Unsure where to start with the redesign or update of your website, app or other digital channels? The older or bigger the organisation, the more content they often have. This can lead to:

outdated content,
lack of ownership on key pages, and
dead links.

Compared to startups, it can be harder to find the starting line for a content strategy or digital transformation project. This is where content audits come in. They give a bird’s-eye view of content, helping organisations create a long-term plan to follow, and clear metrics to measure against.

Content audits help you plan how you create and manage content. What type of content should be audited? Everything, from content calendar to website updates to social media plans and product releases. Auditing helps you find out where you stand, giving you clarity on how to move forward.

Key takeaways

Content audits break down your content into three areas: redundant, outdated, and performing. This can help give you the information you need to improve your content.
Content audits need clear boundaries and measures for success. If you make it too broad it can result in scope and time creep.
A well-developed content checklist ensures that no element of your content is overlooked.
Create content that is accessible by all groups of society.

What is a content audit?

A content audit is an analysis and evaluation of some or all of the content assets on a website or digital platform. The audit reviews and assesses the quality, relevance and performance of existing content to help you plan your content strategy.

Content audits are vital before any digital transformation or migration. They identify the strengths, weakness and gaps of your content. This gives you a wider view of your overall content structure and architecture to help you align content goals with business objectives.

How do content audits work?

Content audits are scalable based on the goals of the audit. They can focus on one aspect of a business (e.g. social media) through to the entire user experience.

Content audits are often broken up into different approaches with different measures of success. These approaches can help you develop your own personalised content checklist:

Inventory and categorisation: Categorising all existing content based on criteria (e.g. format, topic, and target audience). This is crucial before any analysis can take place.
Evaluation of quality: Assessing the quality and relevance of each piece of content. This could be for things like accuracy, readability, grammar and alignment with brand guidelines. Content that is outdated, redundant, or underperforming is flagged.
Performance analysis: Examining engagement criteria, such as page views, behaviour on site and conversion rates. This helps identify the most successful content and areas that require optimisation.
Gap identification: Identifying content gaps or areas where more content can help. This could be based on user needs, keyword research, or topics that are underrepresented.
SEO assessment: Evaluating the content’s SEO performance by looking at things like keywords, metadata, accessibility, UX and linking.
Content recommendations: Providing recommendations for content improvements, updates, consolidation, or removal.
UX: Reviewing the elements of a digital experience from a UX perspective. This can include things like HTML heading structures, image alt tags, links, content structure, user navigation (e.g. breadcrumbs) and other elements of the experience that might impact engagement.

What can a content audit achieve?

A content audit breaks down your content into three core aspects:

Redundant (Remove it)
Outdated (Update it)
Performing (Keep it)

Beyond looking at what’s working and what needs updating, audits help identify opportunities to improve your existing web content:

Consistency – improve consistency across your content and your brand
Discoverability – improve discoverability (e.g. SEO and GEO) of your content
Errors – identify errors or broken aspects of your content
Business opportunities – speak to aspects of your business
Usability – improve the usability of your digital experiences and optimise customer flows
Accessibility – define and update your level of accessibility
Strategy – create a clear path forward for your business and content strategies.

Consistency

A content audit creates the foundation for consistency across your entire digital ecosystem. It shows you exactly what you’re covering with your content and what gaps exist. This helps you avoid repetitions or redundant content while plugging gaps.

As a copywriting agency, we often see inconsistencies in areas like:

tone of voice
product naming conventions
brand alignment.

A lack of consistency is an indicator of a lack of clear content governance, with multiple stakeholders and product owners inserting their own voice into the pages they oversee. Organisations often lack clear permissions structures or governance strategies for their content management. This always leads to a breakdown in consistency.

Discoverability

A content audit can assess how easy it is for users to find your content. This could cover SEO and GEO performance through to the user experience.

You can use specific SEO auditing tools or website analytics to track the performance of your content. User research helps you gain understanding of how people interact with your content. Using these in conjunction with each other can give you a granular view of the discoverability of your content. It also gives you invaluable insights into how you can improve how your site’s visibility.

Errors

A content audit run correctly will result in errors being spotted. These issues or gaps can get in the way of a good user experience and reduce engagement. Some common issues include:

broken internal links that might lead to non-existent pages
pictures that are missing correct tags or alt text
missing micro copy, such as clear calls to action (CTA)
errors in your product information.

Errors like these can lead to a poor user experience and expose you to legal risks by displaying incorrect product information on your channels.

Business opportunities

A content audit will identify if your content marketing and digital strategies are addressing all aspects of your business. You may find you’re ignoring key elements of your product offering.

User research is an important part of finding out whether your informing users about your service or product. Things like adding links to a page, directing traffic flow to low-performing pages, and optimising content on-site can make a big improvement to how your business performs.

Usability

User experience (UX) research helps organisations prioritise updates and back up other insights from a content audit.

Combined with user research, content audits often lead to a range of improvements to an organisation’s digital experience. For instance, an audit might find that important content is only accessible through the footer of a website. This might lead to simple UX changes to improve engagement with that content.

Accessibility

You may already have engaging and high-quality content on your website, but can all your users access it? Approximately 1 in 5 of us live with a disability. This can be temporary (a broken arm) or permanent (vision impairment).

Screen readers are used by approximately 47% of people who own iOS devices. It’s important that your website follows the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1) to help all users access your content. This allows a more inclusive user experience, engagement and search rankings.

There is a range of easy-to-use and insightful digital tools for auditing the accessibility of your website. These tools can be used to:

analyse colour ratios
suggest linking strategies
check for broken links
identify image alt tags and text
check website responsiveness.

Strategy

Content audits are crucial before any content strategy development. From small-scale to comprehensive, a content audit helps you make informed decisions with your strategy.

More in-depth content audits can help you build out sophisticated and clear strategies for growth. Having a granular understanding of your content means you can prioritise and create multi-year strategies for your organisation. How do you know what your business strategy will be for the next five years without knowing how you’re approaching content over that same time period?

Case study: A web content audit for one of the world’s largest tech companies

Content audits are our bread and butter. Our work with one of the world’s largest tech companies has led to a complete overhaul of its design, UX and copy.

We ran a comprehensive traffic-light content audit of every touch point relating to the platform. We identified different ways to improve engagement through UX and copywriting updates. This led to an overhaul of the different pathways into the rewards program as well as changes to the platform itself.

One key part of a content audit is being able to clearly weight your priorities. We came up with an effective but simple-to-use scoring system for all touchpoints. Individual sections of the experience were assessed for:

readability
availability of relevant information
utility of the information and UX of that section.

This was our ‘content value score’. We also developed an ‘overall touchpoint score’ based on broader goals we developed for the content. These two scores helped our client address low-hanging fruit and prioritise their updates.

This content audit also lay the foundations for a new content strategy revolving around the significant philanthropic role of the points system. Without a content audit, this new brand positioning might not have been recognised and targeted as a long-term strategic priority.

Get started on your content audit

Everyone needs to know what content they have and what it’s doing for them. If you want to build out a long-term content strategy that you can measure against, then a content audit is your first step.

Regular audits can ensure there is a clear understanding of how a strategy is performing while keeping on top of things like content governance and tone of voice. Speak to our copywriting experts today to organise a content audit, or explore how healthy your content is with our new free content quality assessment tool.

Image credits: Illustration by pikisuperstar on Freepik.