Content Audits
Know what is worth paying for
Before you rebuild, rewrite or publish more, find out which pages deserve further investment. Established firms rarely have a shortage of content; the problem is knowing which content still has a useful job.
Service pages reflect old priorities. Articles cover the same subjects. Campaign pages remain online long after the campaign has finished. Important services may be buried beneath years of accumulated material.
My content audit services give specialist B2B businesses – firms whose websites grow faster than they can be pruned – an evidence-led basis for deciding what happens next.
An audit can help you:
- Protect pages that still attract useful prospects
- Stop paying to rebuild or migrate content nobody needs
- Find overlapping pages before commissioning more copy
- Give writers, developers and SEO advisers an agreed plan
- Direct your budget towards the services and subjects that matter now
You receive recommendations you can act on, supported by the evidence behind them.
When an audit earns its fee
A content audit is particularly valuable when:
- A rebuild or website move is approaching
- Several years of articles and service pages have accumulated
- The firm has changed direction but the website has not kept up
- Traffic is growing without producing the right enquiries
- Your firm is missing from AI answers
- Different teams or offices have published without one overall plan
- You want a smaller website without sacrificing useful search traffic
- An agency needs a sound brief before it starts writing, designing or migrating pages
Without an audit, a rebuild can produce a smarter-looking version of the same problem. Old pages are migrated because nobody has decided what to do with them. Duplicated material receives a new design. Gaps remain because nobody has reviewed the site as a whole.
An audit settles those questions before the expensive work begins.
If your site is small or the problem can be answered without a full audit, I will tell you. The scope should match the decision you need to make.
How I judge each page
I begin with the business decision behind the audit. You may need to decide what survives a rebuild, which services need better support or why existing content is failing to generate useful enquiries.
I then consider each page in context:
- What job is it supposed to do?
- Is it accurate and still relevant?
- Does it support work the firm wants?
- Can readers find it from the right places?
- Does it overlap with other pages?
- Is there evidence that people find or use it?
- What would be lost if it disappeared?
Where available, I use search, analytics, crawl and internal-link data. These figures inform the recommendation, but they do not make it.
A low-traffic page may support an important sales conversation. A popular article may attract the wrong audience or lead nowhere commercially useful.
Each recommendation therefore combines page-level evidence with editorial and commercial judgement.
For larger websites
Manticore keeps every page accounted for
A site with thirty pages can be reviewed directly. A site with hundreds or thousands presents a different problem. A fully manual review becomes expensive, while reviewing a sample leaves most pages unexamined.
I built Manticore specifically for larger professional services content audits.
It brings the available evidence together for every page within the agreed scope and preserves the reasoning behind each recommendation. I then review that evidence and decide what to recommend.
The result is a consistent page-by-page audit, with an explanation your partners, marketing team, writers and developers can refer to when the work begins.
What you receive
The output depends on the size of the site and the decision the audit needs to support.
For a smaller website, a concise written review with priorities may be enough. A larger audit may require a working workbook covering every page in scope.
Whatever the format, every page ends with one of five clear decisions:
Keep
Content that still earns its place.
Improve
Good content weakened by poor structure, thin detail or unclear purpose.
Merge
Overlapping pages or articles that compete instead of working together.
Remove
Outdated, duplicated or low-value content that no longer helps the reader or the business.
Create
Missing content with a clear job to do.
Depending on the project, I can also provide:
- The reason and supporting evidence for each recommendation
- An order of work showing what matters now and what can wait
- A migration or redirect list for your developer
- A brief for writers showing what needs rewriting or combining
- A view of the site structure and its missing internal links
- A record of decisions that can still be understood when implementation starts months later
The documents are shaped around the people who will use them. You will not receive a generic report full of warnings and no agreed next step.
Sectors I know well
A lot of this work is for accountancy firms, insurers and financial firms, law and professional-services firms and agencies– but the approach is the same for any site that’s grown faster than it’s been pruned.
What working together involves
First, we agree what the audit needs to decide and which parts of the website it should cover.
You provide the information already available. This may include Search Console, analytics or Semrush exports, along with the commercial knowledge that those systems cannot contain.
I carry out the audit, review the evidence and prepare the recommendations.
We then discuss the findings, resolve any questions that depend on the firm’s plans and agree the order of work.
I can deliver the audit independently or work with your existing marketing team, SEO adviser, copywriters, web agency or developer.
Practical questions
A few things people ask
A place for the questions that often come up before a content audit.
Is a content audit the same as an SEO audit?
No.
An SEO audit usually looks at how well a site can be crawled, indexed and found in search. A content audit may use SEO data, but it asks broader editorial and commercial questions.
Search performance matters. But it is not the only test.
Do we need to audit the whole website?
Not always.
Sometimes the most useful audit focuses on one part of the site, such as service pages, blog content, resources or pages linked to a planned rebuild.
The scope should fit the decisions you need to make.
Do you need access to our website admin area?
Usually, no.
I can often work from the live website, exported data, Google Search Console, analytics summaries, crawl reports, spreadsheets and shared documents.
Admin access may help in some cases, but it is not normally the starting point.
Do we need Google Search Console or analytics data?
No, but it helps.
I can still assess the live site, structure, copy, internal links and business context. Search and analytics data sharpen the audit by showing how people find and use the content.
The best audits usually combine both: evidence and judgement.
Will a content audit damage our search rankings?
No. The audit itself does not change anything.
The recommendations may include rewriting, merging, redirecting or removing pages. Those decisions need care.
That is exactly why an audit helps. It lets you make changes with evidence in front of you, rather than guessing.
Can you prioritise the recommendations?
Yes.
A useful audit should not leave you with a flat list of problems. It should show what matters most, what can wait, and what may not be worth doing at all.
Can you work with our SEO agency or web developer?
Yes.
Content audits often work best when editorial, SEO and technical decisions line up.
I can provide findings and recommendations your existing team can use.
Can you turn the audit into a content plan?
Yes.
The audit may show that you need rewrites, new pages, merged articles, better internal links or a more coherent publishing plan.
I can help turn the findings into a practical next stage.
Can you rewrite the content afterwards?
Yes.
Some clients want the audit only. Others want help putting the recommendations into practice.
That might mean rewriting service pages, improving existing articles, consolidating overlapping content, creating new pages or developing a more focused content programme.
Find out what deserves attention first
If a rebuild is approaching, your website has become difficult to manage or your content is failing to support the right work, send me the website and tell me what you need to decide.
I will tell you whether an audit would help, what it should cover and what you should receive at the end.
