12 Reasons to Audit Your Content in the New Year

It’s always a good idea to start a new year fresh and unencumbered by the things that have been weighing you down. Personally, I tend to clean out closets and bookshelves and donate unwanted items at the beginning of a new year.

For digital communicators, it’s a good idea to eliminate the unneeded and/or outdated content that may be bogging down your digital properties—clogging search, diluting your brand identity, dragging down your image, providing a less-than-optimal user experience for the people who interact with you in the digital realm.

Content audits may not be the most exciting aspect of digital consulting or content work, but things can get pretty interesting in the worst of ways when you DON’T audit your content!

Content audits are vital because—

  • A successful digital presence depends on useful and effective content.

  • You need to know what digital content you published in order to maintain and improve it.

  • We always find weird things on digital properties that haven’t been audited in a while!

A content audit is a typical early step whenever I start to refresh or redesign an existing website, or assist a client with content strategy or digital governance. Why? You have to know what content you have in order to make good decisions about what to do with it.

After an audit, there a few things that can happen to the content:

  • Some content may be kept as is.

  • Some will likely need to be revised or updated.

  • Some content will be eliminated because it’s no longer relevant, timely, or no longer meets business or user goals.

  • New content may be needed to fill gaps—for instance when there’s a new audience, offering, or strategy that needs to be supported by digital content.

You will not be able to make informed decisions about your content without actually reviewing it all. And let’s be honest—that can be a daunting exercise, especially when we’re talking about a lot of content. But content audits are a vital exercise in the maintenance and revision of any digital property—especially if it’s been a while since you did an audit. (And consultants such as me are here to help lessen the burden.)

Without further ado, here are 12 (more) reasons to do a content audit, collected from various projects over the years.

  1. Opportunities for better content practices. A frequent pitfall of large and multi-platform digital presences is a fragmented user experience, wherein content on similar topics is spread across different platforms and can’t be discovered holistically.

    For example, one organization had excellent best-practices content in its online community but not on its website. A content audit uncovered this issue and allowed us to create a process for mining the online community for new website content ideas, so those best practices would be represented in an authoritative form on the website. We also took the opportunity to implement a new taxonomy and new search engine, so users could find all the content on topics of interest, regardless of where it was published.

    Another client had great visual content and testimonials on Instagram that should also have been on their website. Auditing their content allowed us to identify this opportunity to repurpose social media content on the website and increase sales conversions.

  2. Embarrassing pages. One of my clients years ago had no idea there was a page on their website that contained only an image of Woody Woodpecker. It was never supposed to go live but had been up for years. Multiple clients have had greeked-in text (“lorem ipsum” placeholder content) somewhere on their websites. These content items were never supposed to be live, but they were and no one knew until we did an audit.

    Websites in general have gotten better, but when organizations neglect their websites for long stretches of time, content audits can feel like the reality TV show Hoarders. I am always wary of clicking the link that will reveal the digital version of mouse skeletons.

  3. Days of Future Past? There might be a page on your website that refers to something that happened in the past as though it’s in the future. Honestly, I find this on most of the client sites I work on. It may be in event content, but it can be anywhere. (Speaking of events, please change or unpublish event pages after the event takes place!)

  4. Out of site, out of mind, but not out of search. There could be content that is not linked anywhere in your navigation and was intended to be unpublished, but is showing up in search results. Sometimes content managers forget that removing content from navigation menus doesn’t mean it disappears. Make sure content that isn’t intended to be found is unpublished or deleted.

  5. Duplicate content. In one extreme example, our audit found three versions of one page, living in different areas of the client’s website, and all had conflicting information. Generally speaking, the culprit is having different people writing and publishing content without coordination. This happens in busy and decentralized publishing environments without strong governance practices.

  6. PDFs, PDFs, PDFs. Sometimes there are good rationales for having PDFs, but some organizations rely too heavily on publishing PDFs instead of easier-to-access and more mobile-friendly HTML pages. Often, the PDFs are old and forgotten. Auditing helps identify PDFs and other documents so you can get rid of the outdated ones, update the necessary ones, and repurpose the useful ones as HTML content where possible. For long PDF documents, an HTML summary on a web page is very helpful, for search and for the overall user experience.

  7. “Naked” documents. On nearly every site I’ve audited that had too many documents, some of them lacked branding—which means there was nothing identifying the source. Audits give organizations a chance to identify those “naked” documents and dress them with a branded header and footer showing provenance and copyright.

  8. Broken links. There are lots of automated tools that can help identify broken links on a website. I use these as part of holistic content audits and often uncover broken links pointing to content that no longer exists or that has moved.

  9. Content with no "owner." Staff turnover and position changes within an organization are reasons some content ends up without anyone responsible for its maintenance. Audits help turn up orphaned content and find new owners.

  10. Who dat? Sometimes in an audit, we find pages that contain contact information for people no longer at the client organization. It happens more often than you might guess.

  11. Broken design. Audits force us to visit all the pages in a digital presence, which means we see when pages have broken design elements, skewed or blurry photos, or are published in old templates that don’t match the latest site design or visual brand. Audits allow us to make sure pages with a poor user experience can be updated.

  12. New audiences, offerings, and strategy. Markets change. Audiences change. Business goals and strategies change. Products and other offerings change. That means content must change. Audits help us understand the scope of the content and its particulars, so we can see what existing content is useful in supporting current goals, audiences, and strategies; what content needs updating; and where we need new content.

So, take a deep breath, and audit that content. Your digital presence, and your organization, will be better off for it.

Need help getting started? Get in touch!

 

Photo credit: Orgalux on Unsplash

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