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 Calendars Inventory 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) o Excel doc with Misty’s Social Audit, Kelly’s sample qualitative audit, and Kelly’s mega audit