Making the Most of Your Content Audit

A content audit is a comprehensive review of the content in a website or family of websites. It’s usually conducted using a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, with the qualities, contents, hits and misses of each page painstakingly catalogued. The spreadsheet (called a content inventory) is then provided as a report.

Like other reports, it serves two functions:

• It shows your clients (internal and external) that you’ve done due diligence.
• It provides usable data to continue to the next phase of the project.

When conducting content audits, we content strategists often tout the first function without giving much thought to the second. Yes, we’ve exposed issues with the current website. Yes, we can pinpoint a few red flags in the content. But is the content audit usable? Comprehensive? High-quality from start to finish? Most importantly, does the content audit provide actionable, quantitative information?

After auditing a few large healthcare websites, we at HCB Health have learned a few strategies to improve the value of every content audit.

Decide What Your Goals Are

Are you redesigning a website or managing an existing site? The answer will tell you what kind of information you need to gather. Change your content audit template to match.

All content audits should tell you:

• Which content to keep, which to alter/improve and which to dispense with completely
• Qualitative analysis of content
• Successful interaction/architecture elements that may be reused

A content audit for site management should contain:

• Exhaustive interaction/architecture information
• In-depth metadata or linking information
• Content timeliness or expiration information

A content audit for site redesign should leave out these features. Remember that your content audit must be a usable report. By documenting too much information, you increase clutter. You also potentially create auditor fatigue, which can lower overall quality.

Do the Up-Front Work

Survey the site(s) before you start. Get an understanding of site architecture, content templates (if any are in use) and common page problems.

Then, document your findings. Architecture and templates affect the site as a whole; get critiques (or endorsements) of these elements out of the way early. Use a separate section of the report for these elements, and reference deviations from this in page-to-page assessments.

Make a list of common page and content problems, and the solutions you suggest — in short but understandable prose. You’ll use this to autofill your content audit and generate better quantitative figures.

Use Predictive Text to Your Advantage

Use predictive text to save time in your content inventory.

While Excel spreadsheets can be clunky to use, they offer one feature that should improve the time it takes to audit content: Predictive text. The feature works by detecting the first few letters you’re typing and presenting you with text you’ve used previously.

Remember your list of common problems and solutions for each content audit category? Reformat the list so each entry begins with its own letter. For example, content reusability entries might include:

• High-quality content. Reuse without editing.
• Irrelevant content. Recommend deleting.
• Medium-quality content. Revise and reformat.
• Poorly classified content. Move to another section.
• Some relevant content. Combine with additional content on other pages.

Then create a dummy list at the beginning of your audit spreadsheet with each option. When you find high-quality content, type H, select “High-quality content… ” and move on. Use an additional Notes column if more nuance is needed.

The predictive text strategy cuts down on auditor fatigue, and makes it easy to quantify the results of your audit: Out of 125 pages, 32 can be reused without editing, 12 should be deleted completely, and so on.

Give Yourself Enough Time

The last strategy is to ensure that you’re given enough time for the content audit. Set a manageable goal of number of pages audited per hour — say, 10 pages per hour. Set aside uninterrupted time to complete the audit, and recognize that content audit fatigue may set in after 4-5 hours in a single day.

Auditor fatigue is a major factor in the success of a content audit. It can impact the care with which you conduct the audit, and increase the chances of missing vital information. Give yourself extra time to notice patterns in the content, and ensure the consistency of your comments.

Final Thoughts

In Content Strategy for the Web, Kristina Halvorson made a great argument for qualitative audits over quantitative audits. The idea was to get away from simply listing pages and the items on those pages.

Today’s content strategists do a great job of evaluating the sites they’re auditing. The trick is making the resulting rich content inventories useful, usable and easy to follow. In the end, these steps will help generate better deliverables down the line, and more content audit work in the future.