The content audit, step by step, before a redesign
A content audit reviews every page of a site to decide its fate. Here is the six-step method, from URL inventory to action plan, as carried out before a redesign or a migration.
A content audit means reviewing every page of a site to decide, for each one, whether to keep it, update it, merge it or remove it. Before a redesign or a migration, it sets the list of pages to carry over, and therefore the scope of the redirect plan.
This article describes the method, step by step. Reading ranking data, which decides the fate of the pages that matter to Google, has its own article: analysing the content that ranks before a migration.
The method in six steps
1. Set the goal and scope
An audit does not cover the same ground when it prepares a migration, an editorial overhaul or explains a traffic drop. Write the goal in one sentence, then the scope: the whole site, one language, the blog, product pages. A site with several thousand pages is handled by template (all product pages together), an editorial site page by page.
2. Inventory every URL
Gather the most complete list possible: a crawl of the site (Screaming Frog or similar), the sitemap, the CMS export, Search Console pages and those that receive external links. Each source finds pages the others miss: orphan pages, old addresses still indexed, content published outside the menu.
3. Collect each page's data
In a spreadsheet, one row per URL: page type, title, last update date, length, Search Console clicks, impressions and average position, Google Analytics 4 sessions and conversions, number of linking domains, number of internal links received. A tool such as Semrush adds estimated keywords and a technical audit, but your own site's data remain the reference.
4. Evaluate quality
Figures tell you what works, not why. Read the pages: is the information accurate and up to date, does it answer the reader's question, is it covered better elsewhere on the site? Along the way, spot:
- duplicate content and pages without the right canonical tag;
- close pages covering the same topic: a semantic analysis of the site brings them out;
- important pages that receive few internal links: internal PageRank can also be worked on during the redesign.
5. Decide page by page
Each row gets one of four decisions: keep as is, update, merge into another page, remove. Note the reason and, for a merge or a removal, the page that will take over the address. The decision criteria based on positions and clicks are detailed in analysing the content that ranks.
6. Plan and follow up
The spreadsheet becomes an action plan: who rewrites what, by when, on which template. Decisions that affect addresses (merges, removals, changing URLs) feed straight into the redirect plan. After going live, keep the spreadsheet: it is the reference for comparing clicks and positions page by page.
The audit tools
A crawler for the inventory and the technical state of pages, Google Search Console for actual visibility in Google, Google Analytics 4 for usage and conversions, a link tool (Ahrefs, Majestic) for popularity, a spreadsheet to bring it all together. A suite such as Semrush combines several of these functions, with estimated data.
Swan comes in at the next step: once the pages to carry over are decided, it crawls the old site and the staging site and matches each old URL with the new one, to build the redirect plan.
Audit done? Swan takes your URLs and suggests the redirect plan for the redesign.
