Content Strategy: The Content Audit

The content Audit or Content Inventory is a painstaking process that results in a surprisingly useful document. Going through your content and bringing yourself to really come to grips with it can be a scary process. Let’s not lie, it’s no fun and it feels as though you aren’t being productive when engaging in the activity.

This is of course where you’d be making a big mistake. By going through the process of auditing our content and blog sections, many things came to light. Things like inactive links, broken images and opportunities for further blog topics. It allows for the opportunity to improve older content and make it more relevant, by partially rewriting, relinking, or restructuring the content into better presentable shapes.

For a quick snapshot of your website’s content, you can do a quick Content Inventory with columns for only the basics:

• Page Id
• Page Name
• Source Content (URL where the content is situated)

This will provide you with a basic guide of what content you have and where it is located on your website.

Good, but not really good enough

To improve the Strategic value of your Audit process, it is important to include further information on your content. Remember that the Audit process, while time consuming and mind numbing, provides the information for your Analysis phase, building the basis for your strategic decision making and new Content Strategy – The ultimate goal of the entire  3 Step Content Strategy process.

More Information that can be documented during the Content Phase includes:

Author, Approver and Publisher

• For small websites this might be the same person, but for bigger sites their might be a big team of people and people from different departments involved in the content creation process. Documenting who is responsible can help the process when you need to ask questions surrounding the content.

• Dead links frustrate the reader, damages their confidence in you and is bad for SEO. Use this opportunity to go over every link in your content, and make sure that they are: a) Alive, b) Relevant, c) Well Described
• Why Links should be Well Described: Links should not repeat the same text to link to different pages. Usually this is a problem where a link is non-descriptive. Once again, if your links are poorly described – Bad SEO

• Content has to serve a well defined purpose. It has to support or further your business goals and be of value to your users.
• Document this usefulness with either a 1 to 5 rating scale, or Writing a short description of how you see the content to be useful.

Analytics

This is important to note. Utilize your web analytics reports from Google Analytics to document the metrics that are important to your business goals. Metrics that are insightful include Page Views and the bounce rate for each page

SEO

• SEO considerations include:
• Keywords. Document the Keywords used on each page and evaluate compared to your list of targeted keywords and the appropriate keyword density of each page
• Metadata. The metadata on your pages allow Search Engines to index your content. Review the metadata, including the Tags and page descriptions.

• For the Blog Audit of each individual Blogpost, I recommend noting the Custom Excerpt for Each Blogpost. This is often overlooked by Content Creators. The Custom Excerpt is a short summary of your post content and if not entered WordPress will generate the excerpt for you based on the first 55 words in your post
• Why is this important? Excerpts have a way of cropping up all over the place and can often be the first thing someone (including our robot friends, the search engines) see after the post title. They populate RSS feeds, archives and Search engine results. They are important.

Once you’re done with the Content Audit you’ll be much better informed on what content you have. You would’ve no doubt identified problems and maybe some points that you’ve been doing well. And you’ll have some ideas on how to proceed, what must change and what content can be repurposed.

I found this myself when I started our Blog Audit. It is not the most fun to do, but it enforces you to enage with your websites content, see it for what it is and make it your own.

The seeds will now be planted and you are ready for the Analysis phase.