Content Audit

Why Perform a Content Audit?

A content audit can be seen as a two-part process. First, an audit helps you determine what content you have and what content you need to meet user and business goals. Second, it helps you assess this content's quality, relevance, and effectiveness. Together, these steps play a crucial role in your digital content strategy.

Overall, conducting a content audit will help you determine:

  • What content you currently have
  • Who the content is for
  • Why the content exists on your site (content purpose)
  • Whether your content has a clear call to action
  • Whether your content is written for the web
  • Whether your content needs to be made accessible 
  • Whether your content needs to be revised, deleted, or moved to a different site

Related to a content audit, content mapping is an activity you'll conduct after you've determined your information architecture (IA). With a content map, you'll note where your inventoried and new content should appear in your site structure (IA).

Completing Your Content Audit

A content audit can take some time, but it is critically important to your website’s success.

When you think about starting your content audit, it’s easy to find yourself getting overwhelmed. Just take it one step at a time and you will be done before you know it.

Content Audit Template (Excel)

Step 1: Find your content

  • If you have a way to get a list of all the published pages on your site (for example, exporting your XML site map), then use this to complete a content inventory.
  • If you do not, go through each page and write down that URL and the URL of every link on the page that goes to a different page on your website.

Step 2: Enter all the URLs on the spreadsheet in the “Page URL” column

Step 3: Add the page title for each URL

Step 4: Fill in the page topic

  • Ask yourself what the topic or purpose of the information on the page — this helps you group pages that have related topics.

Step 5: Fill in the page audience

  • Ask yourself who needs this information — Examples: current students, prospective students, faculty, staff, public, alumni, etc.

Step 6: Add the page analytics

  • Add the number of views the URL has received over the past 12 months. This will help you determine whether or not people are visiting the page.

Step 7: Add the page's 'last updated' date

  • When was this web page last updated? Determining the age of the content will help you assess whether the content is current and relevant.

Step 8: Evaluate the page content

When reviewing current content, consider these questions to help you evaluate its quality:

  • Is the content relevant to the intended audience?
    • Think about your end user and the situation in which they will be accessing this content. Does it answer their primary questions? Can they complete their primary tasks based on this content?
  • Does the content utilize important keywords in page titles, headers, sub-headers, URLs, and links?
  • Does the page provide clear and relevant calls to action?
    • What should users be able to do next after interacting with this content? Have you created ways to easily take this next step?
  • Is the page written for the web, supporting quick scanning for important keywords and calls to action?
    • Is the content chunked into easily scannable paragraphs?
    • Are important keyword frontloaded in paragraphs, sentences, and links?
    • Are you using bulleted lists, headers, and sub-headers to support scanning?
  • Is the content written in plain language, avoiding jargon and acronyms?
  • Does the content meet web accessibility guidelines?

Step 9: Prioritize next steps

Now that you have completed your content audit, it's time to prioritize the changes you'll make. Things to consider when prioritizing content changes include:

  • Is new or updated content required to ensure that the information you're providing is accurate, up-to-date and relevant?
  • How important is the update to a successful user experience?
  • How important is the update to supporting your organizational goals?
  • What level of effort is required to update or create the content?
  • What is the timeline for updating or creating this new content?
  • How will you handle content that has been deleted or moved? (notify stakeholders, broken links, navigation changes, etc.)

If you have created an information architecture site map, now is the time to create a row in your content audit to map your content to that IA.