Maximize your content with a multi-dimensional audit

Your web content has taken months — if not years — to create. But for some reason, it’s not performing as well as it should.

A content audit is an efficient way to improve its quality and ensure a stellar audience experience — all while increasing recognition of and conversions for your brand.

Whether tasked to an in-house team or partnering with an agency, auditing will move you closer to your goals. Here’s some key steps to get you started.

How do you define quality?

Content quality goes beyond the parameters of a style guide — making the importance of deeper assessment clear. For your brand to reach its goals, examine your content along several dimensions.?

Strategy professionals lean into objective heuristics to assess a website’s content. At Baunfire, we consider seven heuristics when auditing our clients’ content:

1. Relevancy
2. Clarity
3. Quality
4. Suitability
5. Accuracy
6. Timeliness
7. Actionability

Defined heuristics position your team to evaluate your website’s current content. Additionally, leveraging your brand’s heuristics long-term maintains a digital experience of the highest quality possible.

Right now, what’s the experience?

Heuristics in-hand, it’s time to jump into the audit. By gauging each page against each individual dimension, your aim is to rate each as good, fair or poor. Then, use those ratings to decide which copy you’ll keep as-is, optimize, consolidate or deprecate. Taking on a full-scale audit is no small task; here’s the Baunfire approach:

• Start with core pages: Identify your brand’s highest-performing pages or those that are closely tied to your goals. Commonly, this will include your homepage and product or solution pages. Expand scope as bandwidth allows.
• Organize: An audit spreadsheet should include columns for the page title and link, type, core messaging and notes. A dropdown-enabled column for each dimension and potential ratings enables quick assessment, easy adjustments and collective scoring.
• Evaluate each page: Through the lens of your audience, experience each page with each dimension in mind. Is it audience-centered? Is it logical, clear and approachable? Is it grammatically and stylistically accurate and appropriate? Is it unique and valuable? Is it fresh and actionable??

The more critical you can be in the evaluation step, the more dramatically your content will evolve.

Where is your brand headed?

This process will enable your team to make a strategic, thoughtful and objective recommendations for each page.?

• When possible, keeping or optimizing content saves resources and retains or improves rankings. High-quality pages that meet most heuristic criteria are candidates.
• Consolidating duplicative content improves your audience’s experience and streamlines future audits for your team.
• In some instances, deprecating stale or sub-par content is the way to go. Lower-quality pages lacking in significant areas are candidates.
• More often than not, auditing uncovers gaps that exist between the content you have and what your audience needs. Jot these down and ideate their creation.

Though time consuming, you’ll be surprised and encouraged by the amount of opportunity you uncover throughout the process.

Get to work!

You’ve done the heavy lifting; now it’s time to enact each of your decisions, page-by-page. At Baunfire , we partner with clients to define how we’ll measure the success of our audit. Is success quantifiable — a higher number of pages per session or longer time on-page? Or is success more subjective — improved feedback from prospects, clients and via social listening??

Whatever your goal, define it early and establish an approach and timeline for measurement. This way, you can make adjustments to your refreshed content, if needed, and celebrate the success of your efforts when they’re achieved.

At Baunfire , every partnership begins with an audit of your current website’s content by our seasoned, versatile team of strategists, copywriters and SEO experts.?

To set up a time to chat with our team, reach out to [email protected].

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