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Rosina Grove
If current Rosina could time-travel back and tell college-Rosina that book publishing was maybe not the best industry to get into, she would still do it all the same. She has brought her passion for clear communication to the Internet as a content strategist, which is basically the same thing as an editor but way cooler.
June 29, 2016 | Learn About Gravitate
Your website is a pantry. It’s where you keep content that’s shelf-stable: the white paper industry research that only changes every two to three years (flour), the infographic of cost savings that only refreshes every couple years (sugar). It’s also where you stash some things at the front of the shelf that are perishable, but don’t need refrigeration: product launch campaign assets (multigrain crackers), event landing pages and webinar registration forms (dried cranberries). As with any pantry, new stuff goes in, and existing stuff gets pushed around and shoved farther to the back, until you get ants and you’re compelled to unpack the whole thing and reorganize. Let’s break out some of the parallels:
This is where you get the value of a content audit—it’s a proactive, preventative review of inventory and quality, before you get ants. The content audit is your opportunity to dig in and rediscover all the things lurking in the corners of your site. I promise there’s something findable somewhere on your site that you’ve forgotten about, and you should get to decide whether that’s still content you want to serve to customers.
A content audit is generally a solitary click-and-think task for a content strategist, but there are parts of it that can be divvied up or performed collaboratively. If you feel comfortable, you can start yourself with a site crawl or a manually compiled list of URLs. Or you can let a content strategist compile that information, and you can provide input on some key criteria you want to evaluate for. The easiest option for you, of course, is to delegate the entire task to someone who’s totally comfortable with it and surprisingly eager to dig in. Content strategists are passionate about information and data.
Content audits are usually performed in Excel, and then the content strategist summarizes the data in a PDF or PowerPoint deck. A lot of content analysis can be quantified, so we can provide visuals to help illustrate content distribution, age, relevance, alignment with messaging, etc.
This is a question that can only be answered on a case-by-case basis. It depends entirely on your specific site, your goals, how much content you have, what we need to analyze for, and what your budget is.
The general guideline I can provide is that the golden rule of tattooing also applies to content audits: A good audit isn’t cheap, and a cheap audit isn’t good.
The content audit is a part of a larger process, which generally follows the pattern of (1) audit, (2) analysis, (3) strategy. Here’s a quick case study: In a previous audit for a large corporate client, I identified that 70% of the client’s findable content was aimed at raising awareness. The client wasn’t nurturing customers through the sales cycle because there wasn’t enough content to support further engagement. By highlighting this in a gap analysis, our team identified an opportunity to create highly effective content to address a real need.
Let’s go back to the comparison of your website and a pantry: Your end goal is to make a pie. One of the first steps is to check the pantry and find out what you have (audit) or determine what you need to get at the store (gap analysis). Once all the ingredients are gathered, you follow the recipe (content strategy), mix it all together, and >SCIENCE!< you have pie (measurable business growth). Just like that recipe for pie, an informed content strategy based on a thorough audit and careful analysis can lead to a predictable result.
Content strategists are friendly people who are passionate about what we do. You can search online for content strategy forums and groups, and review industry blogs (like this one!). I’ve also included a short list of recommended resources for further reading. Now go get that pie!
Why: http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2015/12/content-inventories-audits/
How: https://moz.com/blog/content-audit-tutorial
What to include: http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2015/08/analytics-content-audits/
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