SWEEPING OUT THE COBWEBS

CONTENT AUDITING FOR LARGE WEBSITES

Justin is Head Of Training and

Content Services at Sigma and

focusses on User Research and

content. His background is in

writing, information design and

training delivery.

Email: justin.darley@sigma.se

Twitter: @Just_UX

Phone: 01625 410988

About the author

Like anything else, websites can deteriorate without maintenance

It’s easier to add content than delete it

Not everyone who edits a page is a skilled writer or designer…

Why audit your site?

Content auditing is time consuming, manual and a little dull

Lots of what you want to find out about your site needs a human being to look at the pages

Some of the work can be automated

And I’ll show you how to automate as much of it as you can

It’s helpful to have an Olly

Someone with a level of web knowledge/savvy who doesn’t mind some repetitive work (students and interns can work well)

1 Crawl your site and create an Excel content inventory.

4

2Use Excel formulae to create columns showing your website hierarchy. Optionally, use Excel formulae to create charts showing the distribution of content through the site.

3

A recommended audit process

Assess your priorities, reasons for auditing and resource availability – use this information to decide what criteria to assess in the audit. Add the relevant columns to your inventory.

Using the inventory, audit the site adding content to all of the columns you have prioritised.

5 Agree next steps and resourcing to address any issues you find

Automating a content

inventory

A couple of definitions:

An inventory is quantitative; it mostly tells you what content you have,

how much content you have and where it is. I suggest you try to automate

this (see below)

A completed audit is qualitative; it can show you how good your content

is, whether it meets the needs of your audience, how frequently it is

accessed, when it was last updated…

Content inventories

Automating your Content inventory – crawling

The Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Crawls sites and fetches key SEO

data

Much of this data is useful for an

inventory (as well as SEO)

Can be exported to Excel

Free up to 500 URLs

License £99 a year

Automating your Content inventory – crawling

1. Crawl the site with the Screaming Frog SEO Spider

2. Export the whole crawl to Excel

3. Open the spreadsheet

Automating your Content inventory – Excel mark 1

Automating your Content inventory – Create a table

Automating your Content inventory – Split the content

1. Create Excel worksheets

for each file type

2. Use Excel filters to

separate the content into

file types

3. Copy and paste the

relevant rows into the new

sheets

Automating your Content inventory – Excel Mark 3

Automating your Content inventory – Add folders

1. In the HTML sheet, create a column for each hierarchical level of your site

(if your site is huge, you may want to put top level folders on separate

sheets)

2. Use formulae to populate these columns

3. Formulae are in the appendix of these slides

These columns are “working out”, you can hide them

Automating your Content inventory – Add charts

Use Excel formulae to show how your content is distributed

Copy your Level 1 column to a new sheet (be sure to paste ”values”)

Use Excel to remove duplicates

Automating your Content inventory – Add charts

Use count formulae to count the pages in each folder

Insert pie charts

Content auditing (the

hard bit)

Turning your inventory into an audit

All your published content is now in a spreadsheet

It’s separated into folders and content types

Charts show you how it is spread across the site

This is your inventory

Turning your inventory into an audit (a small bonus)

Thanks to ScreamingFrog, you have also already started your audit!

Your inventory contains a lot of useful SEO-focussed audit data including: Status Code

Status

Title and its length

Meta Descriptions and their length

H1s on the page and their length

File size

Word Count

Inlinks and Outlinks

We will now add other columns

What to audit for (adding columns)

You can audit your site across a large range of criteria

Time is the main limitation

Choose what to focus on (and what you have time for) and add columns as

appropriate (for example):

Content management

User experience Analytics Migration Next steps

Owner(s)

Last reviewed

Last modified

Template

Call to action

Enquiry opp.

Target user

Condition/Quality

Style

Page views

Absolute unique visitors

Bounce rate

Duplicate

Required

Action

Note

Assigned to

Due

What to audit for (adding columns)

Use short codes as Excel dropdowns to speed up the audit, for example:

Column Code

Call to action Y/N

Enquiry opp. Y/N

Target user GP = General publicJ = JournalistP = Partners

Condition/Quality Le = Too longWT = Wall of textIm = Wrong imagesFo = Poor formattingLT = Poor link text

Style Y = on brandN = off brand

Auditing (the hard work…)

Use the URL column to visit each page

Fill in the columns

(One last bonus)

Content management

User experience Analytics Migration Next steps

Owner(s)

Last reviewed

Last modified

Template

Call to action

Enquiry opp.

Target user

Condition/Quality

Style

Page views

Absolute unique visitors

Bounce rate

Duplicate

Required

Action

Note

Assigned to

Due

If you are clever with Google Analytics, you can automate this bit too!

Use a custom report to export the data you want to Excel, sort it by URL and

paste in the column

After the audit

The most important column in your sheet

Content management

User experience Analytics Migration Next steps

Owner(s)

Last reviewed

Last modified

Template

Call to action

Enquiry opp.

Target user

Condition/Quality

Style

Page views

Absolute unique visitors

Bounce rate

Duplicate

Required

Action

Note

Assigned to

Due

After the audit – what are your next steps?

Do you have any content with no target users? Why is it there?

Which content is infrequently updated? Why? What will you do to fix it?

Do you have content that is in poor condition:

Badly written?

Overly verbose?

Badly laid out?

Off brand?

Carry out a top tasks analysis – do you have content for your top tasks?

What are your strategic objectives – do you have content for those?

Are you well set up for SEO?

...

Thank YouPlease feel free to ask

any questions

AppendixFormula Notes

=SEARCH("/",A3,21) Returns the position of the first slash in the URL

In column B in a table column called “Postn of 1st /”

21 is the position of the last character of our shortest domain., edit for your site

=IFERROR(SEARCH("/",[Address],([Postn of 1st /]+1)),"") Returns position of 2nd /. Returns blank if there is no 2nd slash.

In column C in a table column called “Postn of 2nd /”

=IFERROR(SEARCH("/",[Address],([Postn of 2nd /]+1)),"") Returns position of 3rd /. Returns blank if there is no 3rd slash.

In column D in a table column called “Postn of 3rd /”

Repeat for each part of your URL

=IFERROR(MID([@Address],([@[Postn of 1st /]]+1),([@[Postn of 2nd /]]-[@[Postn of 1st /]]-1)),"!Root")

Shows directories at Level 1 of your site

Returns text between the first and second slashes (between “Postn of 1st /” and “Postn of 2nd /”)

Returns “!Root” when there is no second slash (the “!” keeps root at the top when sorting

=IFERROR(MID([@Address],([@[Postn of 2nd /]]+1),([@[Postn of 3rd /]]-[@[Postn of 2nd /]]-1)),"")

Shows directories at Level 2 of your site

Returns text between the second and third slashes . Returns blank when there is no third slash

Repeat for each part of your URL

=COUNTIF(HTMLPages[Level 1],[@Folder]) Use this for pie charts showing how your content is distributed.

HTMLPages is the name of the table you insert on the HTML sheet of your spreadsheet.

Level 1 is the level 1 column on the HTML sheet.

Folder is the first column on the sheet you are adding the chart to (see slide 17)