The great Cancer Research UK content audit
The Cancer Research UK website is big. We have a lot of content and a lot of content creators. So to take stock of our content reality, we decided to run a site-wide content audit towards the end of 2019.
Cue many hours of work, lots of snacks, a few surprises and one giant spreadsheet…
Why we decided to audit our content
When I joined the charity in July 2019 we’d recently assessed our site health score and discovered that it was, well, unhealthy.
There were other factors behind the scenes that contributed to this. But a lot of it was because of content ROT. That is, content that was redundant, outdated and trivial. We also knew a lot of our content wasn’t owned by anyone, wasn’t meeting a user need and wasn’t being maintained. Essentially, it was a bit of a mess.
Enter, the great content audit.
Our audit approach
There are lots of ways to approach a content audit depending on your goals. Our goals were to mainly to:
- Improve our site health
- Remove redundant, outdated and trivial content
- Identify key issues and areas for improvement
So for us, it all started with a spreadsheet that contained all the live URLs across our website. For this we borrowed and adapted an audit template from Megan Casey’s Content Strategy Toolkit to record our findings and accumulate the scores.
We recruited a group of people from across the Technology directorate (who may or may not have been bribed with cake). Then we got everyone together in a room to audit a few pages together. This proved critical in making sure everyone was on the same page about the audit criteria (more on that later).
We then split the content into sections and everyone went away and audited their pages. We did this over a month or so, meeting once a week to audit together and talk through any questions or concerns.
Given the scale of our site, we decided to audit one section at a time. We started with the ‘Get Involved’ section, because it had the most challenges, but also the most opportunities.
Our audit criteria
We based our audit criteria on the insight from our site health score. Plus our prior knowledge of some of the content issues we face at Cancer Research UK .
In total we chose 7 qualitative review factors to audit against:
- Readability — does the content follow writing, stylistic and formatting best practice?
- User need — is there a clear user need for this content?
- Business need — is there a clear business need for this content?
- Actionability — as a user, is it clear what I need to do on this page? Is it easy to share (if appropriate)?
- Usability — does the content follow general usability and content design principles? Is the content up to date and accurate?
- Accessibility and meta data — is this page accessible? Is it well optimised for search?
- Findability — how easy is this page to navigate to via the homepage (if appropriate)?
For each of the criteria, we then created a checklist of what ‘Yes’, ‘Ok’ and ‘No’ looked like. We didn’t stick too rigidly to this criteria. Instead, we used it as a guide.
Our initial audit findings
After a month or so of auditing we had enough insight to start gathering our recommendations.
Some of the immediate findings from the audit were:
- At least 5% of pages in the Get Involved section were out of date
- There was a lack of a clear funnel for conversion and often no clear next step for the user
- There was a lot of ‘thin’ content and lack of context across pages
- You couldn’t easily find and navigate to lots of pages
Why content audits are so valuable
The audit gave us valuable insight into our content quality. But we also learned a few things about the value of content auditing as an exercise in itself.
Audits are a great PR exercise
It can often be tricky to get people to care about their content on a website, especially once it’s gone live. But the audit was a great exercise for getting people to take an interest in what happens when you don’t look after your content.
Everyone has their own concerns and priorities. Be it brand reputation, user experience or accessibility. An audit is a great way of showing how content is either easing or contributing to these concerns. It gets people to see the value in improving and governing their content to avoid their worst case scenarios.
There’s a real appetite for this
We found that lots people wanted to get involved with the auditing themselves, which was fantastic.
Once the ‘Get Involved’ section audit was underway, we also started auditing the ‘Funding for Researchers’ section. We did a shout out to the directorate for volunteers to help audit the content and ended up with around 25 people!
Content governance is key
Above all else, the biggest thing we learned from the content audit is how important good content governance is. So that’s going to be a big priority for us over the coming months.
Our next steps
We’ve been doing a bunch of things since wrapping up the first phase of the audit.
We prioritised some of the more technical issues that it highlighted, and have started to fix those. We’ve also removed a load of the outdated content that was bloating our site map.
We’ve also been going out to teams with the results and working with them on prioritising the next steps for their content. There’s a lot of work to do, but thanks to the audit we have a great shared starting point to work from.
Our top tips for doing a content audit
Keep a notes section for each page alongside your scoring system
If there are lots of people doing the auditing, it’s important to keep track of why you’ve made certain decisions. Especially if you’re not going to review the results until a little later.
When you’re collating results at the end of the process, it makes life a lot easier to have a notes or summary section for each page as well as just the scores.
Involve people from all levels
It’s really important to get people of all levels of seniority involved from across the organisation. This is so that they can see first-hand the issues you’re finding. If they’re involved in content, then find a way to (somehow) involve them in the audit.
Be focused on your goal but flexible in your approach
Our audit criteria changed over time to accommodate for some of the recurring issues that we found.
We also started with a small group doing the auditing but expanded this out as demand and interest grew. But while our approach flexed, our ultimate goal always remained the same.
Summary
The Cancer Research UK website is far from perfect. And as we know, a website will never be ‘finished’.
But while an audit won’t fix everything, it’s a great starting point for improving your content, getting buy in from stakeholders and for shining a shared light on your biggest issues and opportunities.
Useful audit resources
If you’re planning your own audit, you may find the following resources useful:
- The Content Strategy Toolkit by Megan Casey
- Content Strategy for the Web by Kristina Halvorson
- How to plan a content audit that works for you by Lauren Pope for GatherContent
