It takes time to conduct a comprehensive content audit. Actually, it might even take up to a couple of weeks or months to thoroughly assess content on all of the pages from a website. The duration is however pegged on the website’s size and the objective of the audit. Most website owners still don’t understand why it is very important to create an inventory for their content. You may generate very creative content but if you don’t understand your current content, you may not be in position to come up with fresh content to meet your customer needs.
The significance of conducting a comprehensive website content audit is best understood by content strategist who know that it is worth the time and financial investment it attracts. Automating the content inventory with DYNO Mapper is not only another way to save your operational costs, but it can also save time. Businesses exist to make profits and therefore, every investment you make should be geared towards generating more income for the business.
Understand Your Content
The best business investments are executed with deep research and understanding of a customer needs. Your content is crucial, not only its existence but also the environment in which they were generated, published and modified and the objectives they were intended for. You truly have to know what works and what doesn’t. In the end, your end value is enhanced by the relationship between your content and customers and you must learn how best you can improve so that all your customers’ needs are met.
The fact is, most large and multinational companies do not remember to carry out a thorough content audit whenever they re-launch. As a result of this negligence, most companies have had to endure many days of endless work at a higher cost whenever there is need for content migration. Some companies conduct quick content inventories that lack detail, which in the end results in the failure to account for some important missing content In the end, a planned website launch may have to be delayed since some of the content may just be discovered towards the end of the project. Due diligence in content assessment at the start of a project does not only have negative implications for business but it might also result in very dire repercussions for the company’s finances.
Website content inventories and audits may be standard in most cases, but it is a bit tricky to work with information that someone else has generated. It is therefore advisable to carry out a content audit which will let you think for yourself and get a chance to customize the work to fit your needs; decide what should stay and what to direct to the recycle bin. You risk having critical content left out if you outsource this service to a different person because some content might only require some basic rewriting and not complete deletion,
Design Vs. Content
Understanding your content is very powerful. When working on a new website design, it is important to sufficiently consider the format and volume of content. If you have a template, they must be friendly to the content you currently have if you are to effectively fill in the content from the existing website. Sometimes, you may have to increase or reduce the number of pages, but such expectations have to be realistic in every sense. For example, you cannot be asked to compress 500 pages into a 100 page design. The template has to be customized to accommodate the content if you are to conduct serious and flawless migration.
Sometimes, clients may assume that they have the right quality content, only for a content audit to reveal that whatever they thought was the best is actually not effective and doesn’t meet expectations. In such cases, you may have to rewrite or craft a fresh set of content for the web pages if you are to deliver quality work.
Just the same way a professional doctor will not proceed to diagnosis without properly examining the patient, a content strategists should conduct due diligence to design an informed content strategy. Migration is a multi-disciplinary affair and you risk washing away many hours of serious work if you don’t spend sufficient time planning and understanding your content. Since creation of content inventories and audits has been simplified with the aid of website content analysis tools, there is no excuse why anyone shouldn’t understand a website’s content and how it relates to the overall goals and objectives.
Additional Resources:
How to Conduct A Content Audit, Donna Spencer
