Scaling Your Content Audit

A recap of Misty Weaver’s Confab Presentation

Before You Start—What You Need to Know

• How much time do you have?• How much money?• How many people?• Can those people stare at spreadsheets for

days?• How much content do you have? What size

audit will you do?

Why do a content audit?

It's the gathering of evidence that will help us make design decisions.

Types of Audits

• Quantitative Inventory• Technical Audit• Social Audit• Competitive & Comparative Audit• Qualitative Audit

Quantitative Inventory

• Look for Duplicates• Find weird URL structures• ROT• Care and feeding• Prepare for Migration• ID missing data• Bad Hierarchy• Not even on the navigation

Sample inventory from College of Liberal Arts, U of M

Technical Audits

Helps you improve what you have and how you will improve everything to come. Help us build:• Content models• Page tables• Templates• Checklists• Editorial CalendarsInventory metadata, assets, images, videos, etc.

Social Audit

Ask: are we consistent across channels? Same images? Same descriptions? Is there a hashtag? Are channels funneling to web or other channel?• Channels (FB, Twitter, G+, etc)• URLs• Content of posts• Hashtag?• Frequency of posts• Reach

Competitive/Comparative Audit

When do you need one? To see how your competition uses social, pricing, blogs, or whatever the concerns of the person who asked for it are.Use it to set:• Benchmarks• Differentiators• Audience Insights• Find Potential Partners

(Misty’s sample social comp/comp audit is downloadable from Michael’s website.)

Qualitative Audit

• Define Quality• Business Goals• Audience Needs• Systems and Constraints

Can Include Too Much

• Calls to action• Links, duplicate content• Headings, subheadings, titles, captions, consistent use of

terms• Publish date, author• Event date, location, price, series, speaker, etc• Image metadata• Use of keywords, jargon, overall readability• Scroll length, break points, load time• Accessibility, SEO, shareability• Accuracy

Resources

• Z.umn.edu/contentaudit (Misty’s Slideshare, includes good links to resources at the end)

• http://mb-bc.com/o Excel doc with Misty’s Social Audit, Kelly’s sample

qualitative audit, and Kelly’s mega audit