Building a Cannabis Content Audit Process

The four verdicts

Keep: the page earns clicks and its facts hold up. Leave it alone. Refresh: the page has impressions and a history, but its position is slipping or its information has gone stale. Update it at the same URL. Consolidate: two or more pages are splitting one query, so merge them into the strongest URL and 301 the others. Prune: no impressions, no backlinks, no business purpose. Delete or noindex. Every URL gets exactly one verdict, and forcing that choice is what makes the audit produce action instead of a report nobody opens twice.

Pull the data

Search Console does most of the work. Export page-level clicks, impressions, and average position for the full 16 months the interface allows, so seasonal cannabis traffic like 4/20 spikes does not distort the read. Add publish and last-updated dates from your CMS. On a large site, run a crawler to catch orphan pages that never show in the export at all. That is the whole toolkit; the judgment is the hard part, not the data.

Run the pass, step by step

1. Export pages and queries from Search Console, last 16 months, into one sheet.
2. Mark every page with steady clicks and current facts: keep.
3. Mark pages with impressions but slipping positions, or content that has aged: refresh.
4. Sort queries by page count, and where one query shows several of your URLs, pick the strongest page and mark the rest: consolidate.
5. Whatever is left with no impressions, no links, and no reason to exist: prune.

The worked example: a blog published twice

An audit I ran this year on a cannabis retailer found the CMS had published every blog post at two URLs, a dated path and a clean slug, and Google was indexing both. Search Console showed each post's impressions split across the pair, with neither ranking as well as one page would. The fix was mechanical: canonical to the clean slug, 301 the duplicates, one afternoon of work. No new content, and the strongest posts climbed once their signals stopped being divided. The lesson generalizes — audits mostly find plumbing problems, and plumbing problems are cheap to fix.

The judgment calls the spreadsheet cannot make

Zero clicks does not always mean prune. A Croptober harvest guide shows nothing in March and earns its keep in October, so check the full-year pattern before condemning seasonal pages. Legal and compliance pages follow law changes, not traffic; a state-rules page gets refreshed when the rules move, whatever its metrics say. And a page with real backlinks almost never gets deleted outright — redirect it somewhere useful and keep the equity.

Put it on the calendar

The first audit is the slow one. After that, each quarterly pass reviews three months of new data against verdicts already made, and it fits in a morning. Quarterly also means a core update never catches the site carrying two years of accumulated dead weight, which is exactly the state in which those updates hurt most.

Frequently asked questions

What data does a content audit need?

A Search Console export of pages and queries covering the last 16 months, publish and update dates for each URL, and a crawl if the site is large. Clicks, impressions, and average position per page are enough to sort most of the library into verdicts.

When should I consolidate instead of prune?

When two or more pages show impressions for the same query, they are splitting one ranking between them. Merge the content into the strongest URL and 301 the rest. Prune is for pages with no impressions, no links, and no business purpose.

How often should a cannabis site run an audit?

Quarterly works for most libraries. The first pass is the slow one; after that you are reviewing a quarter of new data against verdicts you already made. Legal-topic pages are the exception and get rechecked whenever state rules change.