Issue 24

Two weeks ago, your company had a big reorganization and you’re a content strategist joining a new team that you’ve never worked with before. You’re just itching to conduct a content audit of the pages on the company website that your team owns. Not a bad step, right?

It’s a logical starting point, and you need visibility into what you’re working on. An audit is a great tool to do that. And, of course, an audit gives you some data points about the quality of your content experience, so you can quantify your work. Vital stuff.

This kind of work is a familiar ritual throughout the content, UX, and knowledge management worlds, but I’ve seen a troubling pattern.

Sometimes organizations audit instead of act. A new leader joins? Audit. A new team member joins? Audit. Team doesn’t know where to start? Audit. Content is a mess? Audit.

Taken in isolation, an audit makes sense in almost all of those situations, but the pattern I see is that after one of those audits, nothing changes. Another cycle starts and another audit happens. This could run 3 or 4 quarters (or longer), and at the end of that period, no improvement has come and glaring content problems persist.

Teams fall back on audits because they feel safe, structured, and familiar. The problem is that safety can create blind spots—ironic as you’re trying to gain visibility.

There’s two risks that I think are important to recognize.

• Audits can give a false sense of movement—a movement so slight that it registers on individual performance assessments and not much of anywhere else.
• Audits can also become a substitute for decisions. They might uncover some tricky cross-team realities, and it’s a lot easier to document those than to solve them. Or they reveal a daunting mountain of work and it’s hard to know where to start.

Beyond that, I think an unending audit cycle signals organizational problems or a content maturity shortcoming. When I see the repeating audit cycle, the root causes tend to be the following:

• High turnover: I see this one a lot where turnover in personnel or reorganizations mean the people who started the audit leave before the follow-up work can happen.
• Lack of ownership: When it gets down to it, the people doing the auditing don’t have enough agency or ownership to fix it—likely due to cross-team boundaries. Or there’s no assignment of responsibility for outcomes.
• Understaffed, underfunded teams: People see the problems but there aren’t enough resources to get the work done.
• Lack of continuity: Audits capture a moment in time, not sustained patterns. Even if work does happen, it addresses symptoms (which is good) but not root problems (which is better).

The opportunity: visibility and action together

We don’t want to write off audits altogether. That would be like me abandoning corrective lenses altogether because the eyewear shop got the prescription wrong or one time I got mud on a lens.

You need data so that you can tell the story of the impact your work has.

Content teams need systems that bake in data and reporting into the tooling that content teams use. They need instrumentation. Content professionals shouldn’t have to muck around in Google Analytics and deduce what various signals from the data mean.

Imagine if your content team had dashboards showing them up front the content quality, content effectiveness, user sentiment, behavior, and so on. Not raw data, but actionable insights. Colleen Jones calls this “content intelligence” in her book The Content Advantage: Succeed at Digital Business with Effective Content.

In effect, the audit has become hands-free and continuous and the content team can act immediately.

Think about how you can build ongoing monitoring into your content system and give your teams guardrails (in your content systems and ways of working) to fix constantly.

Go read Jones’s book ASAP. There’s a wealth of guidance on content intelligence.

A time to audit

There are, of course, times when an old-fashioned content audit makes sense.

Consider an audit when:

• You genuinely don’t know what’s wrong.
• You’re new to a domain.
• You need to show leadership that issues are systemic.

In these cases, do some groundwork before starting.

• If the scope of the audit is large, don’t start it without buy-in from stakeholders for the audit itself.
• Don’t start an audit without commitment for the next step, which is fixing at least some subset of the problems found.
• Look for ways to automate your audit as you go so that it becomes more continuous, part of your operating rhythm.
• Consider how you might build an environment where folks fix the fundamentals no matter what. You don’t want misspellings, bad grammar, outdated content, unhelpful content sticking around for a year while you audit and re-audit. Maybe you can shift from a culture of audit first, fix second to a culture of fix first, pull data second.

Fix continuously. Audit intentionally.

John Collins

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