What is Content Audit?

Use a Content Audit Tool to Boost and Speed Up Information Gathering

By turning your content inventory into a content audit, you get access to an authoritative tool that can help you understand your website better. With both qualitative and quantitative information, auditing your content lets you scrutinize and analyze deeper pages and gain a clear understanding about the organization, display and maintenance of your content. Using a dependable website content audit software such as DYNO Mapper, you can build the website content inventory, and start the analysis of various areas as you prepare for a comprehensive audit process.

Everyone in the organization that deals or manages content can conduct a content audit. The following are however the most frequent content auditors;

• Content managers and developers
• Marketers and content strategists
• Website designers and managers
• SEO managers
• Taxonomists and information architects

It is important to involve a multi-disciplinary team during a content audits because content audits can stretch beyond data collection. Rather, it is more about having the information sufficient enough to guide the decision making for the organization. You should therefore break down areas of expertise and engage a team that understands systems, technology and standards that are involved in a typical content lifecycle. Whoever is involved in the process gains much better understanding of the content and works towards improving the user experience.

How Important is Content Auditing

Content audits enable you to comprehend and evaluate how a website performs against set business goals, various user needs, editorial standards and various performance indicators like SEO, web analytics and content use. They therefore add value to the site and maintenance assignments by letting you to document and scrutinize content organization, patterns and consistency. You stand a high chance of getting the highest possible volume of targeted areas of content improvement if the content audits are customized to the company’s content goals.

They are very useful for helping you recognize whether the site’s content follows a specific template consistently, metadata guidelines, editorial styles, among others. They also lay the foundation for proper gap analysis between the content that you currently have on site and that you would like to have. Finally, it sets the pace for content revision, deletion and migration.

Content inventories and audits are important in a site’s lifecycle. They may appear as usual documents, but they are useful in connecting designers, stakeholders, technologists and content managers. It is therefore essential to cautiously document all aspects that you can derive from the DYNO Mapper content audit tool like types of content, quantities, content structure, and many more. The audit should serve as a tool to further look into the relevancy of the content, how they perform against the business and user goals and areas that require improvements. Gain more insight into web users’ interaction with your site’s pages by combining content audits with website analytics.

Content Auditing Duration

There is no specific time duration for conducting a content audit; it all depends on the size of the website, basically the number of pages. However, comprehensive and meaningful content audits are mostly time-consuming because the analysis section consumes most of the time as opposed to information gathering. However, you can cut the amount of time you use by strategically planning ahead. Also, make use of content audit tools like DYNO Mapper for data collection automation and set goals for evaluation of content long before the audit. In addition, determine the nature of quantitative and qualitative data you would like to gather from the audit beforehand.

Using Tools to Build Content Audits

You can use software to collect crucial data regarding web pages resulting in comprehensive analysis using automated content audit software. You can gather a myriad of information from a content audit using DYNO Mapper such as page urls, page titles, metadata, inbound and outbound links, and complete list of images, videos and audio files among others.

Website Migration and Content Audits

Moving a site to a different platform or simple website redesigns or any serious changes on the website is a great chance to take stock and get rid of waste. Irrespective of the reason you are migrating to a different platform, it is important that you understand what you currently have, what you would like to retain, delete or modify. Migration will not be a hassle if the content audit is up to date and you can also use it to keep tabs on your content over a period of time.

Finally, it must be stressed that frequent audits will go a long way in ensuring that you deliver the customer promise whenever they check out your site. Consistency is very important because you definitely don’t want to confuse your visitors. If you get this right, your business growth will be more definite than blinding keeping content on the website without proper understanding. 

Additional Resources:

How To Conduct A Content Audit, Rebecca Lieb

How to Conduct a Content Audit on Your Site, Neil Patel