So ensuring that this is providing the right information and services to customers is key. Making certain that your website is working as efficiently as possible, engaging customers and converting them often requires a website review. Bloated websites will have thousands of pages of content that are never or rarely visited. We often find that barely 200 pages out of 4000 (that's 5% of website content) account for 85% of website traffic. So it stands to reason that web managers should focus on that 5% and make sure it is perfect. The steps to take for a website review include:
- Web content audit
- Understanding your top tasks
- Organising your website structure
- Defining user journeys
- The user experience and design
- Launch and promotion
- User testing
Conducting a web content audit is the starting point for Conducting a website review and implementing results for increased customer engagement and conversions.
Feeling bloated?
Web Content Management systems have become so easy to use, that they often contribute to bloated websites. Without the necessary workflow and approvals it can become too easy for all your devolved content contributors to create and publish new content, resulting in a content bloated website. This results in websites with thousands of pages, media items and out-of-date content all adding up to a difficult to navigate and search website. In the public sector this has been compounded by Central Government's guidance (Central Government developed and promoted the Local Government Service List (LGSL), a list of over 870 navigation topic, each requiring content).
Content audits are often prompted by the need to deliver one of two outcomes:
- A new website
- A new website content strategy
A content audit will allow you to discover the full extent of all the content that you are managing, including copy and media. You can then evaluate each item's worth and decide if you want to keep it, amend it or discard it.
Before you start the project, define the scope so you know what you are looking to achieve.
To get a good overview and action plan use a spreadsheet to capture your content audit, with a line for each page/content item, and different columns for the attributes and rating of the content.
Content audit process
A content audit is a two step process to identify and rank your content.
Content inventory - cataloguing your content will take a long time and may be a manual task if you cannot pull any data from your database. You will need to capture data in a spreadsheet so that it can be easily analysed in the audit. It is also advisable to capture content from other channels, so that you can see how it fits in to the bigger picture.
Content audit - evaluating your content catalogue items will enable you to understand what content is important and should be kept and what content is not needed and can be removed and archived.
The validity of each piece of content is based on several aspects including Google Analytics statistics, user interviews and organisational policies.
1. Use analytics to discover dead content i.e. if you have a page that does not appear in your analytics work out why, is it a problem with the page or just content that nobody wants, if the later delete it.
2. Rank the popularity of the remaining pages.Analyse external and internal search terms to ensure you are using the language of your audience.
3. Ensure your goal pages are carefully monitored so you can see where people drop out of the funnel and try to work out why.
Content audit tool
A simple spreadsheet can be used to capture information and to help make decisions. (Get your free Excel content audit template here). Columns you will need in your spreadsheet include:
- Content item
- Content ID
- Format
- Folder/parent
- Target audience
- Owner
- Date last modified
- Page views
- Decision
- Comments
Keep it going
Whether you are deploying a new website or re-viewing existing content, the process of conducting a content audit should not be seen as a stand alone activity. It should be an iterative activity. To help you understand your website users, live content can be further refined using AB or Multi-variate testing on the existing site to determine improvements that should be incorporated in new design and content.
Conclusion
The content audit can be the start of a website review. It is in-depth work and quite time consuming, but will give great results. You should expect to see improved traffic figures as people find what they want quicker. Time on site should reduce - a good outcome if people are finding the information they want, and call to the contact centre should also reduce. Finally conversions should improve.
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First published in CMS Wire
User experience
