Say a SaaS company hires you as acontent marketer. They’re in the People Operations space, and your mandate is to kickstart their thought leadership program. Your employer has plenty of smart people designing software, and many of them have already written articles in their area of expertise. Some of them have even created microsites—on team building, compensation practices, inclusion, and more. However, you notice that the tone and design of these microsites don’t quite seem to match your brand message.
Your teammates’ expertise makes a thought leadership program possible, but what do you do with the materials they’ve created? What do you do with the materials they’ve created so far? How do you wrangle your existing content, and reconcile it with the content you want to create for this thought leadership platform?
One approach is to begin with a content audit. When it’s essential to understand and align your content to achieve yourcontent strategy, an inventory and evaluation of existing content will give you the information you need to define a way forward and make recommendations on how to proceed.
What is a content audit?
A content audit is an inventory of content assets that evaluates the quality of that content or measures its effectiveness.
Depending on your goals, a content audit may also include producing additional recommendations or a long-lived index of content.
Using this content audit template
We’re providing a content audit template that we use as a baseline with our clients. Take a look at it to familiarize yourself. However, a content audit can’t rely on pre-baked metrics. Unlike Distilled’s technical audit, there is some preparation work you must do before starting the execute this audit. There are two reasons for that:
- Qualitative measures of content quality will differ. These are gradings of the design or flow or branding of content. What’s right for one brand won’t be right for another.
- Quantitative measures of content outcomes will also vary. How many people have read this content? How many people engaged with a micro-conversion on this page? Choose the numbers that speak to your goals.
The idea is that the structure of this sheet is a useful outline for whatever measures you wish to use. To get the most out of it, though, you’ll need to develop custom grading criteria.
How to perform a content audit
Decide what you want to know
What do you need to know to take the next step with your content? That’s the stuff you want to record. Our template comes with a representative set of qualitative and quantitative dimensions to inspire you. Here’s our rationale for including each of the categories in our content audit template:
- Organization. That means individual ids for each page, as well as sections and subsections. It allows us to reference specific pages and understand at a glance how we distribute our content.
- Ownership. Who is responsible for this content? When was it last refreshed? How often should you look at it?
- Conversion. What audience is this intended for? What do we want those folks to do? Specific default criteria are in the Grading: Funnel sheet.
- Writing. This section evaluates the quality of writing on each page. We score several facets, and these roll up to the high-level score in the first column of the group. The criteria we use are in the Grading: Writing sheet. For more details, see the next section.
- Design. This is the same as the writing section, but for design and layout elements. If you replace the words with lorem ipsum, would the page still reflect the brand you want to project? The default rubric is in the Grading: Design sheet.
- Other quantitative details. In our template, we include measurements like page views during a certain period and the number of incoming links from different domains. Include any metrics that your business uses to measure success.
Revise your evaluation criteria
Some of the data you’re gathering is objective: how many times was this page viewed in the last 30 days? Other observations are subjective. Does the copy match your brand? Does the design? You probably need to record a judgment about these.
It can be paralyzing to evaluate the quality of a document with a single number. With an open-ended question like, “how good is the writing on this page?” we’ve seen analysts take twenty to thirty minutes or more.
Instead, we break our evaluation into pieces so small that grading is trivial. The questions are so simple that it takes only a moment to evaluate them. There is little discretion in giving any specific score, and the 0-4 grading system is reassuringly coarse.
The upshot of all this is consistent scoring, less stress, and a lot of time saved.
Choose what content to include.
The choice of content will depend on your goal. At Distilled, we’re supporting our clients’ digital marketing. So we usually look at what you could think of as their “marketing site”.
If you invest in evergreen content, you might want to include all of it. If you’re a publisher, and your content is ephemeral, you’ll have to make a judgment call on what is helpful to include.
Ultimately, if you have fewer than a thousand pages, you probably have time to look at all of them.
Evaluate your content
Now that you’ve drafted your grading criteria and know the pages you want to evaluate, it’s time to look at your content. Ideally, you’ll spend two to five minutes per page. If your evaluation criteria are granular enough, you’ll be able to delegate work to your team with confidence. Have at it!
Tips for your content audit
Don’t hide pages that need love
A page with perfect structure, tone-of-voice, and grammar is useless if it’s peppered with spelling errors. The formulas for the top-level scores in the Writing and Design sections of the audit take this into account.
Put into simple English, the formulas mean, “The score is the average of all the other scores unless the page failed on some measure. If it did, the lowest score it got becomes the score for the page.” That guarantees that no page can appear to be outstanding if it has an apparent flaw.
Keep evaluation criteria dead simple
No matter how well you plan, performing an initial content audit is a drag. Even at two to five minutes per page, you’re still likely to spend hours on it. Make your life easier by keeping the evaluation criteria as simple as possible. Paradoxically, the less time you spend thinking about the pages, the more useful your grading will be.
Less is more
Particularly with the quantitative data sections, it can be tempting to add more and more data. The internet makes an immense amount of information available to us. Surely more data will mean better decisions? Not really!
What kind of decisions will you need to make about your content? What data will help you make those decisions? If you accomplish what you want to, which of these numbers do you anticipate changing? Those are probably the only ones you need to measure.
Sarah Howe and I created the first version of this template in collaboration.
Further reading
- What is Content Marketing?
- What is Content Strategy?
- Content Marketing Guide. Distilled’s guide to many of the practices described in this article.
- Tone-of-Voice Guide. Our guide to defining a brand tone-of-voice.