The 5 Benefits of a Content Audit

If we’re honest with ourselves, we should be auditing our organization’s content more often than we do. A content audit, which is a survey and analysis of existing content, should encompass content that is online and printed, long and short, text, audio, video, and graphics. Or encompass at least the part of that whole that aligns with your organization’s current challenge.

If you’re having difficulty selling the need to conduct a content audit, this blog post is for you. If your organization has never conducted a content audit but you suspect it should let me help you understand what a content audit might reveal.

First, let’s take a look at the circumstances that might drive a content audit.

Content Audit Drivers

A content audit can have primary and/or secondary drivers. In other words, the need for a content audit can have an obvious attachment to a project, such as a website refresh or a rebranding effort. In these situations, a business would be foolish not to at least identify all affected content.

However, content audits can have less obvious drivers, too, such as a new product release or business merger. In these cases, the organization’s energy is focused on other efforts, and the principals might have to be persuaded to add a content audit to the mix. Also, these situations might require a more streamlined content audit.

Sometimes, both types of drivers are present. More on this situation later.

The lists below are not exhaustive but might help with the distinction.

Primary Drivers

Here are some primary drivers of content audits:

• Website refresh, including consolidation, improvement, and reorganization
• Rebranding of the organization, division, or product line
• Urgent issue that requires a recast of existing content
• Sustainability initiatives or technical transformations, especially if related to the storage of content or use of content tools
• Adoption of new content tools, ontologies, taxonomies, tagging systems, or similar content categorization systems
• Content quality improvement effort, including to increase accessibility

Secondary Drivers

Here are some secondary drivers of content audits:

• Mergers at the group, division, or organization level
• New product, service, or certification added to the organization’s portfolio
• Major revision to one or more products or services
• Product or service quality improvement effort
• Product or service consolidation effort
• Change of leadership or mission or reorganization of the workforce

Content Audit Benefits

During a transition, such as those listed above, the data collected during a content audit can bring peace of mind and a sense of direction by identifying and helping to prioritize next steps. Completion of those next steps can yield significant benefits for the organization:

• Fresher, more relevant and accurate content
• Better alignment of content with business and project goals
• Improved customer experience with content
• Improved SEO and discoverability of content
• Streamlined content-related activities, including content strategy and content reuse

Let’s dive into each of these briefly.

Improve Freshness, Relevance, and Accuracy

In some respects, the concept of “freshness” in content includes the characteristic of relevancy. Adrian Cojocariu of the Cognitive SEO blogsite defines “fresh content” as not necessarily newly published but “new in meaning and what the data behind it reflects.” Defined in those terms, fresh content is more generally relevant than other content on a similar topic. Thus, fresh content is more likely to be noticed and indexed by search engines.

But bear in mind that relevancy is in the mind of the beholder—in this case, your audience. So, a content audit gives you an opportunity to ensure that your content is still relevant to its intended audience and to its context. Ask:

• Is this content still useful to our current audience? (or is it outdated?)
• If so, is it most useful in its current format and current location?
• If not, what changes should be made to ensure our current audience has the most relevant content on this topic in the most accessible format and location for them?

Additionally, a content audit gives you an opportunity to identify content inaccuracies, including:

• Outdated content
• Broken, irrelevant, or outdated links
• Irrelevant or inaccurate data or graphics
• Outdated names, addresses, and phone numbers
• Branding errors
• Disconnected, unreferenced content (of any type)
• Mismatches between connected or cross-referenced content

Re-Align with Goals

In parallel with being relevant to its intended audience, content must meet its intended goals. These can be overarching business goals or smaller campaign or project goals. During a business transition, these goals can change, so your content might have to change, too.

Alignment of Purpose with Business Goals

All your organization’s content should have a purpose, or an intended business outcome, that aligns with an overaching business goal. That purpose typically falls into one of three categories:

• Inform or describe
• Instruct
• Sell or convince

One of the checks, then, that a content audit can make is to ensure that every piece of content within the scope of the audit still meets its purpose in the most effective way possible. Equally important, your audit should check that the original purpose of the content piece meets the organization’s current goals. Ask:

• What does this content achieve for the intended audience of our organization? Is that outcome aligned with the organization’s current goals? With current business targets or KPIs?
• If not, how could it be changed or improved to better or more effectively meet the intended purpose and current goals? (To this, you might have to add “within scope and budget.”)
• Or is there a similar piece of content that meets the same purpose better? And aligns with organizational goals better?

Alignment with Accessibility and Sustainability Goals

Remember that business goals can also include social responsibility goals, such as accessibility and sustainability. Improving accessibility inevitably improves customer experience (CX), as described in the next section. Your content audit can include checks for conformity to the WCAG 2.1 guidelines, for instance, to help your organization meet its accessibility goals and deadlines.

Additionally, a content audit can help your organization’s sustainability goals by highlighting areas for improved resource usage. This type of evaluation can reduce digital waste and thus contribute to a reduced carbon footprint. The content audit can target:

• Redundant or obsolete content that can be removed entirely from digital storage and tools. Less (content) is more (available resource) in this context.
• Missing metadata and keywords or broken links. These obstacles can hinder a customer’s ability to find content and thus drive up resource usage.
• Resource-intense content (e.g., video) that is seldom visited. If still useful, this content can be converted to a less-resource-intense format (e.g., PDF).
• Unnecessarily complicated content. This content can be simplified or streamlined for better CX and reduced resource usage.

Most notably, a content audit forestalls the proliferation of redundant content, thus preventing unnecessary use of digital resources and tools.

Improve CX

A positive customer experience (CX) with your organization’s content furthers business goals as well as branding and reputational goals. Sometimes, we know about CX with content only through the negative, for instance, a customer complaint. But, one set of data often included in a content audit–performance analytics–can help identify positive CX.

Analytics for online content, usually gathered through tools like Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics, should always be evaluated in the context of audience needs and business goals. (Note that many tools are available to help you analyze online performance; Google and Adobe happen to be the two I have used.) There is a myriad of metrics to choose from. So, select the two to three performance metrics that best capture what you want to evaluate with your content audit.

For online content, you want to ensure that you consider more aspects of a piece of content than just its latest hit numbers. For instance, examine where the users go after they view a certain page. Additionally, try tracking performance metrics over time; looking at a piece of content’s track record can often yield a clearer performance picture, especially for content tied to a new product or service.

Also, remember that if the scope of a content audit includes printed material, performance metrics might be limited to whatever the distributor (often the Marketing department) can provide. A supplemental survey might be necessary.

No matter the tool or collection point, a content audit should consider how well the target audience interacts with the content. The goal of collecting this data is to gauge expected interest and engagement against what the data reveals. Ask:

• Is the target audience finding this content?
• If so, how are they finding it?
• When they find it, are they responding to it in the expected way?
• Does the content take them on the expected journey? If not, where do they drop off, and why might that be?
• Is there a way to improve the customer experience with this content?

Including this type of analysis in a content audit can help an organization:

• Fix a broken or circumlocutory customer journey
• Improve a website’s navigation logic and/or clarity
• Find and fix broken internal links or redirects
• Uncover issues with access or flow
• Uncover missing or unclear CTAs (calls to action)
• Find and fix content that is confusing to or misaligned with the target audience

Improve SEO and Discoverability

Similarly, examining analytics or using specialized tools can help a content auditor judge how quickly and easily your important content is being found. This kind of analysis examines how well search engines index key content. It often focuses on keyword usage and tagging.

If keeping an edge in a competitive market is important to your organization, then it’s equally important to ensure that your content competes well. Ask:

• Which content pieces are being found most frequently by search engines?
• Is your actionable content being served up to your target clients as well and as often as your competitors’ content?
• Do the search engine results reflect an understanding of your content? Of your business goals?

This kind of analysis can help an organization make improvements on some of the meta aspects of its content. It can help you:

• Improve keyword usage and consistency (and avoid keyword cannibalization)
• Find and fix tagging errors
• Improve your organization’s taxonomy
• Strategize about backlinks

Streamline Content Development

As I mentioned earlier in this post, a content audit can yield a prioritized set of actions for the content within the scope of the audit. This allows content teams to focus resources on enhancing and developing impactful content. They can ask:

• What content activities will yield the best results for the least amount of energy? What are nice-to-haves?
• Do we have enough resources to accomplish the minimum?
• If we had more resources, what more could we do?

A successfully completed content audit can also help the team develop long-term goals and refine its content strategy so that they know what to focus on next and where to enhance existing skill sets.

One of the goals of a content strategy often is to identify content that can be reused or repurposed. Identifying reusable content building blocks (reusable modules) can save a lot of time and resources on future projects. (For more about reusable modules, please visit my blog post “Step One in Component Content: Common Modules.”) Identifying high-performing, well-received content can also kick-start or enhance content repurposing efforts: A popular blog post can become a video script, a podcast, or a social media thread, for example.

Finally, a successful content audit can become its own sales tool, helping to pave the way for a content team to conduct more content audits and to strive for continuous improvement of the organization’s content.

Additional Content Audit Tips

When you are planning your content audit, be sure to formalize your effort. Here are a few tips and reminders:

• Know your why: What do you want to accomplish with the audit? What is its purpose and scope?
• Start small: Test your tools and process. Start with a small project or a Proof of Concept (POC) and then refine from there.
• Capture all actions: In addition to the prioritized list of actions captured in the audit document, be sure to capture parking-lot actions that can be discussed later or added to a different project
• Have a single point of contact: Each audit should have an owner, someone others in the organization can contact with questions. List the owner’s name and contact information on the audit document.
• Apply the same criteria: Each audit for the same or similar type of project or for the same set of content should use the same analytical criteria. Following this practice will help the team track changes, see trends, and evaluate its content audit practices and tools
• Avoid assumptions: Avoid common pitfalls when pressed for time: Avoid assuming that content is too important to be audited. Avoid assuming that seldom-viewed content is useless and should be eliminated. (A data recovery procedure might not be viewed many times, but it could be vitally important to your clients.)

For additional tips on conducting a content audit, see my blog posts “Your Website Content: Audit Tips” and “How to Develop a Combined Content Audit and Plan.”

The content audit tools you choose are also important. One tool I offer for your content audit journey is my content audit template in an Excel document (see capture below). If you would like a copy of this template, please email me at debra@dkconsultingcolorado.com, and I will send you the template. If you also subscribe to this blog, I will send you an example content audit that uses this template. (Happy to send this sample to long-time subscribers, too; just email me for it.)

Happy auditing!