From Inventory to Analysis

By transforming a content inventory into a content audit, you gain a powerful tool in further understanding your website. Containing both quantitative and qualitative data, a content audit allows you to dig deeper, analyzing page-by-page how your content is structured, displayed and maintained. Content audit software can help you build your website content inventory and do initial analysis of areas for further evaluation in a full audit process.

What is the Value of Content Audits?

Content audits are critical to understanding and evaluating the performance of your content against business goals, user needs, editorial standards, and performance factors such as search engine optimization and content use or web analytics. They bring value to your website project and on-going maintenance tasks by allowing you to carefully catalog and analyze your content structures, patterns, and consistency. Content audits tailored to your organization's content goals will reveal the highest quantity of specific opportunities for content improvement.

Content audits are useful for

  • Identifying whether content consistently follows template, editorial, style and metadata guidelines

  • Establishing a basis for gap analysis between content you have and content you want

  • Preparing content for revision, removal, and migration

In From Content Audit to Design Insight, Christopher Detzi explains how inventories and audits also help communicate throughout a project or website's lifecycle. These documents can connect stakeholders, designers, content managers and technologists. He recommends documenting aspects such as content types, volume, content structure, and using the audit as a tool to further investigate content relevancy, performance against business and user goals. Combining content audits with website analytics, you gain insight into users' interaction with website pages.

 How Much Time Do You Need for an Audit?

It depends. The size of your website as well as the depth to which you want to evaluate the content are key factors in estimating audit schedules. Truly meaningful, useful content audits are often time-consuming. Ideally, you want to dedicate as much time and energy as possible to the analysis portion over the manual tasks of data collection and collation.

Planning ahead, there are many ways that you can decrease the amount of time and tedium that is associated with content auditing:

  • Using website content audit software to automate information gathering

  • Establishing goals for content evaluation before you audit

  • Determining what quantitative and qualitative data to gather in your audit

In deciding how to analyze content from your audit, always consider your goals, audiences, timeline, and budget. You may choose a scoring rubric as simple as ROT (redundant, outdated, trivial) to the more updated RAITES (relevant, accurate, informative, timely, engaging, standards-based) criteria from content strategy expert Rahel Bailie, to a complex process involving many individualized factors.

Content Audits and Website Migration

Moving a website from one platform to another, redesigning a website, or making any other major change to a site is an opportunity to take stock and remove waste. Just like moving house or offices, you want to clearly label and evaluate the usefulness of everything you take with you to your new location.

Most sites at some point are migrated from legacy systems to newer platforms to take advantage of new technology and enable better content management. Make your site migration-ready all the time by regularly updating the content audit. Your website is constantly changing and an updated audit can help you better plan, manage, and maintain it by offering you an at-a-glance resource for tracking website growth.

Using Content Audits to Track Content Over Time

Maintaining a website has been compared to tending a garden. It needs regular watering and weeding to thrive. Governance practices that allow you to identify areas in need of attention will help create an environment where your content can flourish. Tracking content dates and changes over time can help you have a picture of how fresh your content is and how often it is updated, so you know whether it is time to weed it out or give it some extra care.

Whether you're migrating a site or just maintaining it, taking the time to regularly audit will help you provide the most consistent, current and relevant content to your users. Conducting regular audits, known as rolling audits, allow you to regularly check in on the state of your content and address issues as they arise.