Why and How to Do a Content Audit?

Perhaps you’ve already heard and read on several resources that Content matters and that from time to time you have to do a content audit.

You’ve also must have heard that content must be qualitative. Due to the recently appeared Google Panda and Penguin, black hat and grey hat SEO practices are obsolete now and will yield only penalties for you.

Another topic that is currently hot is the responsiveness of your website. Earlier it was only a trend, but now it’s a must– how else will you reach your audience that uses mobile devices to browse your website?

Making your website responsive is much easier than making a separate mobile version. You won’t have to pay as much for responsiveness and the content of your website will have only one URL, which facilitates sharing and discussing the content.

While all of it is true, no word was mentioned on what to do with the heaps of content that already is on the websites, especially if we are talking about websites of well-established businesses. You may redesign your website for it to be squeaky clean and new, but old and obsolete content may show its ugly head through incompatibility with the new design or in any other way.

That’s the main reason why it’s essential to do a content audit before uploading it to the redesigned website. Thus, you’ll get the chance to get rid of the outdated and unnecessary content, leaving more place for a new one. This problem may appear unexpectedly while designing a mobile version of your website. If you don’t get rid of the old and obsolete content, it may appear on the pages that were never meant for it.

Thus, it may clog the access to your multi-layered content, leaving only 2 out of 4 or 5 layers accessible. Due to this, other layers of content will be accessible only through search and you definitely don’t need that.

Conducting a Website Content Audit is a MUST

There is no way around it – it has to be done, despite the fact that no one is willing to do it because raking through piles of obsolete content is no fun. However, content is the what people interact with on your website, which is why it must correspond to modern trends and be absolutely relevant.

Every company can conduct this content audit for different reason. Some browse through it to find outdated information and remove it. Others want to restructure it and present in a way that is better for understanding.

In any case, managing the content you already have can set realistic expectations of the new website design, as well as help you choose the right direction for it.

How to do a content audit?

The best way to conduct a website content audit is to take every single page separately and review all the elements that it includes. Start with the text, see if it's relevant, contains useful, concise and up-to-date information.

Define its purpose – is it a story, a guide, a featured article or simply a block of information with instructions on using certain sections of your website. Delete and modify it to correspond to the recent changes if such changes took place.

Further on you might want to look on the banners, promotions and button inscriptions. Perhaps you’ll have a great idea for updating it – go ahead, because any new element is more exciting than the one your visitors saw a thousand times already.

Besides, you’ll have a better structure of your page in general if you take time to learn how the type of text that you defined information on your page to be, must look like professionally.

What content audit tools to use?

The very process of reviewing your website’s content has been around for a long time. However, recently there has appeared a wide row of tools that you can use to help you analyze the content. One of the best this Content Analysis Tool (CAT).

This content audit software costs just a couple of dollars, but will provide you with detailed reviews of each page of your website. This is extremely useful, considering that in such way you’ll be able to notice and weed out bad content.

Tough Decisions

Remember that there is no way around it and there is no right way to conduct the content audit. Your purpose is to find what is called a “golden mean” – a structure and meaning of the content that will be convenient and appealing both to users as well as for designers, who’ll be working on updating your website to make it a responsive one with positive UX.

Try to make the content on your website brief and concise – straight to the point. People don’t like to work hard to obtain something and they will definitely won’t be doing any additional reading.

If your website has many pages, overloaded with info – it just won’t be supported in the responsive version. Make it short, interesting and scalable.

Have you recently done a content audit on your website or you are planning one? What you think is the toughest part in the whole content audit process?