A content audit is one of the highest-value activities a tour operator’s marketing team can undertake — and one of the most frequently postponed. The premise is straightforward: systematically review everything you’ve published, understand what’s working and what isn’t, and make deliberate decisions about what to improve, consolidate, update, or remove. For travel websites that have been publishing blog content for several years, the audit often reveals significant opportunities to recover traffic that’s been quietly declining without anyone noticing.
What does an audit involve?
A content audit systematically evaluates your existing content against defined criteria. Done properly, it answers questions like: which posts are driving meaningful organic traffic? Which pages have strong ranking potential but are underperforming because they need updating? Which older posts are outdated, thin, or now redundant because a better piece covers the same topic? What we’ve found is that most travel websites that haven’t audited their content in two or more years have significant untapped value sitting in posts that just need updating or consolidating.
Content audit checklist
Why am I doing a content audit?
Define the objective before you start. For most travel brands, the primary driver is SEO — improving organic traffic and ranking performance by making existing content better rather than just adding more. But content audits can also serve conversion rate objectives (identifying high-traffic pages with poor conversion rates), brand voice objectives (ensuring all published content reflects your current positioning), or housekeeping objectives (removing outdated information about trips you no longer operate or destinations you’ve moved on from).
SEO
From an SEO perspective, a content audit looks at organic traffic, keyword rankings, backlinks, and click-through rates from search results. For travel brands, it often reveals that a significant proportion of published content has never earned meaningful organic visibility — either because it was built around poorly chosen topics, has never been properly optimised, or has been overtaken by competitors with stronger content on the same subject. Clients often ask us how to improve organic performance without building more links or publishing more content, and the audit is often where the answer lies.
Content Quality
Quality assessment looks at whether content is genuinely useful and accurate — does it still reflect your current tour offering? Does it answer the specific questions your target customers have at this point in their research? Is the travel-specific expertise and practitioner voice evident throughout? For tour operators who’ve been publishing for years, early content often lacks the specificity and authority that your current experience justifies. Updating it to reflect that expertise is a straightforward improvement with meaningful SEO and conversion benefits.
What are my content audit goals?
Be specific about what you want the audit to produce. A ranked list of your top-performing content and your worst-performing content is a starting point. But the most actionable outcome is a prioritised action list: which posts to update immediately (high ranking potential, just needs refreshing), which to consolidate with similar posts (cannibalistic duplicates reducing each other’s ranking power), which to significantly rewrite (outdated or generic), and which to remove and redirect (irrelevant or damaging to your overall content quality signal).
Which tools or resources will I use?
Google Search Console provides keyword and impressions data for your existing content. Google Analytics provides traffic, engagement, and conversion data. Screaming Frog can crawl your site and export a full content inventory. SEMrush or Ahrefs provide ranking and backlink data by page. For most travel brands, combining Search Console data with a crawl export is enough to identify the highest-priority opportunities without requiring enterprise-level tooling. In our experience, the audit process itself reveals patterns quickly — within the first 20–30 posts reviewed, consistent themes usually emerge about what’s working and what isn’t.
Get in Touch
If you’d like help running a content audit for your travel website, get in touch with the Summon team. We work exclusively with tour operators, ferry companies, airlines and activity providers.