Once you are past a hundred posts, you stop knowing what is on your own site. When you find yourself searching your own archive to check whether you already wrote something, it is time for an audit.
“Content audit” sounds like a spring clean, but deletion is not the point. The work is reviving what got buried, resolving what overlaps, and finding what to write next. In practice the most valuable output is never the delete list — it is the update list.
Start with a list — four columns
An audit begins with an inventory. For a hundred posts a single spreadsheet is enough, and four columns will do.
The post list exports from the admin; traffic and queries download from Search Console for a chosen period. Three to six months is the right window — shorter and seasonality dominates, longer and changes you already made get mixed in.
Four verdicts
With the list built, give every post one verdict. There are only four, and asking in order usually settles each in a minute.
Update is the heart of an audit. Watch especially for posts with impressions but few clicks: they appear in results and nobody chooses them, which is usually a title and description problem rather than a content one. Fixing it without rewriting the article is the best return in the whole exercise.
When correcting stale information, change the wrong parts rather than rewriting wholesale. Keeping the URL means the post keeps everything it has accumulated.
What retiring requires
Retirement is the verdict to be careful with. No traffic does not mean no links pointing at the address. The order is this.
First, find and clean up the internal links aimed at it. Then choose the nearest replacement — another post on the subject, or the subject archive. Finally remove it and 301 the old address to that replacement.
If there is genuinely no replacement, leaving the post alone is often better than deleting it. Removal was never the objective.
Cadence — quarterly, and not all at once
Once a quarter is enough, and trying to process a hundred posts in one sitting reliably stalls halfway. Judge everything, but act ten at a time. Work through ten updates, look at the result a few weeks later, and the next ten will prioritise themselves.
Recording the date of each change matters — you can only explain a movement later if you know what you altered and when. How we run procedures like this is published on our process page, and related articles are gathered in the SEO archive.
Next part
The final part is measurement: how to tell whether the hub is working, at the level of the group rather than the individual post.