What is a Qualitative Content Audit?
A content audit is the exercise of compiling a large list of each page, document, and image on your website and evaluating each piece of content for usability, knowledge level/readability, findability, actionability, audience, accuracy, value, message, voice, ownership, and other metrics important to your agency/business.
Suggested Reading
Content Strategy for the Web by Kristina Halvorson and Melissa Rach is a great, simple read that we recommend to everyone who manages a website redesign. As a part of the overall strategy, chapter 5 titled Audit focuses on Content Audits and goes into much more detail than this website.
Why Perform an Audit?
The main advantage to performing a content audit is to quantify to your management and stakeholders the magnitude of content currently hosted on your website and to become intimately familiar with what content you have and where it comes from—think of it as a State of the Union for your website. Understanding the ins and outs of yours website equip you to make informed decisions on what content to keep, remove, update, consolidate, create, or archive. They also equip you to go into the next step of the process (Performing a Card Sorting Exercise) with a firm understanding about the various content and audiences incorporated in your site.
If properly audited, we’ve seen 60-80% reduction in content. Some agencies have eliminated over 15,000 pieces of content which was out of date, incorrect, or unnecessary. While not the entire point of the exercise, less content is more manageable, is easier for both you and the public to use, and results in cost savings.
Who Should be Involved?
A team of subject matter experts from various areas of the business is the best choice for an auditing team. Since this process does not require a large amount of technical skill, the team can easily be broadened past the current web authors, marketing, and/or IT team(s).
The more auditors you have involved, the stronger and more unified the team and the quicker the process; however, when using a team, the auditing process, testing/evaluation criteria, and ratings system need to be very clear. For each criteria/rating, have “real world” examples created and build a communication plan which ensures than everyone is on the same page. It also pays to create a check-in schedule to monitor and make small corrections throughout the process. This avoids repeat work and makes for a more pleasant project.
Do I Need to Look at ALL of it?
If you have up to 10,000 pieces of content, the short answer is definitely Yes. If you have 25,000 or more pieces of content (or an extremely small auditing team), it may be best to look for large volumes of alike content and determine a different, abbreviated evaluation strategy for each set.
For instance, PDFs what all service one main purpose may all be required due a ruling and do not necessitate a content review as they are not to be altered. Having several strategies for special content allows you to spend most your time/effort on your core, more varied content. You may also consider a rolling audit whereby you stretch out the audit timeline, focusing on one set of content at a time. This may be more fitting for a smaller team of auditors.
Regardless of content volume or team size, a creditable evaluation should always be done to guarantee a high degree of quality and elimination of erroneous content.