Website Content
Strategy & Audit

Content strategies and audits help clients guide and control their web content in order to effectively communicate and manage their websites. It's easy to accumulate huge amounts of information (narrative content, dynamic data, documents, forms, online services, etc.) on a website.

In just the past couple years, we've seen clients place even more data and information on their websites and mobile applications in order to meet the increasing demands of users (businesses, citizens, consultants, and a variety of other stakeholders).

Content Strategy
A content strategy involves both internal and external stakeholders. The goal is to identify and differentiate between true vs. perceived needs they have for website content. We gain this valuable insight by conducting strategic workshops that utilize the latest user experience research techniques. Learn more about user experience research & testing.

Content Audit
The process involves developing a list of all the content on your site, which typically includes text, images, documents, databases, and applications. To gain insight from your inventory, we assess each piece of content. Doing so will help you understand what is on the website, if it is located properly, and whether the content is up-to-date. Prior to pulling an inventory, we identify your goals (understanding what you intend to do with the results) and scope (determining which areas of the site or particular date ranges should be captured).

Once goals and scope are understood, we use our content inventory crawler to scan your entire site and create an inventory report. Although inventories vary in what they capture, most include the following raw data for each piece of site content, based on the data your website is reporting:

• Title
• URL
• File Format (HTML, PDF, DOC, TXT…)
• Meta Description & Keywords
• Categories/Tags
• Dates (created, revised, accessed)

Turning the raw data in your inventory into something useful requires someone to actually go through each piece and perform an assessment. The type of assessment you choose to conduct depends on what you’re hoping to learn. Often audits are used to track:

• What pages should be removed
• Whether content needs to be revised
• Which content needs to be written due to gaps
• Where content should be mapped to if being moved or if it requires redirects

Depending on your goals related to the inventory, we add columns related to your editorial process noting if something is being fact-checked, edited, approved, or sent for development.