Evaluate Existing Content

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Create a content inventory.
Define audit criteria.
Determine the scope of your evaluation.
Conduct a content audit.

Survey the Content Landscape

One of the greatest things about the web is that it’s an endless platform for publishing. But that can also create endless problems.

Most organizations churn out masses of content, and no one knows how much has been published, where it is, what it says, whether it’s useful, or why it was created in the first place. Typically that translates into a poor experience for the people who use your content.

Fortunately, Ursa Major Solar just put in a ton of effort to define the goals of both the company and its customers. So now Ursa Major can view its content through fresh eyes and make informed, strategic decisions about it. Does the content support the customer journey? How does it map to business objectives? What’s the gap between the content they have and the content they need?

The process of evaluating content can be time-consuming, but Grace is ready to forge ahead!

Make an Inventory

It probably goes without saying, but in order for Grace to evaluate Ursa Major’s content, she has to find it all first. These are the basic steps Grace follows to figure out how much content the organization has and where it lives.

She makes a list of all the content repositories that the organization owns or manages. That includes sources like the main website, microsites, knowledge base, help documentation, video library, and so on.
Using a handy audit template, Grace creates an inventory of the content assets from each source.
In the audit spreadsheet, Grace includes factual information about each piece of content, like the title and URL or location.
Grace makes sure to click hyperlinks on all the web pages she finds. Following the bread crumb trail to other assets is a great way to reveal hidden content sources that have been forgotten or abandoned.

Save time when building your content inventory by using an automated web-scraping tool, like Screaming Frog, Content Analysis Tool, or ContentWRX. You might also be able to export a report from your content system.

From Inventory to Audit

Grace knows it’s not enough to simply catalogue Ursa Major’s existing content. She has to audit it, too. The insights she learns from that evaluation will inform Ursa Major’s strategic efforts going forward. Here are some of the important questions Grace can answer by conducting an audit.

Who are the audiences of the existing content, and how are they currently prioritized?
Is there content to support the stages of the entire customer journey for each type of audience? Does it actually meet their needs? Where are the biggest gaps?
Is it possible to find the content? By which paths would a customer find it?
What’s the quality of the content? Does it adhere to branding and editorial guidelines? Is it up to date?
What content types currently exist? Is the content consistently tagged and categorized? Is the navigation clear or confusing?
What is the overall state of the content?
Which content assets align with business objectives?

Define the Audit Criteria

Now that Grace is thinking about all the awesome things she can learn, it’s time to define the criteria for the audit. She’ll capture a combination of objective and subjective details.

Objective

Audience
Journey Stage
Calls to action
Content type
Keywords and tags
Content owner (if known)
Attached files, downloads, or media
Connected content (for example, links to recommended or related information)
Engagement and performance metrics

Subjective

Customer need (what the content helps customers achieve or understand)
Business impact
Accuracy
Findability
Usability (whether the content is clear, useful, readable, relevant, and consistent)
Recommendation (keep, improve, delete, or merge)

As for your own content audit, keep in mind that you might document more or less criteria than what we included here. These are just suggestions. Tailor your list so that the audit provides the right insights for developing your unique content strategy.

Determine the Scope

The amount of effort an organization spends on an audit depends on budget and timelines, so it’s important to determine the scope before beginning. There are three main approaches to auditing content.

Full: A long, broad audit where you review all of your content assets. If time permits, this is the best method for generating a complete picture of your content ecosystem.
Targeted: A quick, narrow audit where you evaluate the content your customers encounter during a particular journey or product-specific content. This approach is useful if you’re auditing to inform work on a single project, product, service, journey, or campaign.
Representative: A quick, broad audit where you take a sampling of content from all of your assets and resources. This approach is useful if you’re short on time, but you still want an overview of the current state so you can identify issues and patterns. You might choose a handful of pages from each content source or select a few examples of each content type.

Perform the Audit

Finally, the moment of truth! Grace kicks off the content audit at Ursa Major Solar. It takes several weeks to evaluate the full set of content assets, and then the process is complete. Grace picked up a few tips along the way.

If there’s a lot of content to review, ask for volunteers to assist with the audit. Subject matter experts and content owners can help with certain areas. Stakeholders can assign some of the work to their respective teams.
Set realistic deadlines. Not sure how to gauge the workload? Start by tackling a small but representative chunk of content and time how long it takes. Use that as a basis for your estimate.
Schedule periodic check-ins with members of the audit team to review the progress and discuss challenges.
When the audit is complete, synthesize the results, then share insights, recommendations, and analytics with stakeholders and content teams.

Once you’re ready to start your own audit, be sure to download the template in the Resources section at the end of this unit.

A Quick Peek at Ursa Major’s Audit

Ursa Major’s audit produced a ton of findings, so we won’t delve too deeply into the results here. But we know that Grace is already thinking about the billing issues that Ursa Major’s customers are experiencing, so let’s take a look at the relevant insights Grace uncovered.

Area	Findings
Customer Need	Grace discovered two help articles and two blog posts related to solar bills. However, those resources don’t address all of the questions and concerns customers have when trying to understand their bill.
Usability	There’s some overlap between the existing billing content, and one of the blog posts is very outdated. Also, the help articles include technical terms like “net metering” that aren’t explained in a clear, simple way.
Findability	Based on the web analytics, it’s obvious that customers aren’t finding the current help articles. Including relevant search terms in the documentation might improve findability. Grace also notices that the link to the Help Center is buried in the footer of Ursa Major’s website, making it easy to miss. Most importantly, Grace suspects that there are ways to push important billing content to customers when and where they need it most.

Pretty valuable insights, right? And that’s just a tiny slice of the findings from Ursa Major’s content audit. As you can see, evaluating your content is the best way to figure out how your content is meeting—or falling short of—customers’ needs and expectations.

The Home Stretch

Grace loves learning about her customers, but even her brain is spinning after all that researching and auditing. Content strategy is hard work! But luckily she’s about to cross the finish line. Let’s move on to the next unit to see how this story ends.