You have a thriving website, are adding new content regularly, and are seeing a steady increase of users.
You feel comfortable with the content you are creating, but what about the massive library of content that’s already been posted?
Ongoing maintenance of old content is an often overlooked aspect of website management. If you produce new content often, it won’t take long to accumulate a trail of old content. What do you do with it?
A content audit is the best way to review and manage everything you have on your site. What is it? In simple terms, it’s organizing a catalog of every webpage on your site and then reviewing each one. This may seem like an overwhelming task, especially if you have a large site with thousands of pages. But it’s an important part of maintaining a top-notch web presence.
Getting Started: Planning and Setup
Strategy and Goals
What is the primary purpose of your audit? For instance, is it:
- For regular content maintenance?
- To target outdated or troublesome content?
- An assignment from your leadership with specific directives?
- In preparation for an information architecture redesign or a migration project?
Having a clear picture of your high-level objectives will be important to both inform your tactical process throughout the audit, as well as define the core principles to refer to if you need to make strategic decisions.
Stakeholder Involvement
It’s likely you will have pages that are owned or influenced by stakeholders outside of your team. Think through which stakeholders you may need to involve in the planning process. They might have specific needs or goals that you need to account for.
Audit Criteria
Based on your high-level objectives and stakeholder needs, determine the most important data and observations to capture as you review your pages. Standard metadata such as page title, URL and page description should be a part of this, as well as the author and publishing date, if applicable.
You may wish to include the page type, such as whether the page is a blog post, a navigational landing page, an e-commerce page, and so on. If your team has certain categorizations for your content, or other notable KPI’s, include those too (for example, the quantity and quality of call-to-action links on the page). If you’re doing a more technical audit, you can even include numerical data such as views, visitors or page speed — it’s really up to you.
Audit Tools
Decide how you want to gather and store your list of pages. A spreadsheet is the most straightforward way to do this. Take advantage of cloud-based software that allows for easy sharing and collaboration, as well as simultaneous editing by multiple users. An audit is a big task, and you’ll welcome as much help as possible.
While something like Google Sheets will do the job, a more robust tool will provide a significant boost. This is especially true if you are auditing a large site or have complex criteria. An online service such as Airtable makes the process of setting up and completing a comprehensive audit much easier.
Having used Airtable myself for a massive (4,000+ pages) content audit, I highly recommend this tool. It makes populating, organizing, and sorting your sheet incredibly simple. It also provides useful, visually driven methods of analyzing data.
Create Your Page Inventory
Next, you’ll need to scrape your site to pull a list of all your page URLs into your spreadsheet of choice. How you accomplish this will depend on your content management system. WordPress, for instance, has plugins (like this one) that will accomplish this for you. There are internal methods as well as other third-party tools to extract a list of page URLs, so check with your web development team or system administrator to see what works best for you.
Once you have the URL list, copy it to your spreadsheet and populate the column headers with your assessment criteria. Your first column will likely be the page URL — order the rest in a way that makes the most sense for your process.
Prepare the Audit Team
Determine who will be doing the actual auditing. Ideally, you’ll have a team of people working together, but depending on the size of your site, one person may do the audit by him or herself. If auditing as a team, train everyone ahead of time on the correct process.
It is critical that your audit criteria is well-defined and that you explain to everyone the way they should be assessing content. While it is impossible to eliminate subjectivity and personal biases completely, aligning everyone to make judgments as objectively as possible is crucial to the success of the audit. If two people are not auditing from the same perspective, they may give entirely different assessments for the same type of content.
Doing the Audit — What Are You Looking For?
With your spreadsheet created, your page URLs imported, and your columns and formatting set up, it’s time to start reviewing your pages.
But what should you look for as you go through each page? Assess whether each page is ok as is, needs to be edited or updated in some way, or needs to be removed from the site altogether.
How do you make this determination? Again, it will likely vary somewhat depending on your organization/team and your specific goals, but a good general measuring stick is to check for content ROT, which stands for Redundant, Outdated or Trivial.
- Redundant content is not necessary or is no longer relevant on your site. A common thing to look for is content that is very similar to other content on your site. You may have many blog posts or landing pages about a certain topic or resource that are competing with each other and confusing users. If you encounter any exact copies of pages, flag these right away so you can eliminate the duplicates.
- Outdated content is old content that is no longer needed or that needs to be updated because of out-of-date information. A common situation is something related to a past “current event” or a campaign that ran years ago.
- Pages may also contain contact names or numbers for people who have changed roles, old branding or logos for teams or products, or articles about people whose lives are now completely different. Articles about some topics, such as technology, tend to become outdated very quickly, so it’s important to keep up with your content in those areas especially.
- Trivial content is, in a sense, “bad content” — anything that is useless, is too thin or lacks meaning, or doesn’t meet your business objectives. It could be bad content that made it to publication long ago because your editorial process was different then. Or, it could be that a change in your goals and objectives has made what was once an acceptable article something you no longer need.
- One way to get a feel for trivial content is to look at your analytics: if the page gets very low traffic, there’s a chance it is trivial. (This isn’t absolute proof, but it is a good indicator that a page might fall into this category.) Triviality is the most subjective measurement of ROT, and it depends a lot on your team’s specific goals; if there’s a page you’re not sure what to do with, it’s probably good to get feedback from others. Even then, you may disagree, so know who gets to make the final call.
In addition to ROT, evaluate pages based on your predetermined criteria that are specific to your situation (such as an internal measurement that your team uses).
As for the actual mechanics of reviewing each page, the hope is that you don’t need to read every word or exhaustively review every on-page element. Skimming the page and reading each high-level heading should give a good idea of what is needed. In some cases, you may need to dig deeper, especially if a page is full of hyperlinks that need to be checked, but try not to get too bogged down in the details.
After reviewing each page, record your observations in the spreadsheet. Depending on your setup, you may select options from a dropdown menu or you may fill in the blank with a custom note (a good audit sheet will likely have both).
Update or Remove?
For any content that doesn’t pass the “ok as is” test, you’ll need to decide whether to update it or remove it from the site. How you should categorize your articles depends on the individual pieces of content, how much work they need, your team’s goals and plans for the site, and your team’s capacity to update content.
Update
For content you mark to update, take good notes on what needs to be updated so that it’s easy to go back and find later. (You can do this in your spreadsheet.) After that, put all content marked for updating into some kind of workflow to create an easy process to update it.
If the problems on the page are broken links or missing images, you can probably assign it directly to your web content manager, but if a page needs copywriting updates or requires a strategic decision, it will need to go to an editor or content strategist first.
Remove
If you decide to remove a piece of content from your site, in most cases you actually should not delete the page from your site. Rather, follow a two-step process:
- Archive the page by placing it in unpublished/draft status.
- Set up a 301 redirect from the page’s old URL to a new URL.
Step 1 retains the page for historical purposes and allows you to easily recover it should you choose to republish it. Step 2 preserves the page’s old URL to avoid “404 Page Not Found” errors on your site if people happen to visit the old link.
For a redirect, you’ll likely need to ask someone on your web development team to set it up. Give the web developer the URL of the old page and the new URL it should redirect to. If you don’t have an equivalent piece of content to redirect to, you can choose a landing page that fits the general category of the old page’s topic. If nothing else is available, you can redirect to your homepage.
How Often To Audit
The size of your website and the nature of your content will determine how frequently and how extensively you need to audit, but as a rule of thumb, conducting a yearly audit on at least a basic scale will allow you to maintain your content well. If you have the capacity, you may also choose to conduct regular audits on a smaller scale (perhaps monthly) to avoid a larger undertaking later on.
The Power of the Audit
Content auditing is a component essential to maintaining a healthy website. By consistently monitoring your existing content and updating or removing items that need attention, you will benefit yourself, your team, your site and, most importantly, your users.
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