Sweeping out the cobwebs: Content auditing for large websites
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Transcript of Sweeping out the cobwebs: Content auditing for large websites
SWEEPING OUT THE COBWEBS
CONTENT AUDITING FOR LARGE WEBSITES
Justin is Head Of Training and
Content Services at Sigma and
focusses on User Research and
content. His background is in
writing, information design and
training delivery.
Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @Just_UX
Phone: 01625 410988
About the author
Like anything else, websites can deteriorate without maintenance
It’s easier to add content than delete it
Not everyone who edits a page is a skilled writer or designer…
Why audit your site?
Content auditing is time consuming, manual and a little dull
Lots of what you want to find out about your site needs a human being to look at the pages
Some of the work can be automated
And I’ll show you how to automate as much of it as you can
It’s helpful to have an Olly
Someone with a level of web knowledge/savvy who doesn’t mind some repetitive work (students and interns can work well)
1 Crawl your site and create an Excel content inventory.
4
2Use Excel formulae to create columns showing your website hierarchy. Optionally, use Excel formulae to create charts showing the distribution of content through the site.
3
A recommended audit process
Assess your priorities, reasons for auditing and resource availability – use this information to decide what criteria to assess in the audit. Add the relevant columns to your inventory.
Using the inventory, audit the site adding content to all of the columns you have prioritised.
5 Agree next steps and resourcing to address any issues you find
Automating a content
inventory
A couple of definitions:
An inventory is quantitative; it mostly tells you what content you have,
how much content you have and where it is. I suggest you try to automate
this (see below)
A completed audit is qualitative; it can show you how good your content
is, whether it meets the needs of your audience, how frequently it is
accessed, when it was last updated…
Content inventories
Automating your Content inventory – crawling
The Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Crawls sites and fetches key SEO
data
Much of this data is useful for an
inventory (as well as SEO)
Can be exported to Excel
Free up to 500 URLs
License £99 a year
Automating your Content inventory – crawling
1. Crawl the site with the Screaming Frog SEO Spider
2. Export the whole crawl to Excel
3. Open the spreadsheet
Automating your Content inventory – Excel mark 1
Automating your Content inventory – Create a table
Automating your Content inventory – Split the content
1. Create Excel worksheets
for each file type
2. Use Excel filters to
separate the content into
file types
3. Copy and paste the
relevant rows into the new
sheets
Automating your Content inventory – Excel Mark 3
Automating your Content inventory – Add folders
1. In the HTML sheet, create a column for each hierarchical level of your site
(if your site is huge, you may want to put top level folders on separate
sheets)
2. Use formulae to populate these columns
3. Formulae are in the appendix of these slides
These columns are “working out”, you can hide them
Automating your Content inventory – Add charts
Use Excel formulae to show how your content is distributed
Copy your Level 1 column to a new sheet (be sure to paste ”values”)
Use Excel to remove duplicates
Automating your Content inventory – Add charts
Use count formulae to count the pages in each folder
Insert pie charts
Content auditing (the
hard bit)
Turning your inventory into an audit
All your published content is now in a spreadsheet
It’s separated into folders and content types
Charts show you how it is spread across the site
This is your inventory
Turning your inventory into an audit (a small bonus)
Thanks to ScreamingFrog, you have also already started your audit!
Your inventory contains a lot of useful SEO-focussed audit data including: Status Code
Status
Title and its length
Meta Descriptions and their length
H1s on the page and their length
File size
Word Count
Inlinks and Outlinks
We will now add other columns
What to audit for (adding columns)
You can audit your site across a large range of criteria
Time is the main limitation
Choose what to focus on (and what you have time for) and add columns as
appropriate (for example):
Content management
User experience Analytics Migration Next steps
Owner(s)
Last reviewed
Last modified
Template
Call to action
Enquiry opp.
Target user
Condition/Quality
Style
Page views
Absolute unique visitors
Bounce rate
Duplicate
Required
Action
Note
Assigned to
Due
What to audit for (adding columns)
Use short codes as Excel dropdowns to speed up the audit, for example:
Column Code
Call to action Y/N
Enquiry opp. Y/N
Target user GP = General publicJ = JournalistP = Partners
Condition/Quality Le = Too longWT = Wall of textIm = Wrong imagesFo = Poor formattingLT = Poor link text
Style Y = on brandN = off brand
Auditing (the hard work…)
Use the URL column to visit each page
Fill in the columns
(One last bonus)
Content management
User experience Analytics Migration Next steps
Owner(s)
Last reviewed
Last modified
Template
Call to action
Enquiry opp.
Target user
Condition/Quality
Style
Page views
Absolute unique visitors
Bounce rate
Duplicate
Required
Action
Note
Assigned to
Due
If you are clever with Google Analytics, you can automate this bit too!
Use a custom report to export the data you want to Excel, sort it by URL and
paste in the column
After the audit
The most important column in your sheet
Content management
User experience Analytics Migration Next steps
Owner(s)
Last reviewed
Last modified
Template
Call to action
Enquiry opp.
Target user
Condition/Quality
Style
Page views
Absolute unique visitors
Bounce rate
Duplicate
Required
Action
Note
Assigned to
Due
After the audit – what are your next steps?
Do you have any content with no target users? Why is it there?
Which content is infrequently updated? Why? What will you do to fix it?
Do you have content that is in poor condition:
Badly written?
Overly verbose?
Badly laid out?
Off brand?
Carry out a top tasks analysis – do you have content for your top tasks?
What are your strategic objectives – do you have content for those?
Are you well set up for SEO?
...
Thank YouPlease feel free to ask
any questions
AppendixFormula Notes
=SEARCH("/",A3,21) Returns the position of the first slash in the URL
In column B in a table column called “Postn of 1st /”
21 is the position of the last character of our shortest domain., edit for your site
=IFERROR(SEARCH("/",[Address],([Postn of 1st /]+1)),"") Returns position of 2nd /. Returns blank if there is no 2nd slash.
In column C in a table column called “Postn of 2nd /”
=IFERROR(SEARCH("/",[Address],([Postn of 2nd /]+1)),"") Returns position of 3rd /. Returns blank if there is no 3rd slash.
In column D in a table column called “Postn of 3rd /”
Repeat for each part of your URL
=IFERROR(MID([@Address],([@[Postn of 1st /]]+1),([@[Postn of 2nd /]]-[@[Postn of 1st /]]-1)),"!Root")
Shows directories at Level 1 of your site
Returns text between the first and second slashes (between “Postn of 1st /” and “Postn of 2nd /”)
Returns “!Root” when there is no second slash (the “!” keeps root at the top when sorting
=IFERROR(MID([@Address],([@[Postn of 2nd /]]+1),([@[Postn of 3rd /]]-[@[Postn of 2nd /]]-1)),"")
Shows directories at Level 2 of your site
Returns text between the second and third slashes . Returns blank when there is no third slash
Repeat for each part of your URL
=COUNTIF(HTMLPages[Level 1],[@Folder]) Use this for pie charts showing how your content is distributed.
HTMLPages is the name of the table you insert on the HTML sheet of your spreadsheet.
Level 1 is the level 1 column on the HTML sheet.
Folder is the first column on the sheet you are adding the chart to (see slide 17)