SEO content audit

Purpose

Assess a content library against search targets, evidence quality, audience usefulness, internal linking, and performance so each item receives a clear next action.

Scope

The skill covers inventory, overlap, freshness, structure, metadata, links, performance mapping, and update/merge/retire recommendations.

Excluded: changing pages, guaranteeing rankings, technical crawling beyond supplied data, and backlink outreach.

Data basis

• Content folders or inventory table in scope.
• Performance table, keyword list and audit criteria supplied as inputs or in scope.
• Brand and product facts in scope.

Result

An evidence-cited findings sheet and prioritized action plan.

Quality criteria

• Every finding cites a document, section, URL or row.
• Every inventoried item has a disposition or explicit data gap.
• Overlap recommendations name the affected items and target topic.
• Priorities explain expected value and effort without invented metrics.

Instructions

Separate observed performance from editorial judgment. Treat dates and metrics as supplied facts, and mark freshness only when a date or source supports it. Recommend consolidation only when overlap is material. Preserve useful content even when performance is weak if it serves a defined audience need.

Adapt before use

• Map inventory, keyword and performance columns.
• Define freshness, overlap, priority and retirement rules.
• Add brand, product and internal-linking guidance.
• Define who owns updates and what evidence is required.
• Keep source facts, analysis, recommendations, and unresolved questions visibly separate.
• Preserve stable document, section, page, sentence, URL, or row identifiers in every finding.
• Record assumptions about audience, channel, period, approval status, and data coverage.
• Treat missing guidance as an adaptation gap rather than inventing a company rule.
• Prefer a precise, bounded recommendation over a broad generic rewrite.
• Use supplied terminology consistently across the document, sheet, and any derivative copy.
• Do not infer performance, customer behavior, product capability, or market response from wording alone.
• Make every unresolved issue actionable by naming the missing decision, evidence, owner, or source.
• Keep factual claims traceable even when the final copy is concise.
• Recheck that counts, names, dates, and identifiers match across all outputs.
• Mark hypotheses as hypotheses and preserve competing explanations when evidence is mixed.
• Use the stated acceptance criteria as the final completeness check.