The content lifecycle nobody plans for

Most content is never looked at again once it is published

I have opened content inventories where nobody could say whether a page was still true.

There was a service page describing an offer that had changed 2 years earlier. A blog post ranking well for a term the business no longer wanted to be known for. A campaign landing page still live months after the promotion ended.

Nobody had decided to keep bad content. It survived because nobody owned the decision to remove it.

The cost is easy to miss. A prospective client finds an outdated offer through Google and wonders whether you still provide it. An existing customer reads an old process page and emails to ask which version is right. Your site starts to hold several versions of what you do and who you serve.

Old content does not become harmless. It keeps making promises you may no longer want to keep.

A content audit is a judgement, not a list

Two different things get called a content audit.

A content inventory is a list of what exists. Every page, its URL, who is responsible for it, when it was last checked.

A content audit is the decision you make about each item on that list. You open the page and judge whether it still earns its place.

The Nielsen Norman Group draws the same distinction between inventory and audit. It matters in practice. You cannot audit what you have not listed, and a list on its own changes nothing.

Most published advice treats a content audit as search optimisation. You crawl the site, pull traffic and ranking data, then find pages worth improving. That is a reasonable use of the exercise. I think it is the less useful one for a small business, because it asks whether a page performs rather than whether a page is still true. It also assumes you have enough traffic for the performance data to mean anything, which I go into in what data cannot decide.

The version I run asks a different question. Does this page describe the business I am running now.

Public sector content teams answer 3 questions

Public sector content has to be managed as a living service. A page about an application, an eligibility rule or a deadline can cause real harm when it is wrong.

The better teams I worked with treated publication as the start of the work. That did not mean a heavy governance process. It meant 3 questions had an answer.

Each page has a named owner

Every page that matters needs one person who can decide whether it is still accurate.

'Marketing owns the website' is not an answer. In a small business the owner is often you. If you publish a page about a service, you are responsible for noticing when that service, price, process or positioning changes.

For a specialist business the owner might be the person who delivers the work. They are the first to know when a common customer question has changed, or when the old explanation no longer matches what happens.

Without an owner, a page only gets noticed when someone complains. Ownership extends past individual pages to anything that has to stay true in more than one place, such as your price or a claim about results. I set out how to record that in content governance.

A change in the business triggers the review

Public sector content is usually reviewed when something in the service changes. A policy update, a new application route or an amended deadline triggers a check of the pages that explain it.

That is a better trigger than a date arriving.

If you move from fixed-price projects to retained work, review the pages that mention pricing. If your best-fit client has changed, review the case studies and service pages built around the old audience. If a blog post keeps attracting enquiries for work you do not offer, decide whether to update it, redirect it or remove it.

A date still helps, because it stops forgotten pages staying forgotten. The useful trigger is a change in what you sell.

Retirement is normal

This is the question most businesses skip. They ask whether a page could be improved. They rarely ask whether it deserves to exist.

In government, retiring content is routine. A service changes, a campaign ends, a piece of temporary guidance is replaced. Keeping the old page live would create confusion, so it goes.

Deleting content is not an admission that the original work was bad. It is evidence that the business has moved.

The 4 decisions

Give every page one of 4 decisions. The point of naming them is to stop 'I will come back to this' being an option.

Decision	When it applies	What you do
Keep	Accurate, still useful, matches what you sell today	Record the date you checked it
Update	The page has the right purpose but the details are wrong	Fix the details and note what changed
Combine	It overlaps another page, or splits one answer across two	Merge into the stronger page and redirect the weaker URL
Remove	It describes an offer you no longer provide, serves an audience you no longer want, or brings traffic without helping anyone	Delete it and decide what the URL should return

A page that performs well in search is not automatically worth keeping. If it brings in people looking for low-value work you have stopped taking on, it is doing the wrong job well. A page with little traffic may be essential if it answers the question that stops a good prospect from enquiring.

Deciding what the URL should return

Removing a page is not finished when the page is gone. You still have to decide what happens when someone follows an old link.

If an equivalent page exists, redirect the old URL to it with a 301. Google treats a redirect to an unrelated page, such as your homepage, as a soft 404, so a redirect only helps when the destination answers the same question the old page answered.

If nothing replaces it, let the URL return 404 or 410. Google handles the 2 responses almost identically. A 410 states that the removal was deliberate.

Check your internal links before you delete. A removed page that is still linked from your navigation or from other articles leaves readers at a dead end, and it is the most common thing I find left behind after a clear-out.

A quarterly routine for a small business

You do not need a content operations team or new software. You need one list, one owner and a short session in the diary.

1. List the pages that matter. Start with your homepage, service pages, about page, contact page, case studies, and the 10 to 20 articles that get the most traffic or support sales. Record the URL, the owner and the date last checked. A spreadsheet is enough.
2. Review the list once a quarter, for about an hour. Put the session in the diary now. Do not try to inspect every blog post. Start with the pages people use to decide whether to contact you, and check each one against what you sell today.
3. Give every page one of the 4 decisions above.
4. Add a content review to your process when the business changes. When you introduce a service, stop offering one, change your process or shift your audience, ask which existing pages could now mislead someone.
5. Record why you decided. A short note does it. 'Removed because I no longer offer one-off audits.' 'Combined because both pages answered the same pricing question.' In 6 months you will know why the page disappeared, or why it needs another look.

An hour a quarter will not cover a large site. It will cover the pages that decide whether someone contacts you, which is where the cost of being out of date is highest.

What you delete is a positioning decision

Your content tells people what sort of business you are.

If your site still promotes services you do not want, it pulls in the wrong enquiries. If it holds 5 loosely related articles because publishing felt productive at the time, a reader has to work harder to see what you believe.

That is a positioning problem before it is a housekeeping one.

The useful work in an audit is rarely deciding what to create next. It is seeing the gap between the business as it is now and the business its content still describes. Your content strategy is set by what you stop saying as well as by what you publish.

So before you plan a new calendar, find out which pages are working, which need work, and which are quietly contradicting the rest.