In approximately every work project I did an audit, now I cannot picture not including audits in a project work.
When I started my master’s degree in content strategy at FH Joanneum, one of the main subjects I had to deal in our first semester with was Content Audits. I will be honest, at first, I hated it, now I cannot picture any work project without it! It has become one of the main most natural/important things to do to, it helps you understand your content, where you stand and have future plans for a better more organized goal-oriented content. Even when I am searching some websites for personal reasons, I cannot help but notice and scan the website in a kind of small screening audit in my head.
The more you seek to understand your content, the better your other work will be.
—Sara Wachter-Boettcher, “Content Knowledge is Power”
What is Content Audit.
It is the organized process of sorting, reviewing and analyzing content on the website, this always starts with creating inventory as the first step, where you list all the website’s links, images, pages, and all other files and analyze it. It is a qualitative assessment of all your content on the website, this will provide a summary knowledge about the website’s content.
There is a lot of content audit, here I am talking about: qualitative and quantitative content audit or let’s say website audit and competitive audit.
After doing the website content audit you can recognize the gaps in the content on the website that are not serving our audience and at the end have a unified content strategy tailor-made to fulfill the website goal.
Reasons to do a website audit:
· Website redesign
· Website migration
· Maintaining a website
How frequently you should audit? “As often as possible”.
Paula Land, Content Audits and Inventories.
Some outcomes of an Audit can be: (Audits have so many outcomes this is taken from some of my recommendations in project work)
· Understanding what content, you need to improve and what content to delete from your website.
· What new content to create.
· Having a better unified strategy for creating and maintain content.
· Checking the links, backlinks, interlinks and broken links.
· Understanding what topics interests your audience best.
· Understanding your competitor’s strong content and how they are using it.
Content audit for me as a tool is the first step to understand my content, audience and competitors more that will help me in creating a better more focused content strategy at the end.
Literature and important book to read about auditing: (The handbook you will read several times and that will be your right hand in doing anything related to audits! Very recommended)
Paula land – Content audits and inventories