Content audits: find out what you have before you make more

Who this service is for

Audits are for businesses that already have content, often more than they realise:

• Established trades and shops with years of blog posts written by different people, or by nobody in particular.
• Businesses that switched agencies and inherited a site full of pages they do not recognise.
• Franchise or multi-location owners whose corridor location is buried under head-office content.
• Anyone who has been posting regularly without seeing calls change.

If you have almost nothing published, skip the audit and start with neighbourhood articles or profile content.

What's included

• A full inventory. Every URL on your site, plus your Google Business Profile and active social accounts, in one spreadsheet you keep.
• Performance data. Search impressions, clicks and enquiries per page over the past twelve months, where data exists.
• A quality read. We read each page as a customer would: is it accurate, current, specific and useful? Does it still describe services you offer?
• Overlap check. Pages competing for the same question are flagged for merging.
• Local accuracy check. Names, boundaries and references to the corridor checked against official sources such as the City of Coquitlam's neighbourhood plan page and Burnaby's community plans index.
• A decision for every item. Keep, fix, merge or delete, with a reason in one line.
• A twelve-month editorial plan. Topics, formats and months, sized to what your team can actually sustain.
• A walk-through call. We go through the findings together and answer questions.

A realistic timeline

How results are measured

An audit's value shows up over the following months. We suggest you track three things, and we will set them up as part of the report:

1. Pages that bring enquiries. Usually a small share of a site. After the audit, that share should rise because weak pages no longer dilute it.
2. Search visibility on merged or improved pages, compared with their combined performance before.
3. Time saved. Fewer, better pieces should mean less effort per month for the same or better result.

What the report looks like

You receive two things. The first is a spreadsheet with one row per page or post and columns for its address, topic, traffic, enquiries where known, our decision and the reason. The second is a short written summary, usually five to eight pages, explaining the patterns we found: which topics earn their keep, which ones attract the wrong readers, where pages overlap, and what the twelve-month plan prioritises first.

Both are written so that someone who was not on the walk-through call can pick them up and act on them.

Mistakes to avoid

• Deleting pages with backlinks or traffic. Those get redirected or rewritten, never just removed.
• Auditing once and forgetting. A light review every year keeps the library honest.
• Keeping content for sentimental reasons. The 2019 post about a long-gone product has done its job.
• Ignoring the profile and social accounts. Customers see those too; an abandoned account looks like an abandoned business.
• Planning more than you can publish. A plan you keep for twelve months beats an ambitious one you abandon in March.

Getting started

Before you call, try a mini-audit of your own: list your ten most recent posts and ask of each one, "Did this bring a single enquiry?" If you cannot answer, that is the problem an audit solves. Our guide to writing local pages shows what good looks like, the pricing page covers costs, and the contact page explains what to send.