How to Conduct a Content Management System Audit Checklist

Content audits are an essential step toward creating a data-driven foundation for strategy updates and recommendations. While automate can perform some aspects of inventory and auditing, human hands tend to perform qualitative data processing more effectively.

Select an inventory and audit management system that’s intuitive for remote teams to ensure meaningful participation from everyone in the process, encouraging meaningful changes from them.

1. Inventory of Content

Content inventories and audits are an indispensable means of assessing existing content, verifying all pieces fit together as intended, and providing data-driven foundation for strategy updates. When selecting tools for these processes, select something with low learning curve and barrier to entry for all collaborators, such as spreadsheet tool rather than more complex software application that might require training.

Based on the scope of your project, inventory details may need to be collected from various sources – crawling tools, CMS exports for titles and authors, analytics platforms for performance metrics, manual reviews as well as crawling. You can then filter this information based on content type (text or image), format or other criteria.

Limit the scope of your inventory and audit to only those items which support primary business or user goals, which will help to focus your efforts and reduce time spent on this process. Once complete, use your expertise to conduct an assessment.

2. Analyze the Content

After your inventory is complete, the next step should be assessing content according to goals. Some online tools provide assistance here, while you could also organize this data manually on a spreadsheet. Tracking each metric may prove challenging – try prioritizing those which matter the most in terms of audit.

For instance, if a page has an extremely high bounce rate, changes must be implemented in order to increase user engagement. It could involve anything from adding a call-to-action button or updating its content; whatever fits best.

An additional metric worth examining is the average time people spend on each page. A higher time-on-page indicates relevance and potential visitor conversion; using this metric can help determine which pages need extra consideration or need merging together with existing content.

3. Create a Prioritization List

Once you have collected all your backlog data, the next step should be analyzing and prioritizing. Some online programs can make this process faster by accessing sitemap data directly.

Other tools can help evaluate certain characteristics of your content to prioritize and target efforts more precisely. For instance, they might consider when the piece was last revised or reviewed – this can give an indication of its relevancy or whether your marketing efforts are actually working to generate leads.

The next step should be deciding the appropriate action to take for each of your content pages, whether this means keeping, updating or deleting. Some pages might need merging together while others need updating with fresh material – perhaps including using H1 tags that signal search engines that the page is the most significant on your site.

4. Create a Timeline

Setting clear goals before beginning any content auditing process will help organize and prioritize any information uncovered during your examination of pages. For instance, if one of your goals is SEO enhancement, focus on those pages with poor rankings for brand keywords or non-keyword rich titles that need improvement.

Focus on page structure and mobile-friendliness as well. Your goal should be to produce engaging, metric-driving content; however, having outdated or underoptimized material makes that harder than necessary.

Once you have compiled a list of action items, you can begin prioritizing and creating a timeline. For maximum impact, do the most essential tasks first in order to show progress towards your goals while showing proof that your content management system is functioning effectively – this is also an effective way of building momentum and keeping teams motivated.