Selecting Audit Criteria

Aligning Criteria and Business Objectives

When planning a content audit, it's crucial to establish criteria that align with your goals, audience, timeline, and budget. By establishing your goals up front, you create a framework for the questions you need to ask and answer about your content. The criteria you select should directly map to those goals and the way you define and measure the criteria will provide the answers to your content questions.

Before starting your audit, review your business objectives and user research to identify whether your content aligns with those needs. For example, you can assess how well your content supports a buyer's journey by mapping it against different stages of the journey. Additionally, overlaying business objectives allows you to prioritize content that directly contributes to revenue generation or other key goals.

Criteria Selection

Selecting criteria that will evaluate editorial issues, audience appropriateness, performance against competitors, and effectiveness will provide insights into brand consistency, content quality, and user engagement.

Note that different content types may require different criteria, depending on the audience and objectives each type is designed to deliver on. For example, promotional content typically differs from technical documentation in substance, tone and voice, presentation, and style. As expectations vary, both from the users’ and business’ perspectives, so should the criteria by which those content types are evaluated.

The scope of your audit will also affect which criteria you choose. If you are focused on a particular section of your site or a particular content type, you will need to choose the criteria most relevant to that content. If your scope is time-based, you will need to consider how to carefully choose only the criteria that you can both reasonably assess in that time frame and that will give you the most return on your audit time investment.

Categories of Criteria

I group content criteria into four categories: business purpose and value, user value, content presentation, and usability and interaction. Business purpose and value criteria assess whether content serves a purpose and supports the brand and messaging. Performance metrics, such as analytics data, measure content effectiveness in achieving business goals. User value criteria focus on relevance, appropriateness for different audiences, and engagement. Content presentation criteria evaluate the format, imagery, labeling, and structure of the content. Lastly, usability and interaction criteria consider the ease of use, shareability, discoverability, accessibility, and actionability of the content. Your goals and scope will be your guide to selecting which are best for your audit.

What to Do If You Miss a Criterion or Need to Change

If you realize you missed a criterion during the audit, there are several options available. Depending on the progress of the audit, you can choose to go back and re-evaluate previously analyzed content. Alternatively, if the issue only affects specific sections, you can focus on those areas for further analysis. Generic issues affecting all content can be addressed in a post-audit sweep. It's important to remain adaptable and address any missed criteria to ensure a comprehensive audit.

On the other hand, if you are partway through your audit and realize that the evaluations you’re making based on one of your criteria aren’t really serving the purpose of identifying issues or answering your questions, you might decide to abandon that one—as always, the goal is to be learning, not confirming what you already know or don’t really need to know.

Choosing a Rubric

To capture and communicate the assessment of criteria, using a rubric can be beneficial. Numeric ratings, controlled vocabulary, or simple yes/no evaluations can help ensure consistency and facilitate sorting and filtering of audit results. Including a table defining each criterion and its measurement in the audit document helps stakeholders understand the evaluation process. Additionally, incorporating a column for content disposition (review, retain, revise, or remove) and a notes section provides actionable recommendations based on the audit findings.

Conclusion

Selecting and defining criteria for content audits is a crucial step in evaluating and improving your content. By carefully selecting and defining your criteria and mapping them to the answers you need in order to make decisions, you can effectively measure the current state of your content and plan for improvement. Remember to consider different categories of criteria, such as business purpose and value, user value, content presentation, and usability and interaction, but tailor your selections to your specific context. Using a rubric to capture assessments and provide clear recommendations makes it easier to communicate audit outcomes and ensures consistency of evaluations during the audit process, particularly if you are auditing as part of a team.

For more on how to define and measure content audit criteria, see Chapter 8 of Content Audits and Inventories: A Handbook for Content Analysis