Content audit: find what your pages are missing, page by page

You’ve published for months. Some posts bring visitors, most don’t, and two of them seem to fight over the same search. A content audit sorts that out before you write anything new.

This page gives you the method and a template, then shows how SemChat handled two parts of the job in my test, mistakes included. SemChat links are affiliate links, with no effect on your price or my findings.

What a content audit is, and when to run one

A content audit lists every page, notes what it’s for and how it performs, then ends with a decision for each one. Run one before a new content plan, after a traffic drop, or once your blog has more posts than you can remember.

Website content audit or technical audit: the difference

The technical SEO checklist checks whether Google can read your pages. A website content audit checks what they say. You need both; a free SEO audit covers a bit of each.

How to do a content audit, step by step

List every page you have

Export your pages from your sitemap or your CMS. For a bigger site, a crawler does it for you. Include every type: blog posts, service pages, categories, old landing pages. Leave out pages that should never be in Google, like the cart or the login page.

Note the question each page answers

Write one plain sentence per page: “How to start a sourdough starter,” “Our prices.” Then add its top queries and clicks from the Search Console performance report. A page with no clear question, or no query, is a candidate for change. Note the date of the last update too: a post with outdated facts belongs in the “improve” pile, whatever its clicks.

Keep, improve or merge

• Each page
  • Keep it answers its question and gets clicks
  • Improve the right question, a weak answer
  • Merge another page answers the same question

When two pages answer the same question, keep the one with more clicks and redirect the other to it. Then update your internal links so they point straight at the page you kept.

Content audit template to copy

	The page	Its data	Your decision
What to write	its address and the question it answers	top queries and clicks from your Search Console	keep, improve or merge, and the next step

Fill the data columns with your own numbers. Nothing here is an example figure.

Demo: a content audit with SemChat

I tested two SemChat skills that do part of this job, on French sites and the French market. The captures show the French interface.

Grouping keywords by intent

I asked SemChat to group keywords about social media automation for small businesses. It sorted them by intent, needs without brand names first, with an SEO difficulty estimated from the top 10 results.

Keywords grouped by SemChat around one need, without brand names. SemChat app capture, October 29, 2026 (French interface).

Don’t copy its volumes. Several were far from DataForSEO (Google Ads, France, October 29, 2026), and one dated keyword (“calendrier community manager 2022”) slipped in.

A page checked against Google’s top results

On one of my pages, SemChat found that the title and the main heading contradicted each other. True. It missed the Search Console file I attached, and its “4 titles out of 10 with 2026” didn’t match the results page pulled that same day (2 out of 8).

SemChat’s on-page audit compares a page with Google’s top results. SemChat app capture, October 29, 2026 (French interface).

What we had to correct before using it

The first keyword list was 15 brand names out of 20, with a “difficulty” taken from ad competition. I asked again, in French, with three fixes: an SEO difficulty, needs without brands, the source of the volumes. SemChat replied, translated: “You’re right on all three points.”

SemChat accepts the three errors pointed out and runs its keyword research again. SemChat app capture, October 29, 2026 (French interface).

The rest of the test is in my SemChat review.

Content audit tools, free and paid

• Google Search Console: free, the queries and clicks of each page.
• Screaming Frog SEO Spider: “Download & crawl 500 URLs for free” (its page, read October 30, 2026), enough to list a small site’s pages.
• SemChat: Free plan at €0; it sorts and compares in plain language, and you check. Its other content skills (brief, refresh, topic cluster) are on our SEO content tool page.

Once your content audit is done, track the pages you changed with a keyword rank checker, share the results with an SEO report template, and see how to analyze a website or the SEO audit checklist for the rest of the site.