- A content audit template needs one row per URL and fourteen columns: identity, performance from Search Console and analytics, authority from your backlink data, quality from a quick manual check, and a decision with an owner and a date.
- Score before you decide. Impressions, clicks, position, referring domains and conversions tell you which pages Google already values; the quality check tells you why the rest do not. Decisions follow from the combination, not from taste.
- Expect roughly a third of a mature blog to need editing, a sixth to be combined into stronger pages, a tenth to go, and the rest to be left alone. The audit is worth doing twice a year and takes a day for a hundred URLs once the template exists.
A content audit template is a spreadsheet with one row per URL and the handful of numbers that decide what should happen to it. That is all it is, and most of the templates circulating online fail by having forty columns nobody fills in. The version below has fourteen, each with a source and a reason, and it has survived audits of blogs from twenty posts to two thousand.
This guide gives you the columns, where each number comes from, how to score pages in two minutes, the rules for deciding whether a page is kept, edited, combined or removed, a worked example from a 90-post blog, and what to do once the decisions are made. Rebuild it in any spreadsheet in ten minutes; the value is in the decisions, and the decisions follow from the numbers.
What a content audit template is for
The template answers one question for every page: is this URL earning its place, and if not, what would make it? Pages earn their place by ranking, by converting, by attracting links, or by supporting pages that do those things through internal links. Pages that do none of the four cost crawl budget, dilute the topics the site is trying to own, and sit in Google’s index as evidence of a site that publishes without purpose, which is a real problem on sites where a share of posts are already “crawled, currently not indexed”.
A good template makes the decision visible rather than making it for you. It puts the performance, authority and quality numbers side by side so that a page with 3,000 impressions and a quality score of two is obviously an edit, and a page with twelve impressions in six months and no links is obviously a candidate for removal or merging. The keep, kill, edit or combine framework is the decision layer; the template is the evidence layer underneath it.
The fourteen columns
Four groups: identity, performance, authority and quality, plus the decision itself.
Identity is the URL, the title, the publish and last-updated dates, and the query the page was written to rank for, which many older posts never had and which the audit assigns. Performance is impressions, clicks and average position from Search Console over the last three months, plus organic sessions and the conversions the page assisted from analytics. Authority is referring domains from whatever backlink tool you use and the count of internal links pointing at the page from a crawl. Quality is the word count and visual count as a proxy, and a one-to-five score from a two-minute human read. The decision columns hold the verdict, the owner and the date, because an audit without those is a report.
Where each number comes from
Twelve of the fourteen columns come from exports, which is what makes the audit a day’s work rather than a week’s. The URL list comes from the sitemap or a crawl with Screaming Frog, which also gives word counts, internal link counts and dates. Search Console’s Performance report, filtered to the last three months and exported by page, supplies impressions, clicks and position; export it with the query dimension as well, so that each page’s top query is visible for the target-query column. Analytics supplies sessions and conversions by landing page. Referring domains come from Search Console’s Links report for a free version or from a backlink tool for a fuller one.
Merge them on the URL, with trailing slashes and protocols normalized first, because mismatched URLs are the most common reason an audit shows zeros for pages that perform. The two manual columns, quality score and decision, are done last and in one sitting, since consistency between rows matters more than precision on any one of them.
Scoring pages
The quality score is a two-minute read against five questions, one point each: does the page answer its target query in the first screen; is it accurate and current; does it say something the top results do not; does it link to the pages that convert and to related guides; and would you send it to a customer. A five is rare and a one is obvious. Do the scoring in one sitting with the questions written at the top of the sheet, because a score given on Monday and one given on Friday drift apart otherwise. The score exists to explain the performance numbers: a page with high impressions and a low score is leaving clicks on the table, and a page with a high score and no impressions has a targeting or authority problem rather than a writing one.
Alongside the score, flag three conditions automatically. Under 20 impressions in three months after at least six months live means Google is not showing the page for anything. Zero referring domains and fewer than three internal links means the page is an orphan whatever its quality. And a target query shared with another URL on the site means the two are competing, which the combine decision exists to fix.
Deciding: keep, edit, combine, remove
Decisions follow rules first and judgment second. Keep pages that rank, convert or attract links and score three or above; leave them alone and spend the time elsewhere. Edit pages with impressions and a low score, pages that are out of date, and pages that rank between positions eight and twenty for a query worth having, because those move with a refresh and a few links. Combine pages that share a target query, pages that cover one subtopic of a stronger page, and clusters of thin posts that together would make one good guide; the strongest URL survives and the others redirect to it. Remove, with a redirect to the closest relevant page, anything that has had no impressions, no links and no conversions for six months and could not be combined into something useful.
Two cautions from experience. Do not remove pages that have links, however poorly they perform; edit or combine them so the authority survives. And do not merge anything published in the last ninety days, because Google has not finished deciding what it thinks of it. On a mature blog the split usually lands near the figure above, and the keep column is larger than teams expect, which is a relief and a reminder that the audit is about the other sixty percent.
Record the reason next to every decision in one short phrase: “shares query with X”, “out of date pricing”, “no impressions in nine months”. Six months later, when the next audit asks why a page was merged or kept, the phrase answers it, and the pattern across reasons shows which editorial habits created the problems in the first place.
A worked example from a 90-post blog
We ran this template on our own blog in late September 2026: 93 posts published over roughly eighteen months, with the exports taking about an hour and the scoring an afternoon. The performance columns showed the usual shape of a young blog. A small group of posts carried most of the impressions, a middle band ranked between positions ten and thirty for queries worth having, and a long tail had attracted almost nothing in six months. The authority columns found ten posts with no internal links pointing at them at all, which no amount of editing would have fixed.
The decisions came out close to the typical split. Six merges were identified where two posts answered the same query, taking 93 URLs to 87 once run; a digital PR services post duplicating a service page was marked for a redirect; a thin local SEO guide was marked to fold into the service page; and a group of overlapping guest posting and AI citation posts were left alone as distinct angles. Roughly a third of the posts went into an edit queue for missing subheadings, missing citations or depth under the floor, sorted by impressions so that the pages Google already shows were fixed first. The merges were scheduled for December rather than run immediately, because a third of the posts were under ninety days old and the data on them was not yet trustworthy.
The part of the exercise that changed the plan most was the combination of columns rather than any single one: posts with thousands of impressions and a quality score of two became the first week’s work, and posts with a score of four and no impressions became link targets rather than rewrites. That is what the template is for. The numbers were all available before; the spreadsheet put them in the same row.
After the audit
The template is only useful if the decision columns turn into work. Put the edit queue on a calendar in impression order, two or three a week, and hold the refreshed pages to the same quality questions that scored them. Run the merges one cluster at a time: write or expand the surviving page, move any unique material across, set the redirects, and update internal links so nothing points at a redirect. Request indexing for the surviving URLs, and check them in Search Console a month later to confirm the redirects consolidated rather than dropped the impressions. Then put the audit itself on the calendar twice a year, because platforms, competitors and the SERP keep moving and a blog that was clean in spring is not clean by autumn.
Edited and combined pages still need links to compete, which is where most audits stall: the content gets better and the rankings stay put, because the pages above it have twenty referring domains and the refreshed page has two. The refreshing old content process pairs each refresh with a handful of placements for exactly that reason. Our link building service runs the placement side for clients whose audits have already told them which pages deserve them.
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