I’m not going to sugar-coat this. Content audits can be mind-numbingly boring and time consuming. They require an incredible amount of patience and curiosity. Someone has to look at the content with a fresh eye and suspend judgment, because any findings from the auditing stage will be the foundation of all conversations regarding the future of the content.
However, content audits are essential – not just important or nice to do. I can’t emphasize this enough. You just cannot know what you have unless you go through it; piece by piece, format by format. You may be able to automate some of this process (there are tools out there), but at the end you need to know:
Chris Detzi, an information architect, describes four reasons to perform a content audit:
If you are truly auditing all the content assets of an organization, you need to look at all of their digital properties – not just their website. There are five types of audits:
With a quantitative audit, you can see how much content there is on the organization’s digital properties. When you do a qualitative audit, you can get a sense of the quality of the content. With a map, you can see the relationship the different pages have to each other. The content mapping audit process works well when you need to make a case for creating new content, or for changing certain parts of the IA.
Picking the right type of audit to perform is not something you should agonize over. There’s no time for paralysis through analysis. Time and budget often dictate which one you should perform, but you must know as much as you can about the content, so that you can know how to change it or make it better.
Yes, content audits can be mind-numbingly boring and time consuming, as I said earlier. They require an incredible amount of patience and curiosity. People tend to avoid them because:
But remember: Content audits are an absolute necessity for all businesses because they give you the date you need to make excellent choices about your content.
[bctt tweet=”Great content begins with great audits.” username=”ahaval”]
In this presentation, delivered at LavaCon 2014, in Portland, OR, you will learn how to:
Ahava used three case studies—a major university, a healthcare client and a major publishing company—to illustrate how to make sense of content audits. The focus is on understanding content requirements, how to present data to the C-suite as well as how to use all the information you learn from a content audit without losing your mind.