Content Audits

Content audits or reviews consist of two parts: a content inventory to list what content is present or required and a content assessment to understand what the content means.
Maloo Business Consulting undertakes a comprehensive inventory of your digital assets, including all on-site content and off-site social media content. Inventoried items are assessed for relevance, impact and untapped potential; they are compared against your existing marketing and business strategies to produce a content gap analysis and series of recommendations. These reports form a practical and achievable, go-forward plan for streamlining your online strategy and production workflow to ensure that you only generate relevant, high-impact content with the goal of maximising the value of your existing online inventory.

Types of content audits

There are two distinct activities called "content audits":

• Inventory and assessment of web content in preparation for a redesign or Content Management System implementation
• Inventory and assessment of all content in preparation for a unified content strategy

Terms

A content audit is sometimes revert to as Content Review or Content Assessment or Content Inventory, and as explained before there is a distinction between the cataloging of all content and the evaluation of content.
An inventory is "what's there" and an assessment is "is it serving it purpose?". No matter what the label, there needs to be both a cataloging and an assessment done for the content; often, the assessment is done a bit later when there is a clear view on the amount and types of content. Please see Content Audit Terms for further explanation of used terms.

The main reason to do a Content Audit is only understandable after uncovering the full scope of what exists and you can begin to evaluate it, see patterns, learn the processes.
The best time to perform a Content Audit is as early as possible; this should be one of the first undertakings in any content related project.
Doing a Content Audit can be a timely exercise, you have to examine everything piece by piece, as thoroughly and quickly as possible. There are not much tools available but try to automate the process as much as possible and capture the result in a spreadsheet or database for further analyses.

A content audit won't uncover what's missing – what was never put online, what is in people's heads, what was considered and not put online, what the organisation never did. That takes interviews with stakeholders and skilled editorial judgment. And that's where the content audit becomes the content assessment, the necessary next step.

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We have performed numerous content audits and if you are launching a new online initiative or redesign a website and need a content audit, contact us at services@malooconsulting.com