What we have here is a case study from real life, with a shocking ending you won’t see coming.
The content audit brief said: we have a national fitness brand with locations across X states, a blog that’s been running for X years, and no clear picture of what’s working. The ask was to find out.
What followed was a two-month engagement that produced more clarity than the client had seen in years — not because the methodology was complicated or proprietary, but because nobody had done the work of asking obvious questions out loud. Here’s slightly anonymized account of what we found — and how.
The starting point
The site had roughly 1,200 indexed pages across three content types: location pages (one per gym), service and class landing pages, and a blog with maybe 340 live posts.
The blog had been managed by three different vendors over six years, each with a different keyword strategy and a different understanding of what the brand was trying to accomplish.
Before touching anything, I needed a picture of the current state. What was driving traffic? What was converting? What was ranking and for what?
It took about two weeks of crawling, pulling GSC data, and spot-checking a sample of posts to understand the qualitative range.
The first key finding:
22% of the blog posts were driving 91% of the blog’s organic traffic.
The rest either weren’t ranking, or they were ranking for keywords with no commercial intent, or for terms the location pages were already targeting, cannibalizing each other.
I want to note that this is pretty typical. 20% of the work driving 80% of the return is a ratio we all know well. But just because it’s normal doesn’t make it optimal.
The truth is that 100% of your content could be driving business. So why not shoot for that?
(Also see: Another angle on the Same engagemeNt.)
The four buckets Are Back
Every bit of content on the site went into one of four buckets.
Keep: Content ranking in the top 10 for relevant terms, with acceptable conversion rates. So About 15% of the blog. These got a metadata refresh and internal linking updates to capture what had been published since, but no really substantive changes.
Improve: Stuff with real ranking potential that was underselling — good keyword signals, decent authority, but with thin treatment or outdated information. That was About 30% of the content. Each got a specific improvement brief: what to add, to cut, what structure changes to make.
Consolidate: Content cannibalizing itself. Eleven different posts about “gym equipment,” none ranking because they were competing for the same authority. We merged the best elements into three definitive posts and 301-redirected the rest that way.
Remove: Content without traffic, without conversions, no ranking potential, no strategic purpose. This was the hardest conversation. It was also 28% of the blog!
Killing loser content — properly, with redirects or deletion depending on whether there were any inbound links — improved crawl budget and let the remaining content find itself a tighter, more authoritative cluster.
This is my idea of fun. This is fun for me.
Is it fun for you? If not, don’t fear. Just figure out what is un-fun about it, and strategize around that.
If you don’t like reading lots of blogs, say, look at them through the other lenses first to cut out the stuff you don’t even need to read.
The Twist nobody expected
The most valuable finding didn’t even come from the blog at all. It came from the location pages.
ah yes. The humble location page, every SEO writer’s fave.
location pages were ranking well for “[city] gym” terms, as you’d expect.
But when we looked at what users were doing after landing on those lovely location pages, a pattern emerged: they were navigating to class schedule pages at an unusually high rate, and then leaving without converting.
The class schedule pages were pulling them in, but not closing the deal.
The problem wasn’t even the class schedule pages, per se.
It was that they were purely functional — times, class names, room locations — with no conversion architecture. No social proof. No “why this class” copy. No nudge toward a trial signup. That’s an invite to bounce, so people bounced.
That one finding — which had nothing to do with the blog audit I was trying to do — led to a content refresh project on 80 class schedule pages that improved trial signups by a significant margin in the first quarter after launch.
And that is what a content audit actually is.
Not a report card.
A good audit is A map of where the gaps are, including the ones you didn’t know to look for.
If your content has grown faster than your strategy, that gap is costing you — and the real cost of bad content is usually larger than it appears in the budget meeting. Start here.
Jacob Clifton is the principal of Clifton Creative, an editorial strategy consultancy based in Austin, Texas. He spent fourteen years as a flagship staff writer at Television Without Pity and has written for Tor.com, Vulture, BuzzFeed News, and the Austin Chronicle.