Purpose of a content audit
Content audits help make sure that information you publish on Mass.gov is up to date and still doing the job you intended it to do. The most common reason to run a content audit is that you haven’t been able to actively manage your content. You might also run one in preparation for a major organization change, such as a name change or a new law or policy.
A content audit is not a redesign
A content redesign is a project where you revise your content to improve the experience of the constituents who use it. Redesigns are most successful when they can target a small, specific set of pages (or even just 1 page). For example, you might redesign all the pages related to a single service. You might also redesign your organization page to better reflect what people are looking for. Redesigns are for when you recognize that a specific audience’s needs aren’t being met by your current content design.
If your organization has not been spending regular time on its content each week, you should run an audit, not a redesign.
Step 1: Identify the goals and scope of your audit
A well-scoped project is quicker, more affordable, and more efficient. Here’s a list of common things to look for in an audit:
- Redundant, obsolete, and trivial (ROT) content (webpages, documents, or both)
- Broken links
- Accessibility issues
- Content that’s not linked anywhere (webpages, documents, or both)
- Info or link dumps
- High-traffic pages with poor analytics or feedback
- Pages with poor readability scores
Even if you choose a long list of things to look for, you don’t have to fix everything in an audit. One deliverable from the project can be a prioritized list of recommendations.
Step 2: Assemble a team
You will most likely need these roles:
- Project manager: Someone to manage, coordinate, and report on work
- Content strategist(s): Experts in designing content to be findable, understandable, and usable
- Subject matter experts: Your content strategist(s) will need to ask questions about who content is for, how things work, jargon, content relevance, etc.
The same person may be able to fill more than 1 of these roles.
The team should meet ahead of time to decide how it will communicate, meet, and work to achieve the audit’s goals.
Working with a vendor
You may be able to hire a vendor to do this work. If so, you’ll need to be clear about what you want them to audit for, and what artifacts you expect them to deliver. Vendors typically charge around $200 an hour (per person assigned) for this kind of work.
Step 3: Run the audit
During the audit, the team will:
- Create an inventory of your content
- Decide on a common review procedure
- Prepare deliverables
Creating an inventory of your content
A content inventory is a list of content and attributes of that content relevant to the audit. The team will probably use a spreadsheet for this content inventory. To start one, they’ll download a list of your content from the Mass.gov CMS. Then, they’ll add columns for tracking any attributes they need to track (e.g. a column to mark if content is out of date, a column that lists the count of broken links, a column that lists accessibility violations, etc.)
This inventory should be one of the project’s deliverables. You’ll use it to start addressing the issues that the audit team uncovers. You can also use it as part of “before-and-after" data to show what the audit accomplished.
Decide on a common review procedure
It’s a good idea to define what team members should look for when they review a page. This makes sure everyone looks at whatever the audit prioritizes. It also helps teams with more than one content strategist use the same criteria to review. For example, the procedure might include, “Note a page if it hasn’t been revised this year” or “Check if the page’s title is unique among pages on Mass.gov.”
Prepare deliverables
A content audit must deliver a prioritized list of action items that would improve your content. The team can present its findings or submit a backlog of items to address.
The action items should match or exceed the goals you set for the audience. For example, if your audit’s goal was to find ROT, the team should provide a list of recommendations for which pages can be removed, combined, or updated.
We recommend that audit teams prioritize based on how easy something would be to fix and how difficult it is to do. For example, a high priority item might be that the audit turned up a lot of COVID-19 content that’s now out of date. A more complicated finding might be that many pages written in a way that’s too complicated for their audiences. Revising a webpage can be time consuming. Instead of working on all of them, you might prioritize just the ones with very high traffic.
How long does a content audit take?
The length of a content audit depends on how many pages you need to audit and your audit’s goals.
Remember that some pages won’t be relevant for the audit. For example, you probably don’t need to look at your “news” pages.
An audit that only focuses on ROT will go more quickly than one that looks for ROT and accessibility issues.
For an inventory of 100 pages, you might need:
- 1 full time content strategist for 1 week (40 hours)
- 1 part time project manager (10-20 hours)
- Time from subject matter experts (5-10 hours each depending on how much content they need to advise on)
Vendors will need extra time to get access to and become familiar with our systems and analytics.
Next steps
After the audit is done, you’ll want to address what the team has found. However, you don’t need to do everything at once, especially if you have limited content design capacity.
The team’s priority list should help you understand what’s most urgent. It should help you understand both how urgent and how difficult each item is to address.
If you haven’t been able to actively manage your content, you may feel overwhelmed by what the team finds. In this case, you should evaluate if your current content staffing and management plan provides enough resources to make sure your content is up to date, easy to find, and easy to use.