crawl budget. Duplicate topic coverage fragments keyword authority. Outdated content erodes trust. Off-brand content confuses the topical signal you are trying to build.

A content audit is the diagnostic that precedes the strategy. It tells you what you actually have, what is working, what can be improved, what overlaps with something else, and what should simply be removed. Done properly, a content audit often produces more SEO value than several months of new content production.

This tool scores each piece of content across five dimensions: traffic, engagement, search rankings, strategic relevance, and recency. The scoring model produces an action recommendation for every piece: keep, update, consolidate, or cut. It is designed to be completed in a single session for a site with up to fifty pieces of content, and the CSV export gives you a working document you can use to brief a writer or SEO agency.

Add your content pieces above or load sample data to see the framework in action.
Score each piece across five dimensions and get an instant action recommendation.

Title / URL
Traffic
Engage %
Rankings
Relevance
Recency
Action
Score
Total pieces
0
in this audit
Avg. content score
0
out of 100
Content to cut
0
reduce crawl budget
Need updating
0
priority rewrites
0
Keep
Strong performers. Leave as is or make minor optimisations.
0
Update
Good bones, needs a refresh. Rewrite, add data, improve structure.
0
Consolidate
Overlapping topic coverage. Merge into one stronger piece.
0
Cut
Low value, low traffic, low relevance. Delete or redirect.
Audit recommendations
Traffic (20pts)
Monthly organic and referral sessions. High traffic signals strong reason to keep.
Engagement (20pts)
Time on page, scroll depth, clicks. Low engagement despite traffic signals thin content.
Rankings (20pts)
Average search position. Positions 1 to 10 score highest. Beyond 30 scores zero.
Relevance (20pts)
Strategic fit with your current business and audience. Your manual assessment.
Recency (20pts)
Age of the content. Under 6 months scores highest. Over 36 months scores lowest.

Methodology

Each piece of content is scored across five dimensions, each worth a maximum of twenty points, for a total possible score of one hundred.

Traffic scores reflect monthly organic and referral sessions: twenty points for high traffic above one thousand monthly sessions, thirteen for medium traffic between one hundred and nine hundred and ninety-nine, six for low traffic between ten and ninety-nine, and one for minimal traffic below ten.

Engagement scores reflect time on page, scroll depth, and click behaviour. Content with high engagement demonstrates that it delivers genuine value to readers regardless of its traffic volume.

Rankings scores reflect average search position for the primary keyword or keyword cluster. Content ranking in positions one to three scores twenty points. Position four to ten scores sixteen. Positions eleven to twenty score ten. Positions twenty-one to thirty score five. Beyond thirty scores zero.

Relevance is a manual assessment of how well the content aligns with your current business focus, audience, and brand positioning. Core topic content scores twenty, adjacent content thirteen, tangential content six, and off-brand content zero.

Recency scores reflect the age of the content. Content published or updated within six months scores twenty. Six to twelve months scores fifteen. One to two years scores eight. Two to three years scores four. Over three years scores zero.

Action recommendations are generated from the score combined with relevance weighting. Content scoring seventy or above is recommended to keep. Scoring between forty-five and sixty-nine with high relevance is recommended to update. Scoring between thirty and forty-four with meaningful traffic is recommended to consolidate. Everything below these thresholds is recommended to cut or redirect.

How to use this tool

  1. Add each piece of content by title or URL using the input fields
  2. Score each piece across the five dimensions using the dropdown selectors
  3. Review action recommendations: keep, update, consolidate, or cut
  4. Use the filter buttons to view only pieces with the same recommended action
  5. Download as CSV to create your content audit working document

Frequently asked questions

What is a content audit?
A content audit is a systematic review of all the content on a website to assess its performance, quality, and strategic value. A proper content audit results in a prioritised action plan that identifies which content to keep as is, which to update or expand, which to merge with similar content, and which to remove entirely. Content audits typically produce significant SEO improvements by reducing crawl budget waste, consolidating topical authority, and improving the overall quality signal of the site.
How often should I conduct a content audit?
For most sites publishing regularly, an annual comprehensive content audit is appropriate, with a lighter quarterly review of the most important pages. High-traffic sites or sites in fast-moving topic areas may benefit from more frequent audits. The trigger for an unscheduled audit is usually a significant drop in organic traffic, a major algorithm update, or a meaningful change in business direction that makes existing content strategically irrelevant.
What should I do with content that is recommended for consolidation?
Consolidation means taking two or more pieces of content that cover overlapping topics and merging them into a single, more comprehensive piece. The consolidated piece should live at the URL of whichever original piece had more authority, incoming links, or traffic. Redirect the URL of the removed piece to the consolidated piece using a 301 redirect. This concentrates your keyword authority into one strong page rather than splitting it across multiple weaker ones.
Does cutting content hurt SEO?
Cutting low-quality, thin, or irrelevant content typically improves SEO over time by improving the overall quality signal of your site and reducing crawl budget waste. Search engines evaluate your site as a whole, and a large volume of low-quality content can suppress the performance of your best content. Always redirect removed pages to the most relevant remaining page rather than allowing them to return a 404 error.
What is crawl budget and why does it matter?
Crawl budget is the number of pages a search engine crawler will index on your site in a given period. Sites with large amounts of thin, duplicate, or low-quality content waste crawl budget on pages that do not deserve to be indexed. This can mean that your most important pages are crawled less frequently, indexed more slowly, and updated in search results less often. Reducing the volume of low-quality content directs crawl budget toward the pages that matter most.

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