Report your findings to get stakeholder support to action your audit data and improve your content.
Contents
Web content analytics can provide useful metrics for each page, but these can only tell you so much. You'll need to do a qualitative analysis of your content to help you decide whether to remove it, rewrite it or leave it as is. Another option is to archive the content. Record a recommended action for each piece of content in your spreadsheet.
Report your findings
When reporting your findings to stakeholders, you can use the data to frame problems. Show your data as percentages. For example, you could say: ‘45% of our online content is out of date’.
You can use diagrams and charts to help you to present the current state.
Once you have stakeholder agreement, you can start to action your audit. For each content item, you may recommend removing, rewriting or archiving the content. Update your audit spreadsheet to reflect these recommendations.
Example findings to report:
- how much of your website content is user focused
- any information architecture or navigation problems
- how much inaccurate or out-of-date content there is
Example audit summary: the UK Government Digital Service content audit template (XLSX, 44KB) has a clear and simple automated summary on the first page.
Remove content
A valuable outcome from your audit can be a recommendation to remove out-of-date or inaccurate content so that it is no longer searchable. This may include content sections, pages or assets that do not need to be archived.
Add ‘remove’ as an action to the audit spreadsheet as you go. You will need to follow these steps to remove content from your website.
Rewrite content
Some content will need reworking. Think about this as you’re analysing the content.
You can make your content clearer by:
- rewriting in the active voice
- reducing the number of words
- rewriting in plain English, which will improve readability and accessibility
- updating the information so that it is current and accurate
- making the content task-focused by including a call-to-action
Add ‘rewrite’ as a task to the audit spreadsheet as you go. You can use the writing style guidance in the Content Guide to improve your content.
Archive content
In other cases, you may recommend archiving the content. You will then need to decide on the best way to retain the content for archiving. The tasks involved may vary, for example:
- removing the archived content from the information architecture
- storing the archived content in soft copy so that it is available for freedom of information (FOI) requests
- grouping the archived material on new or existing pages to retain online access
Add ‘archive’ as a task to the audit spreadsheet as you go. Follow these steps to archive content as a Commonwealth record.