How to audit content for quality and user needs

Recently we looked at why it’s a good idea to spring clean your website and delete old content. It’s a good idea to audit your legacy content and evaluate every page with your users in mind.

Some content you’ll keep, some you’ll delete, and some – perhaps most – you’ll flag for some kind of update or revision.

I recently worked with IE Digital to do exactly that. We optimised the content for a not-for-profit client’s website, as part of an iterative approach to improving the user experience and boost engagement.

Based on that work, here’s my guide to tackling a content audit and optimisation project:

Gather insights on content

It’s always helpful to listen to the voice of the user. User research is central to the success of content design and provides the evidence you need to change and improve your content.

In an earlier iteration, IE had introduced voting buttons and a free text feedback field across much of the site. The Scope website is a good example of this approach. This gave us a useful insight into the content that wasn’t effective. We also had feedback from subject matter experts. Where we had high traffic volumes but low quality scores, we knew we had work to do.

There are lots of other ways to listen to the voice of your users:

• Social listening: What are people saying online about certain topics? Look at their language, the emotions they are experiencing, and the questions they ask. Are you answering those questions?
• Google search: What can you learn from the suggested searches around specific terms?
• Google analytics: What’s your most visited content and what problem does it solve? Are users staying on the page and scrolling down, or moving away? Are you leading the user to your conversion goals?
• Interactive show and tells: Whether evaluating old content or planning something new, live stakeholder feedback can help. With a live polling platform like mentimetercom you can generate a wealth of feedback in a short space of time

Set your objectives

It’s by updating and improving your content that you might make the biggest difference. Of course, what constitutes improvement is very subjective. You’ll need to think about your user’s needs for the website – or even for each page – which will differ for every organisation.

For a medical research charity, your main objective might be fundraising. You’ll want compelling content that demonstrates the impact of your work, and seamless user journeys to whatever ‘conversion’ means to you. Sites like Action Medical Research prioritise this really well.

Contrast that with an addiction support charity. Fundraising might be part of the story, but your priority is supporting someone in a crisis. When they land, users need to see where to get help, quickly. Clear, concise information and a straightforward user experience are vital for someone who may not be thinking clearly – as is a compassionate tone. The GamCare website is a good example, offering a range of convenient contact options to suit the user.

For IE Digital’s client, one of our key aims was to lead people further into the site. We wanted to improve the quality of the content users see when they land on the site, and give them a clear route to discover more. That meant improving how we cross referenced related content and anticipating what else the user might need.

Check your format

IE redesigned some of the core page templates to display the most important content more prominently. We wanted to put the answers to the most common questions right at the top of the page – inspired by the classic GDS example of the UK Bank Holiday dates page redesign.

The new designs were tested on real users to find a layout that worked. Our content then needed restructuring or rewriting to fit the new template.

James Marsh, Senior Digital Consultant at IE Digital, explained: “We considered what users needed to see straight away to answer their primary need. Then as they read further down the page, we reward them with more in-depth content and ways to find out more if they need to. That’s where we add value with background context, deeper explanations, and links to other resources.”

In some cases, it helps to tell the user up front what the page contains – list your subheadings, for example – so they can jump to the bit they need.

Pick your topic(s)

We approached one topic at a time, evaluating related content from across the whole site. This made it easier to see where we had gaps or duplicates. We could spot when content wasn’t where you’d expect it to be within our information architecture (IA).

Record your progress

A big output of this project was knowledge transfer to the client. So that they could continue the work we’d begun, we documented the proposed content changes, and the evidence that had led us there.

Even as a purely internal exercise, it’s well worth recording the decisions made along the way. That will make it easier for others to understand how the website got to where it is and prevent future attempts to ‘just change that’ based on personal preference rather than evidence.  

Get started

One by one, we reviewed each page within our chosen topic. We edited and annotated every page to explain the suggested improvements. Alternatively you could run this as a series of ‘content crits’. We referenced our own insights, as well as external sources for best practice such as CDL’s Readability Guidelines.

Build a checklist

As we worked through the content, the list of things we were looking for grew and grew, evolving into a checklist of points to cover. Along with our annotated edits, the checklist made the exercise repeatable with some consistency across the remaining topics, whoever picks up the work.

Our checklist began with the website’s overarching user story, to keep it foremost in our minds. Much of the checklist has been covered above, but it also included:

• Comparing with user needs: check if your existing content is useful, relevant, and meets the success criteria. If you don’t have user stories and needs in place yet, check out Putting the user first with content design or listen to “Podcast: The benefits of user-centred design”.
• Accuracy: it should go without saying, but check your content is accurate and up to date
• Accessibility and readability: use plain English and set a target readability score for all content on your site. Check out: How to create readable and accessible content
• Other types of content: would a chart, infographics or digital tool be helpful? What about video or audio content?
• Test your content: many of the techniques described above in “Gather insights” can help here, too, so keep testing and learning
• Review regularly: include the date of your last review and schedule the next one.

Of course, you might also add points around tone of voice, refocusing to reflect changing priorities…the possibilities could be endless! What would you put on your checklist?