Knowledge · Website Redesign
Content Audit Before Redesign: What to Keep, Update, Kill
Most redesign briefs treat content like furniture: pack it up, move it to the new house, unpack it. Wrong. About 30-40% of your existing pages are dead weight — they don’t rank, don’t convert, and dilute the topical authority of the pages that do. Here’s the audit framework that decides which pages survive the migration.
№ 01The 4-bucket framework
Every existing page is sorted into one of:
- Keep: Ranks well, converts well, on-brand. Port the content; restyle to the new template.
- Update: Has traffic OR backlinks OR ranks for at least one valuable keyword. Rewrite the body, port the URL, restyle.
- Consolidate: Two or more pages cover the same intent. Merge into one canonical page; 301 the others to it.
- Kill: Zero traffic, zero backlinks, no strategic value. 410 status (Gone), not 301. Lets Google deindex cleanly.
Run every URL through the framework with data, not opinion. The data sources: GSC (impressions and clicks, 16 months), GA4 (sessions, 12 months), Ahrefs/Semrush (backlinks and ranking keywords).
№ 02The data thresholds we use
The thresholds that decide bucket placement for mid-market B2B:
- Keep: 50+ sessions/month, 5+ ranking keywords in top 20, or a primary commercial page (service, pricing, contact). Plus on-brand body copy.
- Update: 10-50 sessions/month, OR 3+ ranking keywords, OR 2+ referring domains, OR a strategic page that should rank but doesn’t. Most pages land here.
- Consolidate: Two or more pages with overlapping intent (e.g. /services/web-design and /web-design-services). Merge to the URL with more authority.
- Kill: Under 5 sessions/month over 12 months, zero backlinks, no strategic value, not commercially important.
№ 03Why killing pages is a positive SEO action
Most founders resist killing pages. ‘It might rank someday’ is the instinct. The math says otherwise. A site with 200 pages where 60 are dead weight has its topical authority diluted across 200 nodes. The 140 that matter compete for crawl budget with the 60 that don’t. Google’s site-wide quality signal drops.
Kill the dead 60 (410 status), and the remaining 140 see ranking lift within 4-8 weeks. We’ve measured it across 30+ redesigns: median +6% organic traffic from the kill action alone, separate from any design improvements.
№ 04The consolidate move: where the biggest wins live
Consolidation is the highest-leverage action in a content audit. Most mid-market B2B sites have 3-7 pages that cover the same intent because nobody pruned over the years. /web-design, /custom-web-design, /web-design-services, /best-web-design-tampa — same intent, four pages, none ranking well.
Merge the body content into one canonical page (the one with the most authority, usually the oldest URL with the most backlinks). 301 the others to it. The consolidated page typically jumps 5-15 spots in 4-6 weeks because Google can finally tell which page is the canonical answer.
№ 05The audit deliverable: a spreadsheet, not a Keynote deck
What the audit produces: a single Google Sheet, one row per URL, columns for current bucket, action, destination URL post-migration, owner of the rewrite (you or us), and a copy-status field.
This becomes the source of truth for the 301 map AND the content production schedule. Most agencies skip the spreadsheet and produce a 40-slide audit Keynote. The Keynote is theater. The spreadsheet is the work.
⚠What to avoid
- Migrating all existing pages because ‘we already wrote them.’ Sunk-cost thinking. Half are dead weight. Audit first.
- Keeping a page because it has one inbound link. One link from a low-authority blog doesn’t override 12 months of zero traffic. Kill it.
- Killing pages with 301 to the homepage instead of 410. The 301 dilutes the homepage’s topical signal. 410 lets the page die cleanly. Use 301 only when there’s a real semantic destination.
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