Why You Should Perform A Content Audit Right Now
Let's answer the obvious question first: what on earth is a content audit.
Websites are made up of content. Product descriptions, videos, blogs, PDF terms and conditions, annual reports...and whatever else lives on your site.
Ideally, this content is fresh, useful and evergreen. Unfortunately, over time, business websites tend to become wastelands full of dead, dying and out-of-date content. Imagine, for a moment, that a customer visited your real-world offices to find it littered with all the marketing and communications materials from the last ten years. It wouldn't reflect well on you, would it?
Unless your site is just a few pages large, you should perform an audit before you even think of piling even more information on top of these content corpses.
How to get started
The good thing is that to perform a content inventory, you don't need expensive software. Instead, fire up a spreadsheet with your preferred program. Excel will do fine.
Next, go through every single page on the website. If you have a sitemap, great. If not, either painstakingly go through each hyperlink in the site, or perform a Google search with the following command:
site:.yoursite.com
Once you've added each page to the spreadsheet, preferably with a short summary description of what the page contains, you need to decide what to do with them. (If you're lucky, your
web design company might help out with all this.)
Evaluation
Decide how valuable or necessary each piece of content is for your site. To do this, you can assess based on basic criteria, such as:
Relevance: does this information still apply, and do we still offer this service?
Quality: is the material well written or presented?
Consistency: does this sound like our company/brand or is it jarringly out of tone?
Usefulness: could this content answer an important question for a customer or help out in some way?
You may have other areas for appraisal depending on what your business does. But the basic question to ask yourself is "is this something we want on our site?"
But, how to use the information?
During your audit, you may even find some really useful, marketable content that you can repackage and use to promote your business. You may realise that you can re-structure your site in a more coherent way for the customer (and maybe push sales up a notch along the way).
Once you have an up-to-date content audit document, you can continually add to the list as new pages are added to your site.
It's then easier to assign responsibility for different content areas. Also, when briefing copywriters and content creators you can send this document to avoid repeating information or adding to the decaying content pile.
Content is at the core of your site. By performing a content audit you're making sure that this core isn't rotting - and helping it stay healthy and alive.
by: oliverp
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