SCOPING YOUR CONTENT AUDIT

Don’t audit content unless you need to

Does that sound odd coming from someone who specializes in auditing content? Here’s the thing: content audits take time and resources. Depending on the size of your content set, the number of criteria by which you need to evaluate your content, and the resources you have to work with, an audit can be a sizable task. So it’s key to make sure that you’re focusing your efforts where they are most valuable—that is, on the content that actually needs to be audited.

REDUCING Your Scope

How do you know what needs to be audited before you actually start auditing? There are ways you can scope your efforts even before you develop the evaluative criteria that you’ll use to assess content quality and some of the data you can use to narrow your scope may be available in your content inventory. Depending on the data you are able to capture, you may be able to sort and filter your inventory to identify content that can be dealt with in bulk and removed from your audit scope.

Date

Depending on the type of content your organization publishes, currency may be a quick way to determine what content is a better candidate for archival than retention (and possible revision). An obvious example is press releases. Unless your organization has a legal or other retention policy that requires that every corporate announcement must remain publicly available for all time, generally you can set a date prior to which the content isn’t required to be live. In my experience, that cutoff date is typically around 3 to 5 years but note that there can be nuances there depending on the type of announcement. Consult your legal and compliance teams to determine what can and can’t be archived or removed. If you are required to keep certain types of information available in case of something like a legal challenge or audit, it may be fine to just retain the content on a non-public server somewhere so it can be retrieved, but it can be removed from your live site—and therefore, from your audit effort.

Content Type

Once again, press releases are a good example of content that may not require auditing effort. Typically, once released, they aren’t revised or rewritten. The same often goes for other types of corporate information that is “evergreen,” such as mission statements, location descriptions and maps (unless, of course, you move!), and other general information about the company. Blog posts or pieces such as case studies and whitepapers are generally evergreen unless there is a need for update over time. If they are relatively recent and you have no reason to think there are inaccuracies, they can be descoped. Here again, currency of the content may be all you need to assess to make a retention, removal, or auditing decision.

Content Topic

Many of the audits I’ve conducted over the years are for organizations that offer products and services, the availability of which can change. If you are deprecating a particular product or service, you can flag content related to it for removal, but of course keep in mind that you will want to have a redirect strategy that ensures that searches for those topics are appropriately redirected to the newer or replacement offerings. If your URL structure allows you to quickly identify and isolate those pages you can quickly mark them for disposition and remove them from your qualitative audit scope.

Similarly content relevant to a time-limited campairn or to a season—holiday promotions or seasonal sales, for example—are easy targets for removal both from the site and from your audit scope. If you can easily identify them in your inventory, you can note those and set them aside.

Analytics

I’ve been known to quote whoever first said “analytics tells you the what, but not the why,” and in general do believe that as a single point of data, traffic data isn’t necessarily a recommended way to make decisions about content retention. That said, in combination with other criteria such as currency and content type, it may be possible to set some rules. For example, if content type is x and analytics data is y, the content can be removed or archived, and again, descoped from your actual content audit.

Retaining Your Scope

So after you’ve figured out what you don’t need to audit, how do you decide what you do need to audit? You still may not need to audit everything —I’ll talk about rolling audits next—but you can use these same criteria to help decide what you should focus on and how to prioritize. As noted above, you may have content that’s so old that it’s definitely outdated or inaccurate and can be safely removed. On the other hand, you may be able to make some assumptions that your newer content meets your current quality and brand standards and is accurately describing your business, your products, or services. But what about all that content in the middle? It may be worth taking a close look at content within a particular time span, especially if there have been significant changes since then.

You can also use your analytics to identify the content that’s getting the most traffic and engagement—on the one hand, that may seem like an unequivocably good thing and safe to assume it’s doing its job, but that may not be the case and should be high priority for review. And again, there is all that content in the middle that you’ll want to include so you can see whether it can be improved on or is doing what it needs to do (not all content can be expected to hit high levels of engagement).

You will definitely want to include content related to your most important products, services, and audiences as well as any topics for which you want to be known, particularly if they are on fast-changing subject matter.

Rolling Audits

Even if content is current, accurate, and worth keeping, it doesn’t necessarily need to be audited frequently. Depending on the type of content (the corporate content noted above) and publication frequency (evergreen or rarely updated vs. frequently updated), some content can be put on, for example, a yearly audit cycle vs. a quarterly (your own audit cycles will vary depending on your content quantity, any changes to your business, and your time and resources). The point is that everything that you are keeping live on your site and available to the public needs to be periodically checked, but that timeframe can vary.

Less is More

The more you can do upfront to carefully define the scope of what your content audit will address, the more you can ensure that your precious time and resources are being applied effectively. Putting some effort into scoping down the list of content you will actually need to carefully evaluate pays off in time savings and helps reduce costs and risk of auditor burnout.  

For more on this topic, see Chapter 6, Preparing for a Content Audit.