Content Audit for a Trade Website: How We Went From 271 Blog Posts to the Ones That Actually Rank

In early 2026 this website had 271 published blog posts. About a hundred of them were generic articles on AI, GDPR, influencer marketing and e-commerce that had nothing to do with helping a Vancouver plumber get calls. After Google’s March 2026 core update, the whole site slipped, including the pages that mattered. So we did to our own site what we do for clients: a content audit. This is the method, with the real numbers.

Why a trade website needs an audit at all

Most trade websites do not have 271 posts. They have 30, written by three different agencies over eight years, half of them about topics the company does not even offer any more. Google evaluates a site as a whole. A pile of thin, off-topic or duplicated pages makes the good pages look less trustworthy, spreads the site’s crawl budget thin, and confuses which page should rank for “roof repair Vancouver”. Cleaning that up is often the fastest ranking gain available, and it costs nothing but a spreadsheet and some nerve.

Step 1: list everything

Export every page and post with its URL, publish date, word count, and twelve months of clicks and impressions from Google Search Console. Add the number of internal links pointing at each one. That spreadsheet is the audit. On our site it was 271 posts plus 30 pages; on a typical trade site it is under a hundred rows and takes an hour.

Step 2: sort every row into four buckets

1. Keep. It ranks, it gets clicks, or it is a service or city page that has to exist. Leave it alone or improve it. On our site: 78 posts.
2. Rewrite. The topic is right for your customers but the content is generic. Same URL if the slug is fine, otherwise a new slug with a redirect from the old one. This is what you are reading: the old post was a generic “how to do a content audit” article with no example in it.
3. Merge. Three thin posts on the same subject become one good one, and the old URLs redirect to it with a 301. On our site the 2024 cluster of twenty-odd “AI in marketing” posts became one post about AI for trade businesses.
4. Retire. Nobody searches for it, nobody links to it, and it is not about your work. Set it to noindex first so Google drops it cleanly, then remove it later. On our site: company news from 2021, posts from 2014, grant programs that no longer exist.

Step 3: the rules that make the sorting fast

• Zero clicks in twelve months and off-topic: retire.
• Zero clicks but on-topic: rewrite or merge, depending on whether the topic deserves its own page.
• Some clicks, wrong topic: keep noindexed for now and watch; the clicks are often bots or one-off queries you never want to serve.
• Two pages targeting the same search: merge into the one with more links, redirect the other.
• Anything with a date in the title older than last year: rewrite with a current angle or retire.

Step 4: do the technical part properly

Every merged or retired URL needs a decision: a 301 redirect to the page that replaces it, or a clean removal. Never redirect everything to the homepage; Google treats that as a soft 404. Update internal links so they point at the final URL rather than hopping through a redirect. Keep the XML sitemap to indexable pages only; a sitemap full of noindexed or redirected URLs tells Google you do not know your own site. Then request indexing on the rewritten pages and wait.

What changed for us

The number of indexed pages went down first, which is the point. Search Console’s count of indexed pages moved from 161 to 174 as Google dropped the junk and picked up the rewritten posts, the service pages started appearing for the searches they were built for, and the blog is now being rewritten one trade at a time for the Vancouver market, starting with the SEO checklist for trades and the review system. We will publish the traffic numbers when there are six months of them.

Doing this on a trade website

For a roofer or HVAC company the audit usually finds: five service pages that overlap, a dozen blog posts nobody reads, three city pages that are copies of each other, and a “news” section that stopped in 2019. The result of a half-day audit is a site with fewer, stronger pages and a clear map of which page should rank for which search. It is the first thing we do in every SEO engagement, before writing a single new page.

Book a free strategy call and we will run the four-bucket audit on your site in the first week and show you the spreadsheet.

Related guides

• The 21-item SEO checklist for Vancouver trades
• What a Vancouver trade business should blog about
• SEO myths Vancouver contractors still pay for
• SEO services for Vancouver trades

Frequently asked questions

How often should a trade business audit its website content?

A full audit once a year, and a quick check of the spreadsheet every quarter when the Search Console data refreshes. Most of the work is the first time.

Will deleting old blog posts hurt my SEO?

Deleting posts that get no traffic and have no links does not hurt; it usually helps, because the remaining pages get more of Google’s attention. Deleting pages that rank or have links does hurt, which is why the audit checks both before anything is removed.

Should I redirect deleted pages to the homepage?

No. Redirect each one to the closest relevant page, or let it return a 404 or 410 if nothing replaces it. Bulk redirects to the homepage are treated as soft 404s.

Can I do this without an agency?

The spreadsheet and the sorting, yes. Redirects, sitemap cleanup and the rewrites are where owners usually hand it off.