Content Auditing: Exploring the Benefits and Steps for Success

An audit is about much more than creating a huge spreadsheet of your content. Done right, it helps you discover areas for improvement and easy opportunities to boost user engagement and site experience. Gaining an overview of your library—what’s there, what’s working, and what isn’t—can give you a roadmap for both your immediate priorities and your future governance strategy.  

At Palantir.net, we’ve been helping organizations of all sizes revitalize their digital content for decades. In this article, we’ll share:

• Why an audit is not just an inventory
• Why—and how—audits can be profoundly valuable
• Steps for success
• How to keep your costs and timelines in check

If your team is managing thousands of pages of content, it’s likely that auditing has already come up for consideration. Our tool takes the gruntwork out of the process and can slash your budget by 30-50%— learn more about how it works.

What is a content audit and why do you need one?

A content audit is the process of collecting, analyzing, and reviewing an existing collection of content—whether that’s all of the pages hosted across multiple websites or intranets, those hosted on a specific site, or just the ones that focus on a specific subsite or topic.

The process of gathering and listing all of the pieces to review is a content inventory. An audit goes further than this, evaluating all of the gathered content against predetermined criteria.

An audit informs a wider content strategy and an action plan for specific issues you’ve identified. With your findings in hand, you can also find new opportunities to achieve your goals with existing content. 

Finding areas for improvement 

Content issues compound as institutions grow and priorities shift. Policies change and documents become outdated. Personnel come and go; and as governance evolves, pages get duplicated and ownership slips through the cracks. New accessibility laws mean older assets no longer make the grade.

When these issues start to compound, you find yourself not only with a long list of direly needed improvements, but also no clear picture of what needs to be improved, where it is, or even an exact idea of how many different pages are impacted. An audit gives you these insights: the broad picture of your content health, and granular data into every page so you know exactly where to focus your attention.

Making your content work harder for you

When you’re dealing with hundreds or thousands of different assets, it’s not just issues that get buried in your repository—it’s also hidden gems. Perhaps articles that would be useful to your site visitors need better search visibility and a more prominent place in your information architecture. Maybe pages with great search engine visibility would benefit from a refresh to bring them in line with your latest style guide or internal policy. An audit will help you discover this potential.

It can be tempting to consider starting from scratch with a total redesign when issues accumulate, but even the most chaotic library will contain hidden opportunities. It’s often more time- and cost-effective to optimize what you already have.

Five steps to auditing success

The specifics of the process differ depending on your scope, content, and wider business aims—but most audits can be broken down into five key steps.

1. The first step is to get clear on why you’re undertaking a content audit in the first place. Having a clear set of goals from the get-go tailors metrics to give you a clearer path for turning your audit into a plan of action. It can also help develop internal buy-in: focusing on the value your audit will create makes it easier to gain support and maintain motivation during the process.
   
   Predetermine the scope: which sites and pages will you evaluate? Short time or resources might tempt you to limit your audit to most-visited and top-performing pages, focusing on where the results will have the most immediate impact. This is a valid strategy, but we recommend avoiding piecemeal approaches wherever possible. You gain most from an audit when you have the clearest picture of your overall content health. In the long run, knowing which underperforming pages can be deleted or merged means less for your team to manage—and therefore, lower internal overheads.

2. With a clear purpose in mind, it’s time to update or create your inventory. Typical data you’ll want to gather at this stage includes:

   • Page title, or asset name
   • URL
   • Date created
   • Date last modified
   • Topic, category, or subsection, where relevant
   • Format (for example, text, video, or image)
   • Content location

   Populating your inventory manually can be time-consuming—and a real headache. Automated tooling, such as a site crawler or a more comprehensive auditing tool, can dramatically speed up this phase of the process.

3. It’s time to analyze your content. It may seem like more metrics means more insights, but you want to avoid data overload or losing your most important signals in a sea of spreadsheet cells.

   Your established goals will help you determine which metrics are most valuable. For example:

   • If you’re looking to improve accessibility compliance, you’ll want to consider metrics like reading difficulty, color contrast, and alt text—and assess whether any text is solely embedded within images and video.
   • For SEO, you’ll be looking at structure and subheadings, existing keyword ranking and search impressions, backlinks, duplications, and page load times.
   • To improve overall content quality, you might consider WROT analysis, brand-tone fit, grammar and spelling errors, and style guide adherence.

   Automated tooling can also help here—ours uses state-of-the-art LLMs for tasks like WROT analysis and grammar checking, typically saving teams 30-50% of the cost of a fully manual audit.

   Our approach always blends automation with human editorial oversight. This means you benefit from the time and cost savings of automation, without compromising on quality or expert judgement.

4. Once you’ve identified what is in your repository, identify what isn’t:

   1. Which steps on your users’ journeys are currently underserved?
   2. What frequently asked questions aren’t being answered?
   3. Which crucial resources are site visitors not finding?
   4. Where are your page bounce rates unusually high, and what’s causing users to click away?
   5. Which topics aren’t getting search visibility? Are there easy fixes (lack of metadata, poor structure) that can remedy that?

   Getting clear about what needs to be added, fixed, or archived will provide the most value in your next steps.

5. Your action plan should be founded upon a subset of actions that can be assigned to every piece from your inventory.

   A typical action subset would be:

   • Keep, for the content that requires no changes
   • Merge, for combining duplicated content
   • Delete and/or Archive, for clearing out content that is no longer required
   • Update, for content which needs to be edited or improved
   • Add, for content that needs added improvements (e.g. metadata, alt text, new information)

   From there, you can focus on more tailored editorial improvements. At the page level, you can include some sub-actions like Spellcheck or Restructure to direct updates. Or you can refocus on larger patterns: if some of your most crucial pages have low views, you might choose to  redesign your information architecture. If some of your best-performing topics only include a couple of relevant articles, you could consider creating new resources to increase backlinks and better serve visitors. Use the goals you established in the first phase to identify priorities, and develop a clear path forward for your team.

Using automation to shrink your audit timeline and budget

The sheer scale of an audit is by far its most common pitfall. Crawling and evaluating thousands of pages takes serious effort, time, and CPU power. Teams can wait months to see a full dataset—and as other priorities emerge, it’s not uncommon for audits to remain half-finished and repeatedly shunted further down your teams’ to-do lists.

The most effective strategy to deal with and audit’s cost sink of an is to automate what you can. The inventory phase has been the typical automation remit—but with advances in AI and machine learning, it’s now possible to automate considerable portions of the audit itself.

Our auditing tool goes far beyond generating a list of your site pages:

• It also provides scoring for WROT analysis, helping to pinpoint issues wherever they occur.
• It checks grammar and spelling, and identifies issues across your whole repository.
• It supercharges the speed of auditing, so you see results in weeks, not months.
• You get a comprehensive audit every time, so there’s no need to stress about your audit project languishing half-finished on your to-do list.

The best audits combine your teams’ expertise with a clean and complete dataset to work from. Automated tools equip you and your colleagues with the data you need to drive strategy and fast decision-making.

Takeaways: The keys to a successful content audit

When planned and executed thoughtfully, an audit is an invaluable tool for getting your content back under control. It can identify repository-wide and page-specific issues, surface insights to help improve user experience and site performance, and give you an informed, data-driven plan for new content creation.

Our two biggest pieces of advice:  identify your specific goals early and use them to tailor your process, and make use of tools that turn the task from gargantuan to manageable. Our auditing tool can shave months off your timeline and thousands off your budget for a content auditing project—get in touch to try it for yourself.