Content audits for small teams

It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. Most advice about content audits assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

Writing for the web is largely an editing job: the first draft is always longer than it needs to be. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

What to keep

Most sites have pages nobody has read in years. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions.

Where to start

Thin content drags down the pages around it. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

How to tell if yours is fine

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
• Consolidate, update, or remove — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.