When content audits is worth the effort

This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. Content audits is not free, and pretending otherwise leads to bad decisions.

Writing for the web is largely an editing job: the first draft is always longer than it needs to be. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

When it is worth it

Most sites have pages nobody has read in years. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

When it is not

If nothing downstream depends on it and nobody is complaining, it can wait. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly.

How to decide

Thin content drags down the pages around it. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

The short version

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

The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.