Content auditing at scale

Content auditing is a practice that Clearleft is very familiar with. We’ve worked with numerous clients looking to review and refresh their web content. Some of those clients boast particularly large websites, ones that have grown organically for a number of years.

They want to get their sites into shape by learning how to effectively audit their content and understand its performance. In many cases, they know what good looks like in theory, but it’s a matter of where to start. How can you make large-scale decisions about what to keep, improve or retire?

Co-create you auditing criteria

When deciding upon your auditing criteria (how you will assess the quality of content on each page), the best approach is to discuss this early with relevant stakeholders. Content leaders within the organisation have the clearest insight into future plans, and will have questions that they want answered about the site.

These questions will give your audit a direction. For example, an organisation with a new strategy will want an audit to report on how closely aligned site content is to these new goals. Or the priority may be how closely pages meet user needs for different audience groups. There is no one-size-fits-all approach. Instead the audit must be crafted to the organisation and meet its needs. 

Sample your website effectively

For a large-scale website audit, the best path forward is to take a sample of pages. Each page takes an estimated 10 minutes to audit. It would not be feasible to audit every page on a website of thousands.

A sample of pages to be audited should be as representative as possible of the domain as a whole. The best approach is to include pages that receive both the lowest and highest amount of traffic (typically sourced from Google Analytics). It’s also important to include a range of page templates from across different sections of the site.

Share this sample with the content stakeholders you’ve already involved. It’s important to remain open to suggestions and additions from them. They will know which unique pages shouldn’t be excluded from the sample. 

Once you have a representative sample, your auditing results can be applied to other pages with similar characteristics. 

Provide the right guidance for auditors

It’s never too early to get auditors on board with your project. Depending on the size of your sample of pages, and the number of auditors, this could be a significant resourcing commitment.

Explain the benefits of content auditing and the aims of the project. This will give the auditing team a vested interest in its success. Write clear and succinct guidelines for auditors. Embed this guidance into your auditing template or spreadsheet to make it easy to find.

Schedule mid-auditing check-ins and set up communication channels to offer support and answer any questions as they arise. 

Analyse and apply your data

The end of the auditing period is a great opportunity to bring auditors together in a session. First, offer your thanks for their work. Then discuss the main themes they discovered during the audit. This discussion will highlight the most common issues across different sections and templates on a large site.

Think about the questions you had at the start of your audit. How does the data you’ve collected help you to answer them? Are there any particular trends within site sections or by page template? What does this suggest about changes needed across the whole site?

If you're not sure where to start with an audit like this, we'd be glad to talk it through. Get in touch.