Subject line: "We deleted 184 posts. Our traffic went up. Here's the spreadsheet."
Three weeks ago we ran a content audit we'd been avoiding for two years. We did it on a Sunday afternoon with two editors, a pot of coffee, and a single shared sheet. By the following Friday, organic traffic to The TLC Blog was up 41% against the trailing-eight-week baseline, and we'd cut our publishing calendar from twelve posts a month to eight.
What this week's letter covers
- The scoring rubric. Seven columns. Anything below a 4 is a candidate for either consolidation or deletion. We share the exact sheet, including the formulas we used to weight search intent against business intent.
- The deletion-versus-consolidation decision tree. Most "prune your content" advice stops at "delete it." We break down when to redirect, when to merge two weak posts into one stronger one, and when a 301 is genuinely the wrong move.
- The eleven-day measurement plan. Day 1 baseline, Day 3 click-through check, Day 7 indexing sweep, Day 11 verdict. We share what we expected to see versus what we actually saw — including one category where we were wrong and lost two weeks as a result.
What ships with this letter
A Notion content-audit template with the seven-column scoring rubric, a Google Sheet with the redirect-and-merge decision tree, and a 90-second audio walkthrough you can play while you make Sunday coffee. Subscribers receive the full version Tuesday morning; free readers get the framework on Friday.