Content Strategy for the Web, Second Edition

5. Audit

SOMETIMES, WE’LL ASK a conference audience, “How many of you know exactly what you have on your website, where it lives, and who owns it?”

Inevitably, even in rooms of several hundred people, only one or two people raise their hands.

This, friends, is a problem. To make even the most basic decisions about your content—like deciding where to focus your resources and budget—it’s good to know how much content you have, where it lives, what it’s about, and whether it’s any good.

And to know these things, you need to do a content audit.

Seeing is Believing

A web content audit is an accounting of the content your organization currently has online. More often than not, when you’re finished (or even midstream), the results are unbelievably valuable. ...