Setting up your audit spreadsheet | Lauren Pope: La Pope Ltd

Now it’s time to combine your inventory and your audit criteria in a new spreadsheet.

Example/template audit

This toolkit includes an example/template audit. You can make a copy and use it as the basis for your own audit.

The example includes all the suggested criteria from earlier in the planner. The template is linked on the content audit toolkit homepage.

Step by step

Open your new spreadsheet.

Copy the inventory data into the audit spreadsheet. Work column by column. When you paste, use the ‘paste values only’ option. This will copy over the data, but not the formula. This is important because having lots of formulas running can make your spreadsheet slow to load, especially if you have a large number of pages

Group your columns. Each inventory and audit criteria should have its own column. I’d suggest grouping columns by theme. For example, if you are auditing for findability, group all the columns that relate to this together, like:

title tag
meta description
‘Would someone who doesn’t know how to use this site be able to find this page from the homepage without using search?’
‘Does this page show up on page 1 of Google if you search for the key search term(s)?’

This will make the process of auditing faster because you’ll be able to see the relevant information together. The section on content criteria has a suggestion for how you might want to group your criteria.

Make sure your scoring is there. Your audit criteria should ideally use some kind of matrix to make it easy and consistent to score your content against the criteria. You can use data validation to make this quicker, easier, and more consistent. I’ve included validation in the example spreadsheet.

Make sure your judgement is there. You’ll need a column for ‘Keep, Improve, Delete, Archive’. Again, you can use data validation for this, and I’ve included it in the spreadsheet.