Every great content project starts with an assessment of existing content. Knowing what you have will help you create useful, unique future content. Although assessment is a perfect first step to any project, you can use the tools below throughout the content life cycle to ensure quality and up-to-date content.
Content Audit
A content audit is an inventory of all your website’s pages plus an analysis. With an inventory of your website on one spreadsheet, you can strategically plan future content, avoiding redundancy.
- How to Conduct a Content Audit by UX Mastery
- How to Audit Big Websites from Brain Traffic
- Find a useful, but not exhaustive, list of types of data you might collect at Usability.gov’s Content Inventory page
Want more? Read Chapter 5 of Content Strategy for the Web by Halvorson and Rach for a more detailed procedure to conduct an audit.
Other Content Assessment Techniques
- Have someone else proofread and “peer-review” your content to help make sure it’s the best it can be.
- Practical Advice for Testing Content on Websites by Hoa Loranger of the Nielsen Norman Group.
- Cloze test for reading comprehension by Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group.
- Diagnostic tools: Grammark, Hemingway App, Readability Score.