Content audits: a (sort of) guide
Content audits are ubiquitous in content strategy toolkits and are useful for all sorts of purposes. We’ve never written down why and how we use content audits, nor our procedures for conducting an audit, so here goes…
Content audits fall in the category of necessary busy work. Frankly, they’re often monotonous, tedious, and time-consuming.
However, routine content audits are crucial to a successful content strategy. Our content needs to change as users’ needs and our business goals change, and the best way to determine if content is meeting our changing expectations and those of our users is to look at and evaluate it.
It may help to think of your content as a process, not as a series of static words and objects. In his book The Tyranny of Words, Stuart Chase illustrates this idea with the word “apple”:
At the verbal level, it is labeled “apple,” and may be described by various characteristics—round, red, juicy, containing seeds, and so on. At a higher level of abstraction, we may class it as a fruit, higher still as a food. At this point, we are a long way from the event. The objective apple in December may be an appetizing thing. Not so in the following May, when it has become a brown and rotted splash. The “apple,” then, is obviously a process, not a static object.
Similarly, we can look to Abby Covert’s excellent book How to Make Sense of Any Mess to see how the information our content delivers isn’t up to us (and is likely in flux):
The most important thing I can teach you about information is that it isn’t a thing. It’s subjective, not objective. It’s whatever a user interprets from the arrangement or sequence of things they encounter.
If we think about content and information in these ways, we understand that the meaning of our content can change, even if we don’t change the content itself.
Content audits can be motivated by multiple needs:
- The scope of our content has changed.
- The content tracks a changing status, such as a legislative bill or annual budget process.
- The content contains footnotes or other references that need to be maintained.
- The audience for the content has changed, and we need to evaluate the content for that new audience.
- Content has accumulated over time, and we haven’t evaluated the aging content for relevance and accuracy.
- You've developed a content style guide, and you want to inventory departures from your guidelines.
- No one knows what we have or how it’s organized.
There are many other reasons to perform a content audit, but these are some of the main drivers.
The scope of your content audit will depend on the motivation for performing one. Are you auditing part of content or all of it? Our team usually conducts an annual content audit of our entire site, but we also run rolling, partial content audits when the need arises.
Here’s an example: When the U.S. left the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, we audited the entire site. Our motivation for doing so was driven by several factors:
- We no longer had the governance structure or content creators from the EITI era.
- We had to reduce the scope of the content to what our small team could support.
- We needed to figure out how much content was manually curated, and estimate the frequency and effort required to maintain it.
- We needed to determine which content we could validate for accuracy and which content we could not.
- We wanted to evaluate the content for gaps and alignment with user research results.
- We needed to figure out how to archive content we could no longer maintain.
- Our team was new, so we wanted to know what we had.
In the past year, members of our team have performed partial audits. Here are some examples:
- Audit revenue rates because they change over time.
- Audit our disbursements content because of legislative changes to how certain funds work.
- Audit Abandoned Mine Land Reclamation content for updates to balance and fees.
So how do we do this?
How you conduct your audit will depend largely on why you’re conducting the audit. Have you discovered your users are confused by jargon and acronyms? You might want to capture reading grade level and the presence of acronyms.
Do you have several instances of manually curated data that changes a lot? You might want to capture those instances.
Have you discovered that your information architecture is limiting the flexibility and organization of your content? You may want to audit, edit, or add keywords or tags.
Is your content accessible? Well-structured?
What about format? Do you have some critical content trapped in PDFs or other formats disadvantageous to users?
You’ll want to consider audit categories that enable you to (1) measure or otherwise evaluate the things that matter most to your users and organization and (2) allow you to sort your content assets according to the most significant editorial or content design needs. In other words, if your main objective is to eliminate jargon and introduce plain language, you may want to sort your content by reading grade level, word count, or your inventory of jargon. That way, you and your team can begin to prioritize your next steps.
Generally, content audits are time-intensive exercises, so you’ll want to try to anticipate what might be useful to capture. For instance, are you soon going to be migrating your site to a new content management system? Try to think about what you might want to capture about the current state of the content that might make that transition easier or better. Sometimes it’s useful to consult with developers, product managers, and other team members to get their input.
You’ve probably guessed it by now, but most content audits are in the form of a spreadsheet. There are several advantages to the format, including the aforementioned sorting capability. Pick a format that works for you, but keep in mind that others may need to access and interpret the results of your audit. Pick a format that can be shared with and understood by others.
To audit your content, you need a list of that content. Obtaining this inventory will depend on how your site is structured, and the level of detail will depend on the goals for your audit. For instance, do you want to audit your images independently, or in the context of the page on which they appear?
Sometimes you can create an inventory from your server or repository. Other times, you may need a plugin to produce an inventory. Depending on the size of your site, you might be able to use an online sitemap generator. Or if you or a member of your team has some programming chops, you can use an existing generator or build your own.
Avoid creating your inventory by clicking around your site and registering what you see. You may (probably do) have content assets that are no longer linked to on the site, but still show up in search results. You need to look at these, too.
Once you have your inventory, it’s time to dig in.
As stated above, what you want to capture or evaluate will depend on your goals for the audit, your product vision (here’s our product vision), your constraints (should you include content creators that may not be working with you anymore?). The last full-site audit I conducted captured the following characteristics of the content:
- Title
- Description
- File type
- Word count
- Reading grade level (Automated Readability Index)
- Tags
- Maintenance requirements (1 high, 5 low)
- Manually curated data (yes, no)
- Quality (1 high, 5 low)
- Number of broken links
- Archive as part of EITI
- Author
- Last updated
- Pageviews (from analytics)
- Accessibility audit score
- Notes
You may have noticed that some of these are subjective (e.g., “Quality”). That’s okay. That’s part of why you’re doing this! Not everything about your content can be quantified, just like not everything about your users can be quantified. Include whatever categories help you improve your content for your users and your team.
And now for the tedious fun part. It’s time to go through your content assets, one by one. I know, it’s 20-whatever and we have automated machine blockchainy things to do this stuff now. Yes, we do. And feel free to automate parts of this audit process, such as crawling the pages for reading grade level (since that’s already algorithmic). But you’ve been hired to do this work because of your expertise, skill, and strategic vision for the content.
Machine learning and AI might be on the rise, but those tools still can’t do what you can do. For instance, in the event of some kind of natural or social disaster for which you have related content (consider an example close to our work: an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico), no machine is going to be able to determine how to handle your content (and do we want them to?).
Meanwhile, you may have legacy content out there which could be misleading or otherwise problematic in the event of a disaster or emergency.
Your judgement is important here. Which means you need to have a look at everything.
Nice! Well done.
You’re probably tired of hearing this, but “what happens now” depends on the results of your audit (and the goals going in). 🙄
If you just wanted to get a sense of what’s there, maybe you’re done (and lucky). Either way, it’s a good idea to summarize your results and see if anything jumps out.
If you had known issues going in, such as “we don’t have the ability to maintain all of this content with a smaller team than we had before,” hopefully you now have some guidance on where to trim (or simplify).
Depending on how fussy you are (I’m guilty of being quite fussy), you’ll probably also have a list of “minor” issues to fix. For example, I recorded a note during my last audit that reads “Inconsistent use of title case; icons missing; check numbers with BLM for lease rates.” If you lack a content style guide, the implications of that omission may show up here. If you do have a style guide, you’ll want to register departures from it somewhere in the audit.
Finally, you’ll need to figure out how to apportion the work. You may have a massive list of content needs at this point, and it can be overwhelming. That’s why your goals and categories are so important. You need them to figure out how to proceed at this point, and what your priorities are.
You may also need help from your team. In that case, it might be useful to summarize and present your findings to them. Just use the right number of gifs when doing so.
This guide isn’t exhaustive, but it is, at this point, exhausting. I hope it’s useful to you when considering and performing your own content audit. And I hope you’re the kind of person who loves a spreadsheet or 10. ;)