The Audit Mindset

Excerpted from the Introduction to Content Audits and Inventories: A Handbook for Content Analysis

Audits are all around us. Consider a movie review. A reviewer (auditor) establishes a set of criteria related to the content, presentation, and production of the movie: the plot, acting, costumes, makeup, style, direction, lighting, and cinematography. The reviewer watches and rates the movie using those criteria in order to assign a ranking—stars, tomatoes, or whatever rubric the publication prefers.

We love to rate and rank content and experiences—movies, restaurants, books, social media posts, you name it. So why don’t we automatically apply that lens to the content we work on professionally?

Auditing content in a professional setting does not come naturally to most people. I began my career as an editor, so early on I learned to spot grammar issues, typographical errors, style inconsistencies, and generally uninspired writing. And those are all valid criteria by which to evaluate content. But anyone with an editorial eye can find those types of issues. What makes a content audit valuable is not only spotting the obvious, but diving deeper into the strategic and structural aspects of content to see where it fails to live up to its potential.

To do that kind of analysis you need to adopt what I call the audit mindset—that is, you need to bring a well-honed, context-aware, research-based mindset to the process of evaluating content quality.

If you’ve ever looked at a piece of content on a website and asked “who is this written for?” you’re using that mindset. If you’ve read a product description and felt frustrated when you couldn’t make a selection because the information wasn’t comprehensive enough, you’ve summoned your audit mindset. If you’ve tried to parse through the documentation for a feature in a piece of software you rely on and gotten lost in jargon and poorly explained steps, your audit mindset may have been activated.

To be effective, content has to be useful—and by that I mean useful both to its creators, by reflecting well on the business and inspiring new and repeat customers, and to end users who need to learn something, buy something, or just be entertained.

As an auditor, your job is to ask questions and dig deeper than the surface. Anyone can spot a typo, but an auditor can spot a typo and ask about the underlying processes that allowed that typo to be published.

Content creation and consumption rely on underlying processes—little on the web happens by accident—and those processes are fair game for questioning. A single typo is forgivable, but to be honest, doesn’t any typo cause you to question how well other information is being managed? And if it isn’t well-managed, is it correct, current, and relevant to you?

As more information moves online and businesses create more and more content, consumers are increasingly challenged to find the information they need. And many companies aren’t doing much to help them. Instead of including a printed manual with their products, they point users to a website or online PDF. And often content created by their user community does a better job of explaining how to use or repair a product than the product documentation.

Although some businesses may be happy to effectively outsource that support function to their user community, most would probably prefer to keep consumers on their site for the opportunity to build brand awareness, customer loyalty, and repeat business.

Competing for customers’ hearts and minds means delivering what they need, in the place and format they need it. And as your business objectives, products, and content change, it’s critical to know how well your content is performing. This requires you to adopt an audit mindset.

Getting to Know Your Content

You may not have created it, but now you manage it. Sound familiar? A content audit is a tool that you can use to learn about your company, its products and services, and how it communicates. It’s also a tactic for understanding how content is structured, organized, and managed.

When you audit a website, you analyze it page-by-page against a set of criteria. The audit can take weeks or even months depending on the size of the site and the goals of the audit. Therefore, you need to understand the value that an audit provides and why you should argue for enough time to complete one when you’re planning a project.

In most situations, your content was created over months or years by multiple people, and it reflects the market, audiences, and business objectives that existed when it was created. Those change and your content needs to reflect that. Using an audit to define current needs and align objectives lets you set a baseline against which content can be evaluated both in the immediate term to find what needs to be changed (or what is working) and over the long term to ensure that your content remains relevant and useful.

Unless you plan to completely replace all content on the site, every staff member involved with creating and managing it, and all the technology used to build and publish the site, you will be working within the constraints that existed when the current site was created. Understanding how that current state was arrived at helps you detect what is working and what needs improvement, both of which inform your strategy.

Getting Started

To manage, improve, and optimize your content, you need to understand it. For content to fulfill its strategic purposes it needs to be actively evaluated on an ongoing basis. Two key tools for doing that are the content inventory and the content audit.

Content inventories and audits are methods of analyzing a set of content from both a quantitative (inventory) and qualitative (audit) perspective. Inventories and audits are usually done either as part of a larger content analysis and improvement project or as ongoing maintenance.

The inventory establishes the scope and begins to reveal patterns in content quantity and type. The audit helps clarify and refine that scope, revealing a fuller picture of what needs to be addressed.

Inventories and audits are a means to an end based on these principles:

■  You can’t improve what you can’t quantify

■  You can’t fix problems without identifying their root cause

■  Simply gathering data without analyzing it is an exercise in futility

In Content Inventories and Audits: A Handbook for Content Analysis, I begin by looking at how to make the case for doing inventories and audits, since many organizations lack experience with these activities and since getting permission and buy-in to spend time and resources may require some justification. Then, I look at how to put together an audit project, including assembling the team and establishing the goals and scope of the effort. After laying that groundwork, the following chapters dive into the various methodologies for auditing content, from qualitative to competitive. I finish up with some advice on presenting findings to stakeholders.