The content audit is
quite essential for each website. But the question arises ‘How to do a
Website Audit, which undoubtedly is a meticulous and rigorous job? The
simple answer is that ‘The website audit needs for checking the quality of
contents on your website’. The website or content audit helps to determine
whether your digital content is relevant to the customer’s requirements and
fulfills the goals of your company. The website audit is necessary due to
following reasons:
§ It’s a device
for content accuracy and uniformity.
§ It represents
the strength of your company.
§ It confirms
the optimization of your search.
§ It identifies
whether the technical frameworks like the Content Management System (CMS)
is able to handle the task of your contents.
§ It measures
the wants of groups, workflow, and management, and it finds the gaps.
§ It outlines
the content ascendancy and governs the capability of future plans.
A website or
content audit is a basis for Content Strategy, which governs the Content Marketing. The main purpose of
website audit is to execute a qualitative analysis of all the website
contents. Sometimes you need to explore a network of websites or social media
manifestations for measuring the quality of contents for which you’re responsible.
How to Do a
Website Audit?
 |
| A website or content audit helps to determine whether your content is relevant to consumers' requirement or fulfills your goals. (Photo by William Iven) |
The following 10 Steps may lead to
performing the best audit of a website or a content:
Step 1: Create a
Website Content Inventory (List)
The first
step in website or content audit is to create a content list by recording all
contents of your website on a spreadsheet (MS Excel) or document file (MS Word)
with Page Title or URL of each content. Then organize this data in outline form
enlisting the Sections headings, followed by subsections and pages.
If you have
an e-commerce site, these headings and subheadings will be like this:
Shoes
> Women’s Shoes > Casual Shoes > Sandals > Dr. Brown
The
website’s headings would align more similar to this catalog:
X
Company > About Us > Management > Richard W. Hodge
Kristina Halvorson,
the Content Strategist recommends allocating a unique number to every Section,
Subsection, and Page, in the form of 1.0,
1.1, and 1.1.1. This can help significantly in assigning
specific pieces of contents to an appropriate website section. Some content
planners also color-code different sections on spreadsheets. It gets down to a
substance of personal preference, as well as the size and gauge of the audit in
question. It’s suggested that every section, subsection, and the page must
contain a footnote regarding who owns each content such as text, image, video,
pdf, press release, product page etc.
§ Is the
content created in-house?
§ If the
content is created in-house, who created it?
§ Is it
outsourced (Third-Party Content, RSS feeds, blog entries, articles from
journals)?
§ Who’s
responsible for crafting, approving, and publishing each part of the content?
The
consequential document is a content list or inventory. After obtaining the
content inventory, the content audit to be started for quality. For every step
of content audit, it’s useful to allocate a grade to each page with numbers
from 1–5, assuming 1 being ‘Pretty Crappy’ and 5 being
‘Rock Star Fantastic’.
Some content
managers say that you can shortcut through specific site pages or sections,
arguing that some pieces or contents are evergreens. Although that can surely
be the case, a detailed scrutiny of every piece of content on every page may
surprise you. Elements that you supposed were set in stone, or changed site
wide, have a callous habit of coming up and stinging you in the behind. For
example, the page showing address of an office your company moved out of five
years ago, or the ‘Contact email address’ pointing to a long-since-departed
employee.
Step 2: Define What
Your Content Covers
At the second
step of content audit, you must prepare for the following questions:
§ What’s it
about?
§ What topics
or issues does your content covers?
§ Are the
pages, section titles, headings, and subheadings promising to deliver actually
what your audience wants?
§ Is there a
decent balance of content addressing products, services, customer service, and
‘About us’ information?
Step 3:
Verify Accuracy and Timeliness
At the third
step, you must prepare for the following questions:
§ Is your
content accurate, familiar and up-to-date?
§ In a word, is
your content topical?
§ Are there
obsolete products, hyperlinks, or incorrect information lurking in nooks and
crannies of your website?
As you know
the location of the company, number of employees, pricing of products,
statistical data, and other information change over time. Therefore, to ensure
the factual accuracy of your content that becomes outdated, update it or remove.
Step 4: Determine
whether the Content will achieve Your Goals
Determine
whether your content supports both the user and business goals? Many voters
feed into a company’s digital presence: senior management, sales, marketing and
PR, customer service, to name but a few. Different detachments may be
trying to attain changing goals in “their” section of a Website or Blog, but
primarily all content must elegantly address the two masters: the needs of
business and the needs of the customer. For example, calls-to-action must be
strong, but not so crushing that they get in the way of the user experience.
The content audit scores the contents as per its ability to attain both of
these goals while remaining in a balance.
Step 5: Find whether
People Are Finding and Using Your Contents
Note that
whether people are finding and using your contents. For this purpose, check the
web analytics with answers to following questions:
§ What are the
types of contents or pages the people looking for on your website, check the
most and least popular contents in question?
§ Where do
users spend time, and where do they go when they leave your content?
§ Are the users
taking desired actions on your page such as clicking to buy a product,
downloading a whitepaper, or filling out a Contact Form?
§ What Search
Keywords and Phrases bring users to your site?
After finding
the analytics data, you must determine the content that'is working, and that's
not working and direct a strategy that supports more content users to use and
learn on your site.
Step 6: Verify
whether the Content is Clean and Professional
Verify that:
§ Is your
content clean and professional?
§ Is your
website contains reliable and quality contents?
§ Are
spellings, punctuation, and grammar consistent and, above all, correct?
§ Are
abbreviations and ellipses standard?
§ If the site
has a style guide, is it being followed?
§ Are images
captioned in a pleasant way and properly placed on the page?
§ Do hyperlinks
open in a new page and in a separate browser window?
Step
7: Check Whether the Content is Sensible and Organized Logically
Ensure that:
§ Is your
content logically organized?
§ Does the site
contain tacked-on pages that don’t track navigational structure?
§ Does the
overall navigation seem sensible?
Step 8:
Examine the Tone of Voice
You know,
every brand or business has a unique voice that speaks its personality. All the
solemn, disrespectful, intellectual, and convincing contents are valid, but the
quality, language, and way of expression must be appropriate and consistent
with the brand. This step assesses the content’s tendency to fall into multiple
personality chaos.
Step 9: Choose
Keywords, Set Metadata, and Do SEO
To improve
the search engine results of your contents, do the SEO of your website properly and
ensure the following:
§ Are target
keywords and phrases of your website are placed on suitable pages in a
beneficial way?
§ Are the page
descriptions and Metadata used properly?
§ Are the
images and multimedia files captioned properly and Metadata working as
search-engine friendly?
§ Are the
headlines optimized for search?
Step 10:
Identify the Issues and Do Actions
The purpose
of conducting a content audit is to focus more on the gaps and weak areas of
your content or web. So make an analysis of your content or web and direct a
content strategy.
§ Are the
problems related to the delivery of product and order fulfillment addressed
satisfactorily?
§ Is the media
section robust on press releases but weak on snaps and video offerings?
§ Does your
website or blog address the company issues profoundly but common industry
trends not at all?
After
identifying the gaps and problems, as well as strengths and weaknesses of your
content or web, develop comprehensive recommendations for improvement.
