Day 1: The Content Audit

Every website owner should review their website periodically to ensure that the content is up-to-date, relevant to their target audience and effective. The first step in this process is to perform a content audit, which involves cataloging and assessing your existing website content. This session will focus on cataloging or taking inventory of your existing content. This phase will serve as the foundation for the remaining activities, therefore it is important that you schedule enough time to perform a careful review.

The Importance of Effective Website Content:

(cliche alert) Content is king. Without effective content, there’s no website. There are many uses for content:

• To inform.
• To answer your visitors/customers questions.
• To manage expectations.
• To build trust & credibility.
• To drive decision-making.
• To entertain.
• To build relationships/community.
• To educate.

A comprehensive content review process will ensuring that your business goals for your website align with the needs of your target audience. Also, you want to ensure that your website is not cluttered with out-dated, ineffective, and unfocused content.

The Goal:

Here are a few important reasons why perform a periodic inventory of your content is important:

1. To ensure that you’re providing value to your target audience – Your website content should be reader or customer-focused. The first step to determining if your content serves the needs of your readers is to take an inventory of the content that exist today.
2. To serve as a reference during website development, content enhancement or web enhancement projects – This step is also critical when planning a new website or website enhancement project to ensure that valuable content stays and invaluable or wasteful content goes.
3. To facilitate website maintenance and emergency planning – It goes without saying that you should backup all website content. Also, knowing the last date an item was updated will give you a better sense of out dated content items. In case of an emergency, you need to know what you have on the website and where to find it (the source).

The Resource:

A content matrix is a great tool for documenting each content item and its attributes. Click the following link to download a copy of a Content Matrix tool that will get you started.

Also, download this summary, which includes a description of the column headings in the Content Matrix file.