Content Audit
What is a content audit?
A content audit is a qualitative analysis of an organization’s current content, assessing whether the content is adequately addressing user needs, meeting business goals, and conforming to web content best practices.
Why should you conduct a conduct audit?
Where the content inventory lets us get an idea of what content we currently have, the content audit allows us to start determining the quality of that content. This information is crucial for making decisions around what to keep, what to delete, what to update, and whether any net-new content is needed.
Since “quality” is often subjective, it’s important that we are auditing content against clear business goals and user needs. It doesn’t matter how well written or beautifully designed a page of content is – if it doesn’t meet a user need or further an established business goal, it cannot be considered “high-quality.”
Types of content audits
High-level content audit
A high-level content audit provides a section-level qualitative analysis of whether content is meeting user needs, business goals, and web content best practices. This typically involves performing a high-level review of a at least 25% of pages within each section, and providing general observations on whether the current content is meeting the needs of a clients' users (as we understand them) and helping achieve the clients' internal goals (as we understand them). This is often appropriate at the beginning of an engagement, and is typically done either as part of a website optimization project (not a full redesign) or as a precursor to a more detailed content audit.
Comprehensive content audit
A detailed content audit provides a page-level qualitative analysis of whether content is meeting user needs, business goals, and meeting web content best practices. For smaller sites (e.g. 100 pages), this means reviewing each page. For larger sites (e.g. 500+ pages) this typically means performing a detailed review of at least 75% of pages within each section. This is typically done in the context of a large website redesign, re-platform, or content migration project - often preceded by a high-level content audit.
Download a free content audit template
Learn more about how a content audit can inform your content strategy.
