Content audit & review
Most companies do not have too little content. They have too much and no idea which of it is working.
Why volume is not an advantage
Content accumulates over the years: posts from old campaigns, pages for services that no longer exist, three texts on the same topic from three departments. Each one made sense at the time. Together they form a picture nobody would have designed on purpose.
For search engines and AI systems that is a quality signal. A poor one. Where several of a company's own pages half-answer the same question, they compete with each other instead of with the market. And where content ages unnoticed, a proof of competence turns into a liability.
An audit therefore does not answer the question "what are we missing?" but the more uncomfortable one: of everything that is already there, what still holds up?
The questions we put to every piece
- Is this piece distinct, or a variation of something that already exists?
- Does it reach the audience it was written for?
- Does the tone match the brand?
- Does it carry the brand narrative or contradict it?
- Does it sit at the right point of the customer journey?
- Does it meet the SEO requirements for its topic?
- Is it worth citing for an AI system?
- Does it work on the device it is actually read on?
- Is it legally clean: copyright, disclosure, accessibility?
How the audit runs
Take inventory
Catalogue everything: pages, posts, downloads, metadata. Nothing can be judged until it is clear what exists.
Assess quality
Every piece against the same criteria: originality, audience fit, tone, structure, legal soundness.
Check visibility
SEO requirements and AI relevance: is it found, is it cited, does it actually answer the question?
Decide
Keep, revise, merge, delete. Every piece gets a decision. Deleting is one of them.
Prioritise
Measures sorted by impact and effort. What comes first, what later, what not at all.
Hand over
Findings and recommendations in a joint session, with the team that will act on them.
Audit or review: the difference
The audit is the one-off stocktake across everything. It produces the overall picture and the priority list. It makes sense before a relaunch, alongside a new positioning, or when visibility slips without an obvious cause.
The review works at the level of the individual text and keeps going: content is checked before publication or reassessed on a fixed rhythm. That keeps the estate current instead of cleaning it up every two years.
In practice, engagements usually start with an audit and move into a review. The finding is almost always that the problem was not the content but the absence of a process.
Content is increasingly cited by AI systems instead of being read by people. That is why we also check whether a text works as a source for AI systems: clear statements, verifiable facts, clean structure. Classic editorial work, with one additional reader.
Your contact
Senior Content Strategist
Senior Content Strategist, with netzstrategen since 2024. She came to content strategy from journalism, bringing a passion for deep research and an eye for the bigger picture. Her guiding principle: no execution without strategy first. She develops content concepts for B2B, technology, innovation, health and social media, thinks cross-media from the start and guides clients from strategic idea to cross-channel execution.
How much of your content still works?
In a free 30-minute introductory call, we look at what you already have.