Choosing your audit criteria

I’ve listed some example criteria below. It’s a long list and covers most aspects of content, but it’s not exhaustive. I’ve also included relevant metrics that provide supporting evidence. You may have different metrics in your organisation, and should use those if they are relevant.

To choose your criteria, think about what you need to know in order to decide whether to keep, delete, or improve a piece of content (and what you need to know to actually improve it too). The more you add, the more actionable your to-do list will be when it comes to improving content. It will also help you make decisions about what to delete, keep, and improve later on.

You can create your own criteria. If you go down this route, try phrasing it as a question, or providing a tangible way of measuring against it. Think about how objective it is too. For example ‘Is the content interesting?’ is a very subjective question. You could answer it in lots of different ways, so it’s not a great audit question. Instead, think about the criteria that indicate something is engaging, like a well-written heading, showing as well as telling, etc.  There’s always a degree of subjectivity in some questions, but try to keep it to a minimum.

You will need a way of scoring for all your criteria . I’ve suggested the straightforward options: yes, somewhat, and no. You could also use a 1 to 3 scoring system.

For some of the suggested criteria, you may want to add your own more detailed instructions to help with scoring to make the results less subjective. For example, if you have content guidelines, a style guide, a tone guide, etc., you might want to make specific reference to them in your criteria.

How many criteria you choose is up to you. I will frequently audit against most, if not all, of these criteria. If the list is looking intimidating, remember that the metrics are just a number you have to look at, not something you need to seek out. In the coming modules we’ll look at how to prime your audit with metrics.