Justin, head of training and content services at Sigma, emphasizes the importance of maintaining web content through regular auditing and automation. He suggests using tools like the Screaming Frog SEO Spider for gathering SEO data and creating a content inventory in Excel. The document provides detailed guidelines for setting up and conducting an effective content audit to improve website quality and user experience.

2. 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: justin.darley@sigma.se
Twitter: @Just_UX
Phone: 01625 410988

3.  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…

4. 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)

5. Crawl your site and create an Excel content
inventory.
Use Excel formulae to create columns showing your
website hierarchy. Optionally, use Excel formulae to
create charts showing the distribution of content
through the site.
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.
Agree next steps and resourcing to address any issues
you find

7.  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…

8.  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

9. 1. Crawl the site with the Screaming Frog SEO Spider
2. Export the whole crawl to Excel
3. Open the spreadsheet

12. 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

14. 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

15.  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

16.  Use count formulae to count the pages in each folder
 Insert pie charts

18.  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

19.  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

20.  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

21.  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 public
J = Journalist
P = Partners
Condition/Quality Le = Too long
WT = Wall of text
Im = Wrong images
Fo = Poor formatting
LT = Poor link text
Style Y = on brand
N = off brand

22.  Use the URL column to visit each page
 Fill in the columns

23. 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

24.  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

25.  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?
 ...

28. Formula 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)