What is a content audit?
A content audit is essentially an inventory of a site, app or service. During an audit, we’ll take a deep dive into the current landscape of your website or service – what’s working and what isn’t.
Depending on your needs, we can either review a sample of your pages or do an in-depth audit of everything you’ve got.
We often look out for issues with:
- readability and comprehension
- language and tone of voice
- on-page structure and prioritisation
- relationships between pages and across journeys
- repetition and relevancy
- template and design components usage
- SEO performance
- ownership and governance
We’ll make use of any data – where users are dropping off, or not finding pages at all. We can also look at the information architecture (IA) to see if there’s a better way to lay things out in your navigation.
If it’s a brand new product, we’ll work with our research team to find your user needs and figure out how we talk their language.
Why do a content audit?
You might need to do a content audit if:
- you’re getting lots of calls about things that are already answered on your website
- people are struggling to find information, products or services and are exiting your site
- it’s been a while since you did an inventory of your service and you don’t have a complete view of what content you have
- you’re about to migrate to a different CMS or restructure your information architecture
- you want to track the success of a content or SEO strategy
Conducting an audit of your service can lead to:
- improved user experience and engagement
- increased sales or conversions
- a decrease in drop offs or calls to customer service
- enhanced efficiencies and content optimisation
Combining content with SEO audits
We recommend partnering content audits with SEO audits. SEO audits help identify technical issues with your site (for example, broken links, unindexed pages and duplications).
SEO audits also lay the groundwork for examining your content thoroughly. It sets you up for success by doing the time-consuming set up activities, while immediately strengthening insights with metrics and analytics.
We offer a combined service for this. Get in touch with our team if you’d like to learn more.
What do you get with a content audit?
An audit will help you to know where you stand and what to do next. We’ll share our analysis in an Excel sheet that sets out where issues are and what you can do about them.
But we also understand that not everyone has the time to read through a large Excel doc. That’s why we summarise our findings in a recommendations report.
These reports provide actionable, practical insights into where your digital product can be improved. For example, we may recommend that:
- you need to create a content strategy to guide work for your team
- content needs to be updated or rewritten
- governance and ownership needs to be better established
- your information architecture needs to be tested with users
We can also partner audits with content design training. These training sessions are built around common issue areas found within the audit. This means we’re able to create training programmes that are entirely tailored to your team’s unique needs and priorities.
Whatever the recommendation, we will always explain the rationale behind them. Our team is more than happy to talk through the science, studies and best practice that inform their recommendations, as well as share advice on how to act on them.
Experience
We’ve done content audits and reviews for:
- M&S
- Cambridge Assessment International Education
- DrinkAware
- Ministry of Justice
- Cornwall Council
- Ramblers
- NHS Test and Trace
- David Lloyd
Let’s work together
Get in touch and see what our content team can do for you.
