The One-Question Content Audit
The Purpose-Driven Audit
I've previously written, here and in the book, about the importance of carefully selecting and defining the various criteria against which you plan to audit your content. It can't be stressed enough that any criterion you choose has to be directly tied to a question you need to answer about your content set and that has to be worth the effort of doing. It's easy to spend time capturing information that ultimately isn't all that useful.
I’ve also written about scope—both in the scope of your audit effort (which content you’ll be looking at) and in the scope of your criteria (the careful selection of relevant, useful criteria I just mentioned).
One way to scope both your content set and your criteria is to begin with one big criterion: purpose. If you can't establish the purpose for any given piece of content, you can potentially stop there and move on to other content. If a piece of content isn't serving a business or user purpose, it doesn't matter if it's current, usable, or grammatically impeccable—you don't need it.
Evaluating Purpose
How do you gauge whether a piece of content still serves a purpose? Begin by looking at your business and user objectives. Can that piece of content be directly tied to a specific objective? That objective could be anything from "inform site visitors about our corporate responsibility efforts" to “sell this product” or even “we need to keep it for historical purposes.” Your customer journey can be a helpful tool here—can a piece of content map to a step in your journey? If not, that’s a quick way to spot potential issues.
Site content serves many purposes, and as long as it is still relevant to your brand, business, or users, that's a start—now you can dive into evaluating the other criteria. Once you've established that you do need it, it gets added to the scope of your audit. Content may be necessary but still needs updating, rebranded, expanded, consolidated, etc. Flag that content for revision.
If you somehow have content on your site that is clearly irrelevant, out of date, or inaccurate (past initiatives, content written for audiences you no longer serve, content that is getting no engagement and isn’t salvageable, etc.) that may be an easy decision to remove and redirect.
When it isn't quite as obvious that the content either is or isn't serving a purpose, you may still want to see if it can be re-purposed—i.e., there's some element worth retaining but the content needs to be revised to be useful now. Flag that content for review.
Prioritizing Purpose
Any content identified as serving a purpose (I often have a column in my audit sheet that captures a goal, conversion, or customer journey step) then gets the full audit treatment, and any revisions to that content are highest priority.
Content that is neither obviously necessary nor unnecessary—that stuff that falls into the gray area where it could potentially be made useful—is secondary in priority. If you’ve kept your content reasonably current, this should be a small subset of the overall inventory and your overall scope. But before you spend any time on it, engage the necessary stakeholders to see why it’s still there and whether it needs work.
Preventive Maintenance
How do you prevent your site from being clogged up with content that isn’t serving a purpose anymore? The best way is to build into your content strategy the requirement that content maps to a business or user objective—and if you can tie some metrics to that, all the better. Knowing which content is mapped to which objective can also be a way to quickly find and update that content when something changes so that it stays relevant. Audits are a key aspect of content governance, but so is preventing issues in the first place.
Read more about content audit criteria and scope in the book Content Audits and Inventories: A Handbook for Content Analysis.