Content audits, explained without the jargon

We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. Here is content audits without the vocabulary that usually surrounds it.

Writing for the web is largely an editing job: the first draft is always longer than it needs to be. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

The short version

Most sites have pages nobody has read in years. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

Why people complicate it

Most of the confusion comes from tooling rather than from the idea itself. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not.

Consolidate, update, or remove. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

Making it stick

Thin content drags down the pages around it. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

In practice

Pages that answer a real question outlive pages written to fill a slot in a sitemap. Three things worth confirming about content audits before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Consolidate, update, or remove — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.