Tenshi Web Solutions How and Why to Perform a Web Content Audit
There are several key reasons why you should undertake a comprehensive content audit of your website:
- To ensure you deliver the right message to the right people, at the right time.
- To ensure you comply with Accessibility Guidelines
- To be consistent, for example, when using content in multiple places but avoiding duplication.
You should also not wait until the site needs an audit – many successful companies and organizations use an audit as an ongoing tool to monitor how successfully their site is maintained.
Design and development of a website can be an exacting and complicated process. Sometimes, too much time is spent making decisions on design and technology and the importance of useful, relevant content is lost or even forgotten.
Knowing how to approach the web project can fix many problems before they start, and also help to deliver an efficient site, which the public, your staff and you will be proud of and enjoy. In essence, you need to assess your content and determine the methods of management it needs.
How to Perform a Content Audit
Step 1: Identify specific objectives for your content.
For example:
- To share content internally across departments to reduce costs of duplicating work and improve intra-office communications
- To improve the accuracy and timeliness of information getting to customers, partners and suppliers
Step 2: Look at your current website and ask, “How is our content currently working?”
- How effective is our Brand control – are there pages with old logos? Discrepancies with boiler plates?
- How current is content?
- Is there much rogue content? - Is there irrelevant, out of date or incorrect content on our site?
- How popular is the site? Be sure to evaluate both external and internal popularity.
- Is the website the first port of call for customers and prospects?
- Is information easily available – count the number of clicks to commonly used documents.
- Do you get positive feedback on ease of use?
Step 3: Identify weakness/ potential development opportunities
There are two phases that need to be carried out in this stage of evaluation, Internal and External
Internal:
- Is it easy for staff to update and maintain information - poll staff to ask their opinion?
- How many steps to add a document to the site? – How long does it take to add an image or a .pdf to the site? This should be no more than 2 minutes
- How many minutes to add a piece of content? This should be no more than 3 minutes
- Who can add content? – Can the people who write the content publish it?
- Is there an IT /Super user bottleneck – does content go out of date because it has to wait in the IT department's job queue to be made live?
- What is the cost of training users to work with the system? Is re-training required each time?
- How do you ensure accuracy and consistency in content? - Do you have an approval process for content?
- Can you use standard business tools to access content? For example, Microsoft Word or Outlook?
- How do you share information between your website, Intranet and Extranet? Can content be shared or re-purposed from a central repository?
External:
- Do you deliver consistent branding on all your pages, across all sites?
- Are there pages discrepancies between various sites or even pages of the same site – for example, a slightly different layout?
- Can customers/prospects find what they need easily?
- Do you offer a comprehensive search facility with easy to understand results?
- How much time does/would it take for you to re-brand your site?
- How much time does/would it take to create a mini/micro site for new launches or products?
Following these steps and identifying areas for improvement will give you a much clearer idea of what needs to be done to deliver a better, more usable and user-friendly website.
Also remember the key statement when thinking about Search Engine Optimisation: Content is King!
If you want to find out more on how Tenshi can help your business, feel free to contact us - site reviews and quotes are free of charge!
