Five mistakes teams make with content audits

It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit content audits.

Pages that answer a real question outlive pages written to fill a slot in a sitemap. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

Warning signs

• Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
• Assuming someone else already owns it
• Most sites have pages nobody has read in years
• Consolidate, update, or remove
• Never checking whether the fix actually worked

Thin content drags down the pages around it. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

A reasonable first step

In practice

Content is the part of a project most likely to be underestimated and most likely to delay a launch. Three things worth confirming about content audits before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Most sites have pages nobody has read in years — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.