When you transform a website content inventory into a content audit, you get to understand your website on a wider scope through the tool. With both quantitative and qualitative data, a content audit tool enables you to critically analyze your site’s content structure, from one page to another, how it is displayed and managed. For a comprehensive audit process, you need a tool like DYNO Mapper, that will not only help you create an inventory, but also proceed with the analysis of different areas for more evaluation in a complete audit process.

Who Should Carry Out Content Audits?

Almost anyone involved in creation, organization and maintenance of content would find great benefit from a content audit. In most cases, content audits are performed by content strategists, marketers, content managers, developers, information architects, SEO managers and taxonomists. Even though the whole auditing process can be handled by an individual, the best results are realized if conducted by a multi-disciplinary team. The purpose of an audit is to enable you to gather sufficient data so that you can make sound decisions. Therefore, the more experts you bring on board, the better for the overall results.

Significance of Content Audits

It is very important to understand and measure your content’s performance against user needs, business goals, editorial policies, performance factors such as SEO and use or overall web analytics. They add value to the site’s project and progressive maintenance activities by making it possible for you to strategically catalog and scrutinize the structure, consistency and patterns of your content. You will identify different definite opportunities to improve on content.

Content audits are especially useful for;

• Understanding whether your content follows the organization’s template, editorial guidelines, style and metadata guidelines.
• Establish a base for gap analysis from what content you already have and the content you would like to have
• Plan for content revision, deletion or migration.

Inventories and audits allows for consistent communication of a project throughout a site’s lifecycle. This way, they connect designers, stakeholders, technologists and content managers. Documentation aspects critical to a business survival like content type, structure, volume, relevancy and their performance against the business goals and user requirements are best realized through website content audits.

How Long Does an Audit Take?

The duration of a content audit varies depending on the website’s size and how comprehensive you would like the audit to be. A comprehensive and meaningful content audit is mostly time-consuming. You definitely will want to spend more time analyzing the data as opposed to manual information gathering and collation. You can significantly reduce the content auditing time by planning ahead, which will make the whole process even less painful with better results. Consider the following factors before you commence with an audit:

• Decide which website content analysis tool you would like to use, DYNO Mapper is highly recommended for this
• Outline the goals and expected outcome from the audit
• Determine what data, both qualitative and quantitative you want to gather in the audit

The data gathered from the audit can be analyzed based on a number of factors such as audience, goals, budget and timeline. It can be a simple process or a more complex one that will involve a myriad of factors.

Building Content Audits With Tools

You can carry out an effective content audit with human oversight. However, the same way you can use content analysis tool to enable you to quickly create a comprehensive list of your site’s content, you can also use a content audit tool to collect important data about the web pages leading to perceptive analysis. Computers are really good at processing data fast which will automatically translate to a faster and efficient evaluation process. Using the DYNO Mapper content analysis tool enables you to collect data for a meaningful audit.

Using the tool, you can view all the pages, page titles, metadata details, inbound and outbound links, a comprehensive list of images, videos and audios, among other categories. You can then decide what areas you need to pay more attention to during your analysis to improve your overall website content.

Content Migration and Content Audit

Migrating a site from a platform to a different one, website redesign or any major changes you can make on a site is not only a great opportunity to improve on your brand identity, but also a perfect time to decide what should be removed, modified and retained. Weigh your content against your overall business objective. The reason for the migration is very important, but one overriding factor is that you will need to accompany the migration with a comprehensive content audit. Whether you are moving because of changing technologies or you just want to change from an outdated website design, think deeply about how you can improve the overall user experience and plan about better management, maintenance and track changes.

Content Auditing for Long Term Tracking

Website maintenance can be comparable to taking care of a garden. You have to plan upfront about what time to water, weed the garden if you are to enjoy a bountiful harvest. Create an environment for your content to flourish by using website content audit tools to reap more from your site. Keep tabs on content dates, modifications, other content like pictures or videos and compare with the ever changing market dynamics. Then decide if time is ripe for deletion, replacement or modification of some content. This will go a long way in enabling you to offer a more consistent, updated and meaningful content to your customers and prospects.

The number one secret to business success is to understand the customer need and setting out to fulfill that need in a way that no one else can. You will not only manage to create loyalty, but also attract new customers in the process. 

Additional Resources:

The Step-by-Step Guide to Conducting a Content Audit - Single Grain Team

What We Learned Analyzing 595 Buffer Blogposts: A Complete Content Audit and Spreadsheet Template, Kevan Lee