Most content audits fail in the same way. Somebody builds a spreadsheet with twenty-three columns, fills in four of them, and the file is never opened again. The audit was not too hard. It was too wide.
This version asks four questions per piece. That is all. It fits in an afternoon for a library of about 150 pieces, and it produces a list of decisions rather than a list of data.
Before you start: get the list, not the analytics
Export every published URL with its title and publish date. Do not pull traffic numbers yet. If the numbers are in front of you at this stage, you will spend the afternoon reading them instead of making decisions.
The four questions
For each piece, answer these in order and stop as soon as one of them decides the outcome.
1. Is it still true?
Prices, product names, integrations, screenshots, legal requirements, anything with a year in it. If a piece contains something that is no longer accurate, it is either a refresh or a deletion, and nothing else about it matters yet.
2. Would we publish it today?
Not "is it good" — that question is too kind to your own writing. Would this piece, as it stands, be approved if someone submitted it this morning? If not, it is a rewrite candidate.
3. Has anything been built on it?
Internal links, ad campaigns, sales decks, onboarding emails. Pieces with things depending on them cannot be quietly deleted, even when they are weak. They get fixed instead.
4. Has it ever been reused?
The one most audits skip. A strong, still-accurate piece that has never left the blog is the cheapest win in the whole library. It needs no new research and no new approvals.
Sorting the results
Every piece lands in one of four piles, and each pile has one action.
- Refresh. Inaccurate but load-bearing. Fix the facts, keep the URL, update the date.
- Rewrite. Right topic, wrong execution. Schedule properly, do not squeeze it in.
- Reuse. Accurate, good, and never used twice. Run the repurposing loop on it this month.
- Retire. Wrong, unused, and depended on by nothing. Redirect it and move on.
An audit that produces four piles beats an audit that produces twenty-three columns, because you can act on a pile before lunch.
Now bring in the numbers
Once the piles exist, add traffic and conversion data to break ties within a pile — which of eleven refreshes goes first, not whether a piece belongs in the pile at all. This keeps analytics in the role it is good at, which is ordering work rather than choosing it.
How often to repeat
Quarterly is enough for most teams. Monthly is a sign that something upstream is broken: either you are publishing faster than you can maintain, or your product changes so often that documentation, not blogging, is the real job.
A note on deleting things
People find deletion emotionally hard and technically easy, which is a bad combination. Redirect rather than remove, keep a record of what was retired and why, and give it a quarter before you remove the redirect. Nothing in an audit needs to be irreversible on the day.