July 2004
The Good, the Bad, and the Undiscovered
A website content audit can help your company expose liabilities, sharpen your brand, and even uncover hidden gems.
Over the last few years, corporate websites have become an integral part of many large companies' marketing communication efforts. Sadly, however, the increased emphasis on Web presence hasn't always resulted in an increase in time and effort spent on these vehicles. Corporate clients come to Tendo again and again with sites awash in disorganized, unwieldy, and out-of-date material, and no internal process for separating the good from the bad, and promoting the best content appropriately.
"We've often found that there's much that is good on a site, but the material is simply buried too deep for customers to find it. That's a shame." Many of these companies have downsized their marketing staff and have had to look for ways to improve efficiencies. Web content has become one of those areas that marketers overlook because they have their hands full keeping a steady stream of material in the pipeline. While companies generally recognize the Web as an integral part of their brand identity and marketing plans, they put little effort toward maintaining and updating Web content.
A website content audit is a smart starting point for companies that find themselves in this position. Tendo CEO Celia Canfield and Chris Zender, Tendo's editorial director, recently sat down to discuss the good, the bad, and the undiscovered elements of Web content—as well as the benefits a strategic content audit can offer.
Chris Zender: Explain Tendo's definition of a content audit.
Celia Canfield: A content audit is a quantitative and qualitative evaluation of all the material on a specific website. Content audits can and should include material highlighting the company (About Us), product and service descriptions, informational and entertainment content, and outbound marketing material such as newsletters, press releases, and other communications.
CZ: Why should companies conduct a content audit, and what can it accomplish?
CC: Most large companies have made major investments in their websites. The challenge is that these companies often view their sites as a one-time investment, and they fail to evaluate, update, and upgrade this investment as they do other marketing communication programs.
Company websites should be assessed for informational accuracy and appropriateness, usefulness to customers and prospects, and consistency of voice and tone. And that doesn't always mean eliminating content or creating wholly new material. We've often found that there's much that is good on a site, but the material is simply buried too deep for customers to find it. That's a shame.
CZ: Some marketers assume it's better to focus resources on creating new content. Why should companies spend against revising existing content?
CC: New content is important, but it can be expensive to keep creating new content in volume. Plus, creating brand-new content on top of older, outdated content adds to a site's problems rather than fixing them. It reminds me of dumping more odds and ends into an already disorganized drawer until it no longer closes and ceases to provide the kind of utility that one would want. When new content gets added, it's a good axiom to remove or revise an equal amount of existing content on a site. The only way you can do that systematically is to perform a content audit.
CZ: When is the best time to conduct an audit?
CC: The best time is before you make any major investment in the site: more content, a major technical overhaul, or a new product launch. If your site has been around for several years and you've added content and functionality without doing an audit, you are probably ripe for one. Remember that integrated marketing practices have to include the Web, and specifically, what your site contains, to be considered effective.
CZ: Many companies believe that content audits can be accomplished by simply "spidering" the site. Why do you think adding a human element—in which experienced editors analyze key content—can enrich this process?
CC: Spidering does exactly what the name implies—it reveals the "web of information" that exists within your Web domain. That list isn't helpful when you need to decide what's useful, what needs revising, what needs to be removed, and what needs to be made more accessible. That analysis is what Tendo does. We use software to isolate the content and then use editorial-based processes to group the content into the appropriate buckets: remove, keep, revise, or reformat.
Tendo has come to the rescue in a number of cases where technology alone has created a list of content, but companies are at a loss about how to act on that data. Tendo's combination of technology and editorial processes helps companies make educated, considered decisions on what to do with the information technology alone yields.
CZ: What company resources need to be involved in an audit to get the best results?
CC: Tendo has created a methodology and found a useful technology to make it feasible for any large company to optimize its Web content. This process is efficient and effective, and it requires very little in the way of management from diminished in-house marketing departments. In most cases, Tendo needs three things to begin an audit:
- 1. A single point contact. We find that we can get results faster and more efficiently if we have one contact who can get us information and access.
- 2. The specific domains to be audited. Our experience with audits for large companies has shown us that taking them one section at a time makes for a more thorough and successful end result.
- 3. A clear objective for the audit. Do you want to find gaps in material? Do you want to look for outdated material? Do you want to smooth the way for a new product launch? Do you want to do all of the above? Clear objectives help us target our resources appropriately.
Having these people and pieces of information in place up front allows us to provide the most useful and comprehensive information for each client.
