The EOFY content audit (what to keep, kill, or rework)

Right about now, your finance team is going through your numbers with a fine-tooth comb. Every expense, every invoice, every subscription you forgot you were still paying for. It's the one time of year a business actually stops and asks whether the things it's spending money on are still worth it.

Your content never gets that treatment.

It just keeps sitting there. Hundreds of blog posts, a website you wrote eighteen months ago, a year's worth of LinkedIn updates, a few dozen email campaigns. Some of it is doing real work for you. Some of it is actively making you look out of date, or worse, getting facts wrong on the internet under your name. And most businesses have no idea which is which, because nobody's looked properly since the day it went live.

So while you're already in the mood to review everything else before 30 June, this is the year to give your content the same scrutiny. Not a vague "we should refresh the blog at some point" feeling. An actual audit, with a method, that ends in decisions.

Here's how I'd approach it across everything you've published.

There are two very different jobs hiding in the word "audit"

This is the bit most people get wrong. They treat a content audit like one task, run the same checklist over everything, and end up with a spreadsheet that's somehow both overwhelming and useless.

But your blog and your LinkedIn presence are not the same kind of asset, and they don't need the same kind of review.

Some of your content is permanent. It lives at a fixed URL, it shows up in search, and it represents you for years. Your blog, your website, your guides. When something's wrong with these, you fix the thing itself. The asset stays, you just make it better. Call this the repair job.

The rest of your content is temporary. A LinkedIn post does its work in the first day or two (or few weeks if you know the LinkedIn algorithm) and then effectively disappears. An email lands in an inbox once and it's gone. You can't go back and fix a post from last August, and you wouldn't want to. There's nothing to repair. What these channels give you instead is a year of evidence about what your audience actually responds to. Call this the learn job.

Repair is about the content. Learn is about the patterns. Once you split your audit along that line, the whole thing gets clearer, because you stop trying to "fix" a LinkedIn feed and start mining it for what it's been telling you all along.

Let's take them one at a time.

Repairing what's permanent, starting with the blog

Your blog is almost certainly the biggest, messiest, most neglected thing you own. It's also where the repair job pays off most, because old blog content doesn't just sit there harmlessly. It works against you.

A post from 2022 that quotes superannuation rates, or references a piece of legislation, or names a "current" minister, or links to a tool that's since rebranded, is not a neutral artefact. Someone finds it through search, reads it, and walks away with the wrong information and a slightly lower opinion of you. In regulated industries, it’s embarrassing, but it's also a genuine risk.

When I run a blog audit for a client, I'm not eyeballing posts and going on vibes. I'm looking at four inputs for every single piece, because no single one of them tells you enough on its own.

Age

Not just "how old is it," but which zone it falls into. New content gets the benefit of the doubt. Genuinely old content gets looked at hard. The age of a post changes what you should even be worried about, which matters more than people realise. An unanchored statistic in a piece you published last month is probably fine. The same loose stat in a four-year-old post is a liability, because readers assume the older piece is settled fact.

Traffic

What's actually getting visited. Your analytics will surprise you here, and not always pleasantly. Some of the posts you're proudest of get nothing. Some throwaway piece you forgot about is pulling a third of your blog's traffic without you noticing.

Search data

‍This is the one most people skip, and it's the most revealing. Google Search Console will show you posts getting thousands of impressions and almost no clicks, which means you're ranking, people are seeing you, and your title is talking them out of clicking. That's not a problem with the content itself. It’s simply a headline you can fix in ten minutes for a real return.

Copy signals

‍The actual words. Dated stats, old rates, superseded legislation, named individuals who've moved on, product references that no longer exist, news framing that's gone stale. This is the correctness layer, and it's the one automated tools completely miss.

That last point is the whole game, honestly. Most "audits" on the market are SEO audits wearing a content audit's clothes. They'll tell you about keyword density and backlinks and bounce rate. They will not tell you that you're confidently stating a rate that changed two budgets ago. A real content audit checks whether you're right, not just whether you're ranking. Those are different questions, and in finance, fintech, super, and insurance, the first one is the one that bites.

Once you've got all four inputs for each post, every piece sorts into one of four piles:

• Keep. It's accurate, it performs, leave it alone. (Resist the urge to "improve" things that are working. You'll only break them.)
• Light refresh. Fundamentally sound, just needs a date updated, a stat checked, a link fixed.
• Significant update. Good bones, but the substance has drifted. Worth a proper rewrite because the topic still matters and you already have ranking history to build on.
• Delete. Yes, delete. This is the one people can't bring themselves to do, and it's often the highest-value move on the list.

On that last point, because it's worth sitting with: deleting content feels like throwing away work, so people don't do it. But thin, outdated, irrelevant posts dilute the authority of everything around them and give Google a weaker overall picture of your site. Cutting twenty dead posts can lift the thirty good ones. The instinct to keep everything "just in case" is the instinct an audit exists to override, and it's exactly why this is so hard to do on your own content. You're too close to it. You remember writing it. An outside read doesn't carry any of that baggage, which is the entire reason external audits tend to be more honest than internal ones.

If you want to actually try this yourself this month, here's the smallest useful version: export your blog's pages report from Google Search Console for the last six months, sort by impressions, and look at the top ten. Any post with high impressions and a click-through rate under 2% is a title problem you can fix today. Start there. That's the fastest content win available to most businesses, and it costs you nothing but an afternoon.

Then the website, which fails in a different way

Your website is the other permanent asset, but it fails differently from your blog, so don't run the same checklist over it.

Blog posts rot through age and inaccuracy. Website copy rots through drift. You wrote it to describe a business that has since changed. You've added a service, dropped one, moved upmarket, niched down, changed who you sell to. The copy didn't move with you. So now your homepage is describing a slightly older version of your company, and the gap between what you say and what you actually do is doing real damage at the exact moment a prospect is deciding whether to trust you.

The questions for a website audit aren't about age and traffic. They're actually about truth and clarity:

Does this still describe what you actually sell, to the people you actually want? Is the value obvious in the first few seconds, or do you make people work to understand you? Does each page have a job, and does it do it? Is there a clear next step, or does the reader hit the bottom of the page and just leave?

The trap here is the same one that makes blog deletion so hard. You can't read your own website like a stranger does, because you already know what you mean. Every sentence makes sense to you because you've got all the context in your head. Your prospect has none of it. This is genuinely difficult for content aimed at more than one audience, where you're trying to speak to a founder, a technical buyer, and a procurement lead on the same site without losing any of them. I wrote a whole piece on creating content for multiple audiences if that's the knot you're trying to untangle, because it's a structural problem, not a copy problem, and structure is where most sites fall over.

A website audit is the one job on this list where I'd most strongly push you to get an outside read, because the curse of knowledge is at its absolute worst on your own homepage.

Learning from what's temporary, starting with LinkedIn

Now the work changes completely.

You're not going to scroll back through twelve months of posts deciding which to keep or cut. They've done their job. The post from March is over. There's nothing to repair. What you're doing instead is treating a year of LinkedIn as a year of free market research that you already paid for and never read.

Pull your best-performing posts of the year. Not just by impressions though, by something that actually matters. Comments, saves, profile visits, follows, the ones that turned into a DM or a call. Then look for what they have in common, because that pattern is the most honest brief you'll ever get about what your audience wants from you.

Most people find something they didn't expect. The polished, carefully-worded thought leadership piece does nothing. The slightly grumpy observation you fired off in four minutes between meetings gets forty comments and two enquiries. That's not a fluke and it's not a reason to despair about the state of the internet. It's a signal. Your audience is telling you which version of your voice they actually came for, and your job is to listen instead of arguing with them.

So the LinkedIn "audit" produces a different kind of output. Not a fix-it list. A short answer to: what themes, formats, and tone consistently land, and what should next year's posting be built around? You're reverse-engineering your own strategy from evidence rather than guessing at one from scratch. It's the cheapest content planning you'll ever do, and almost nobody does it.

One thing worth checking while you're in there: timing. If your best posts all went out mid-morning on a weekday and your flops went out at 6pm or on a Sunday, that's not the content failing. That's you publishing into a sleeping audience and wasting the post. The first hour or so after you hit publish decides almost everything about a post's reach, so if nobody's awake to engage in that window, even your best material dies on the vine. Worth knowing before you blame the writing.

And email, where the data is cleaner

Email is the same logic, with cleaner data.

Your email platform has been keeping score all year, and the numbers are less flattering and more useful than anything LinkedIn gives you, because email engagement is a much higher bar. A LinkedIn like costs nothing. Opening an email, reading it, and clicking takes real intent.

So look at the year's sends and ask: which subject lines actually got opened? Which emails got people clicking through? And the big one, which ones made people do something? A response, reply, or an enquiry from an email is the strongest signal in the whole channel. It means something you wrote was worth interrupting someone's day to do something about. Find those and work out what they had in common, because that's your highest-value content telling you exactly what to make more of.

You're also looking for what to retire. The newsletter section nobody opens. The format that consistently underperforms. The send time that gets you nothing. Same as LinkedIn, you can't delete what you've already sent, but you absolutely can stop doing the thing that isn't working, which is the entire point of looking.

Email and LinkedIn together give you something your analytics dashboard never will on its own: a clear, evidence-backed picture of what your audience genuinely wants from you, in their own behaviour, not your assumptions. That picture should drive next year's plan far more than any trend or any competitor's content calendar.

What to actually do with all this before July

An audit that ends in a tidy spreadsheet and no decisions is just procrastination with extra steps. The point is the decisions. So here's the honest version of how much this takes and what to do with the time you've got left before the new financial year.

If you've got a small blog, a clear head, and a free afternoon, the Search Console exercise above is a genuine, do-it-today win. Start there regardless of anything else.

If your blog is large, or you're in an industry where being wrong matters, the correctness layer is where you'll want a method and an outside eye, because that's precisely the part you can't do well on your own content. That's what the blog audit exists for, and it's built specifically for finance, fintech, super, and insurance and other regulated businesses where a stale stat is actually a compliance problem.

If what the audit surfaces is bigger than a list of fixes, if it's really telling you that you don't have a content strategy so much as a pile of content, then the more useful move going into FY27 is to stop and build the plan properly before you write another word. Sometimes that's a one-off strategy session to get your head straight and your priorities sorted. Sometimes it's ongoing fractional content support, where someone owns the whole function for you on a part-time basis instead of you stitching it together between everything else. Either way, the audit is what tells you which, and that clarity alone is worth doing the exercise for.

But start with an audit. You can't plan a single sensible thing for next year until you know, honestly and specifically, what you're already sitting on. Everyone else gets this treatment before 30 June. Your content has earned it too.

‍Not sure where your content sits, or which of the four piles most of it lands in? Book a discovery call and we'll work out what's actually worth your time before the new year.