Free to use, keep and change. Works in Excel and Google Sheets. In Google Sheets, use File, then Import, then Upload. If Excel opens it in Protected View, click Enable Editing so the formulas calculate.
What it does
A content audit decides, page by page, whether to keep, refresh, consolidate or retire what you have already published. List your pages, paste in a year of numbers from Google Search Console, and the template suggests an action for each one. You make the final call in the column next to it.
What is inside
| Page details | URL, title, topic or target search, published and last updated dates |
|---|---|
| Performance | Clicks, impressions and average position over 12 months, links from other sites, and conversions |
| Judgment | Whether it is still accurate, and which page it overlaps with, if any |
| Suggested action | Filled in by formula from the columns above |
| Your decision | A dropdown for the action you actually take, and a notes column |
A Summary sheet counts suggested actions against your decisions, so you can see the shape of the archive at a glance.
How the suggestion is worked out
- Consolidate if the page overlaps another. Merge the two and redirect the weaker one.
- Refresh if it is out of date, or if it earns impressions but no clicks. It ranks, just not well enough to be chosen.
- Retire if it has no clicks, no impressions and no links from other sites. Nothing is lost by removing it.
- Keep if it earns clicks and is still accurate.
The rules are deliberately simple, so you can see why each page got its suggestion. Treat them as a first pass. A page with even one good link from another site is usually worth keeping at the same address, however much you rewrite it. Should you delete old blog posts goes into when retiring is the right call.
What it takes to do properly
The template costs nothing. Filling it in honestly takes real time. Search Console exports the numbers quickly, but every page still has to be read to judge whether it is accurate, checked for links from other sites, and compared with your other pages to spot overlap.
| Pages to review | 100 |
|---|---|
| Time per page | Five to ten minutes, as a rough estimate |
| Time to fill in the template | One to two working days |
| Then the work itself | Merging, rewriting, redirecting and removing pages, which takes longer than the audit |
The spreadsheet tells you what to do with each page. Doing it without losing traffic needs care: a redirect to the wrong page, or a removed page that had good links, costs rankings that are slow to win back.
The full version: what we do for clients
This template is a basic version of our content audit. The full version covers every page, applies judgment where the template applies rules, and ends with the work done.
| Free template | Clear Mountain | |
|---|---|---|
| Finding every page | You list them | We crawl the site, so pages missing from your own list are found too |
| Performance data | You paste it in from Search Console | We pull clicks, impressions, position and conversions for every page |
| Links from other sites | You look them up | Checked for every page before anything is removed |
| Overlap between pages | You spot it | Checked across the whole site, by the search each page targets |
| The call on each page | Simple rules in a formula | Judged against our four content standards: unique, helpful, people-first and agent-ready |
| Doing the work | Up to you | Merges, rewrites, redirects and removals, done for you |
| Afterwards | Up to you | Tracked in Search Console, so you can see what each change did |
More on how audits fit into our content strategy work.