Content Audit Evaluate and Categorise What You Have

Building the inventory

Export a full list of published URLs along with organic traffic, ranking keywords, backlinks and last-updated date. For most sites this is a spreadsheet of several hundred to several thousand rows. This inventory is the raw material for every decision that follows, so accuracy matters more than speed — cross-check the export against your actual sitemap to catch pages missing from analytics.

Add two manual columns while you review: content quality (does it still reflect current best practice and accurate information) and strategic fit (does it map to a segment and funnel stage from your audience research). These two judgement calls are what turn a data export into an audit.

The four-bucket categorisation

Sort every URL into one of four buckets: keep as-is (performing and accurate), refresh (right topic, outdated or thin), consolidate (multiple pages competing for the same query, better merged into one), or remove (no traffic, no strategic fit, no backlinks worth preserving). This single decision, applied consistently, is what turns an audit into an action plan.

Consolidation is the bucket teams skip most often because it feels risky, but overlapping pages actively hurt rankings through keyword cannibalisation. Merge the weaker page's unique value into the stronger one, then 301 redirect the weaker URL to preserve any link equity.

• Keep: strong traffic, accurate, well-aligned to strategy
• Refresh: right topic, outdated stats or thin coverage
• Consolidate: two or more pages competing for the same query
• Remove: no traffic, no links, no strategic fit — redirect or delete

Running the audit inside RankWriter

Import your URL list into RankWriter's audit tool to pull live ranking position, estimated traffic and last-crawled date automatically, saving the manual export step. The tool flags likely cannibalisation by grouping URLs that rank for overlapping keyword sets, which speeds up the consolidate decision considerably.

Schedule a full content audit at least twice a year for an active publishing programme, and treat the output as required reading before the next editorial calendar is planned — you should never plan new content without first knowing what already exists.

Key takeaways

• ✓Export every published URL with traffic, keywords, links and update date
• ✓Sort each page into keep, refresh, consolidate or remove
• ✓Merge cannibalising pages and 301 redirect the weaker URL
• ✓Re-run the audit at least twice a year before major planning cycles

Why this lesson matters

This lesson belongs to Strategic Foundations, the part of Content Strategy & Creation where the goal is: understand what separates a content strategy from a publishing calendar and build the research base a strategy needs.

Read it once, then do it straight away on a real site inside RankWriter. Nothing here is theory for its own sake — every step produces something you can show a client.

Do it now

1. 1Open RankWriter with sample data already loaded, so you are not stuck on setup.
2. 2Draft the page you just planned.
3. 3Open RankWriter's Strategy workspace and create your first audience and topic map before drafting anything.