Everything you need for useful website content auditing

Content audits are a great tool when you’re working on website content strategy projects. In this guide, you’ll find:

• Step-by-step instructions on how to do a content audit

• What the differences are between an audit, inventory, and evaluation

What is a content audit?

Content audits are a specific process or method of evaluating your website content. A content involves taking stock of all or some of the content on a website, “auditing” or evaluating it based on a set of criteria, then synthesizing what you’ve learned in the audit process to make decisions about what to do with all your content.

As you research content audits, you’ll probably also come across the the terms content inventory and content evaluation, or an evaluative content audit.

What is a content inventory or evaluation?

A content inventory is usually the first step in the content auditing process. An inventory is what it sounds like: a spreadsheet (or other type of database) that documents all the existing content. What a content inventory does not include is any kind of evaluation of the content. It’s purely taking stock of what content is there. 

An evaluative content audit or a content evaluation is just another term for a content audit in which you the purpose is to measure or evaluate the effectiveness of the content. In my humble opinion, a content audit that does not evaluate is just an inventory, and these terms are superfluous. I’ll be using the term content audit to refer to the process of evaluating content within an inventory. 

How long does a content audit take?

How long your audit process takes will really depend on the scope. A small website can be audited in a few days, and a very large website might be a whole month of work.

Why and when should you do a content audit?

You can do content audits quarterly or annually, but a regular content audit is a great way to keep your web content efforts on the right track. If you’ve got a lot of web content that you haven’t really measured or thought about in a while, it’s definitely time to do an audit.

Can I just use a template?

Sure, but you should still read this article first. Templates are great, but can lead people astray. Every audit is and should be a bit different, so there’s probably not a going to be a perfect template out there. And honestly, it’s just a spreadsheet with columns. I promise you don’t need a template… it’ll be fine.

How to do a content audit from start to finish

The 6 steps to running a successful content audit are:

1. Define your goals

2. Define your evaluators

3. Create a content inventory

4. Audit your content

5. Synthesize what you learned

6. Present your findings

Step 1: Define why you are doing a content audit

This might sound silly, but you should be very clear about why your organization wants to audit their website content. 

If you don’t know why you’re doing it, then there’s a good chance it will be a waste of time. You should know what business goals are driving the content audit, and what the business hopes to learn through the process. Knowing this will help you create better “evaluators” for your audit, and also help later in step 5 as you look for key insights from the audit work.

Questions to explore before doing a content audit:

• What do we hope to learn or answer through this audit?

• What business problems, if any, are driving this project?

• Who will be involved in the audit, and what will their role or responsibilities be?

• What is a logical scope for this audit? Do we really need to inventory every single page, or should we focus on key pages or specific sections of the website?

To answer these questions, you can host a goals alignment workshop with your team or client. Once you‘re clear on the goals and scope, you’re ready to break out your spreadsheet. 

Step 3: Define your content evaluators

Now that you’re clear on the project goals, it’s time to decide on your evaluators—a set of criteria you will use to audit your content. This helps you answer the question, what does “good content” mean to our team? 

Examples of evaluators to use in content audits:

• Readable: is the content easy to read and scan?

• Accessible: is the content accessible? Does it meet or exceed WCAG 2.0 guidelines?

• Relevant: is the content relevant to the intended audience? 

• Accurate: is the information accurate (especially if it’s old)?

• Findable: could users easily find the information when they needed it?

• Brand strategy: does the content feel “on brand”? Is the voice right?

These evaluators should be something that any stakeholders agree on up front. Whether you are working in-house or as an outside vendor, you’ll probably be presenting your audit to someone. Those people need to be involved in, or aware of, the evaluators ahead of time. Getting aligned early avoids any needless revision or re-auditing later. 

Step 3: Create a Content Inventory

The first step in a content audit is to do a content inventory. As you know, the inventory is a spreadsheet with all the content—usually individual web pages within a domain. 

Before you start your inventory, you’ll need a spreadsheet. I like AirTable or Google Sheets because they are easy to share, but you can also use Excel. 

You’ll need columns that make sense for your project so that your inventory makes sense to you and your team. Again, this is why you need to set goals for the audit, because you’ll want to tailor the columns in your spreadsheet to meet your project goals.

Columns in your spreadsheet should definitely include:

• Page name

• Page URL

• Content type or page type

• Notes

Columns you might have, depending on your project:

• Site map ID

• Category or theme

• Main CTA

• Last updated

• Author

• Intended audience or persona

• Product line or business unit

Key metrics and KPIs you include could be:

• Bounce rate

• Page views

• Conversions

• Top traffic source

• Time spent on page

• Next page visited

You may want to use a tool that can (to some extent) automate the inventory process, like Screaming Frog. Personally, I find that tools like this end up taking more time because I ultimately want to edit or restructure the spreadsheet—but it’s up to you.

Also, I think if you’ve got more than 10 columns in your inventory spreadsheet, you might need to rethink it. The last thing you want to do is waste time taking inventory of things that won’t matter to the project.

Step 4: Audit your content

Woohoo! You’re at the auditing stage. Now is the time to add some more columns to your spreadsheet: your evaluators. In the audit step, you’re going to look back at each page in your inventory and give the page a score for each evaluator. 

Um, a score…?

Some people like to give pages a score of 1–10 for their criteria. Other people might want to use a “pass/fail” scoring method, or a “great/okay/bad” system. You could also come up with something else entirely. The point is to have a system you that makes sense to you and that you can repeat for each page.

You’ll also want to have and use a “notes” column during the audit stage. Your insights and raw reactions are valuable. What stands out to you as significant? Write down glaring errors, stuff you love, questions you have, etc.

Step 5: Synthesize what you learned

The tedious part is over. Now, you get to look back at your spreadsheet and make sense of all the raw data you just collected.

This is really the most valuable part of a content audit. As the person who did the audit, it’s your mission to make sense of all the small details and find larger insights.

Synthesis can get overwhelming if you just audited a ton of pages, have developed “spreadsheet-eyes,” and your brain has turned to mush.

Here’s a 3-part approach I use that can help. 

Insight, proof, recommendation method

When synthesizing what you learned from the audit, try thinking about grouping together these 3 things:

1. Insights: a high-level finding and why it matters

2. Proof: some type of data point from your audit that supports your insight

3. Recommendation: a recommendation about what the team should do with this information next

For example:

Let’s say that part of why you are doing the audit is to figure out what the web content team should focus on next quarter. So, you might write…

Insight: Much of our content is not accurate anymore because it has not been updated in years. This matters because these pages are still getting traffic, which means our users are wasting valuable time that could be spent on content that will support our sales funnel.

Proof: We know this is a big problem because X number of our pages have inaccurate, dated information.

Recommendation: We need to remove or update the dated content from the website; then we need a content governance plan to avoid this in the future.

This method can stop you from spinning around in re-reading your detailed spreadsheet for days on end. 😊 

Step 6: Present your findings

Finally, you should present your findings to your team in a way that they will pay attention to and easily understand.

Do not show them your awesome spreadsheet. It is awesome, I know. But no one else wants to see it. 

Instead, create a slide deck and schedule a meeting with your stakeholders. You’ll need at least an hour to present your findings. It’s a good idea to send out an agenda for this meeting, too. 

Outline for a content audit findings deck:

You can do this however you want, but this is the slide deck format I use and it works well. 

Methodology (3–5 slides)

• Goals (remind the team of why you did this)

• The evaluators you used

• How many or which pages you audited

Findings (1 slide each)

• A slide for every “insight” from your synthesis. Each insight slide should have your high-level insight statement, and include or be followed be the “proof” for that insight.

Recommendations (1 slide each)

• A simple slide for every recommendation or action step. Or just one slide with a bulleted list. Keep it simple, you can create a more detailed action plan in a different document.

Discussion (1 slide)

• This can literally just be a slide that says “Questions?” because you should allocate time to answer questions and discuss next steps.

That’s it!

Critical thinking is key

Content audits are incredibly useful when you do them thoughtfully, by getting your team aligned, and setting clear goals and scope first. What I hope you’ve taken away from this article is that getting value out of your content audit takes a bit of planning and structure.

As long as you are thinking critically as you go through the process, you’re on your way to content auditing success.