Content Forensics Flowchart - The ultimate content audit decision-making tool

It's common knowledge that working on existing content is the fastest way to get results.

But 95% of people do this without any kind of process.

They just go in and ... do stuff, I guess?

This is not scalable, and it's certainly not effective.

When I started working on existing content audits (which are a staple of SEO & content work), I didn't have any process either.

So I built one.

That went well, I got great results.

I built a team.

And I was faced with a challenge.

My team wasn't in my head.

I knew how to get great results and audit content, but I needed a way to teach it to others.

That's the reason I created the Content Forensics process.

This is the exact process my agency uses when auditing content for clients - to make sure that we can deliver quality results, consistently and at scale.

Now, so can you.

I've decided to make our Flowchart available to the public, with a user manual and all the necessary information to perform a world-class audit of your content.

The Content Forensics Process

My process revolves around analyzing URLs one by one to determine what needs to be done.

This takes me around 5 minutes per URL, so you can audit your content in very little time.

Here are the steps:

• Pull necessary data (optional but recommended) - Ahrefs, Screaming Frog, Analytics, Search Console
• Determine whether a page is valuable
• Follow the flowchart to make the right decision based on the data (different paths depending on whether a page is ranking on page 1 or not)
• Assign one or several actions to that URL

Repeat that process for every URL (apart from the data stuff, that's a once-off thing).

That will give you a straightforward plan with a list of pages to:

• Refresh (short, 1 to 2 hours update)
• Rewrite (full content overhaul)
• Merge (take several pages and make them one)
• Add internal links to (from other relevant content)
• Build links to (not for the faint of heart!)
• 301 and 404.