Paula Land: Content Audits and Inventories, Second Edition – Episode 146

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Paula Land wrote the definitive guide to content audits and inventories almost ten years ago. A lot has changed since then.

The new edition of “Content Audits and Inventories: A Handbook for Content Analysis” has been extensively updated to account for the evolution of auditing practice, including 100 pages of new content and a new emphasis on the importance of analyzing and operationalizing the results of content audits.

We talked about:

• the new edition of her book, Content Audits and Inventories: A Handbook for Content Analysis – and the significance of the addition of “analysis” to the subtitle
• the difference between a (quantitative) content inventory and a (qualitative) content audit
• the variety of circumstances that can trigger the need for a content audit
• how to determine the criteria that guide a content audit
• the up-front work that sets the stage for conducting an audit and gets commitment from the organization to support the work
• the importance of getting buy-in from all of the various stakeholders affected by a content audit
• some of the additions to the second edition of the book: audits for replatforming, content structure, social media, single-page apps, mobile apps, etc.
• how to manage the process of running a content audit
• how to cultivate an audit mindset: recognizing content as an important business asset, cultivating a culture of constant improvement, etc.
• the benefits of auditing and artifacts that ensure that the findings of the audit are addressed
• the importance of emphasizing equally the preparation, execution, and operationalization of content audit findings

Paula’s bio

Paula Land is a content strategy consultant and technology entrepreneur. She has worked for over thirty years in content-related roles, spanning all aspects of the content lifecycle, with a focus on delivering large-scale, complex websites. As founder and principal consultant at Strategic Content, she develops content strategies and implementation plans for private clients ranging from nonprofits to large e-commerce sites.

Paula has also worked as a Senior Content Strategist at NASA’s Earth Science Data Systems (ESDS) group. As cofounder of Content Insight, she was the impetus behind the development of CAT, the Content Analysis Tool, which was designed to create automated content inventories. Before founding her own businesses, Paula was a user experience and content strategy lead for Razorfish, a leading digital agency, where she led the content strategy on the development of enterprise-level websites, redesigns, and CMS implementations.

Paula has also been a Guest Lecturer at University of Washington Information School, teaching content strategy in the Informatics department, and is currently on the faculty of the M.A. in Content Strategy program at FH Joanneum in Graz, Austria, teaching the course in content audits. Paula is a frequent speaker at conferences and presents workshops and webinars on the topic of content inventories, audits, and analyses. She contributed the essay on content inventory to the book The Language of Content Strategy.

Connect with Paula online

• LinkedIn
• Strategic Content
• contentaudits.net

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Podcast intro transcript

This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 146. When you publish a website, or any other digital product, it’s crucial to understand what content you have and how it measures up to your organization’s purpose and your customers’ needs. Paula Land has just revised her groundbreaking book on this important topic. The updated edition of Content Audits and Inventories includes a hundred pages of new information and a new emphasis on the importance of analyzing and operationalizing the results of your audit.

Interview transcript

Larry:
Hey, everyone. Welcome to episode number 146 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really excited today to welcome back guest number two on the podcast, Paula Land. That was five and a half, almost six years ago Paula was on to talk about enterprise content strategy. And I invited her back now because she’s written a new book on content audits and inventories. And Paula, briefly I’ll introduce her. She’s the founder of a consultancy called Strategic Content, a really well-known content strategy agency. She’s been doing that for I think 13 years now, with a little detour to NASA. I always like to work that in because I just like having a friend who’s worked at NASA and like to brag about that. So, anyway, welcome, Paula. Tell the folks a little bit more about the book and your rationale for revising it.

Paula:
Thanks, Larry. It’s exciting to be back and it’s kind of amazing to think, I know you have a lot of these episodes under the bridge since we last spoke. But I’m happy to be back and I’m happy to be back to talk about the release of the second edition, actually, of my book, Content Audits and Inventories: A Handbook. So, one of the things that you might notice in the second edition is the title has changed just ever so slightly to A Handbook for Content Analysis. So when you go to look for that somewhere, that’ll be one hint that you’re looking at the second edition. And that was very important to me to get that into the title because, as you and I have discussed, I think, audits and inventories are really vital processes for understanding content and making content improvements and changing the way organizations manage their content.

Paula:
But audits and inventories in and of themselves aren’t the end goal. They are processes, they can be deliverables if you’re a consultant, and sometimes that is all they are, someone is handing over a spreadsheet or a document. And that’s not what we want to be the case. We want these to actually lead to analysis and actionable outcomes and changes in the way that organizations think about their content. So it was important to me to get those words, “for content analysis,” added to the title because I really want to emphasize that aspect of these processes versus the actual, “Now, set up a spreadsheet and put these columns here and there.” All of which is important, but I want to make sure we’re putting the focus on the what comes after that.

Larry:
Well, I would expect nothing less from a person who runs an outfit called Strategic Content. But one thing about that… Well, actually, the first thing I want to get to is I think most people listening in will know the difference between an audit and an inventory. But I just want to make sure for the folks who are new to this discipline, because we have a lot of folks listening who are coming in from different parts of content strategy, so can you just talk a little bit about the difference between an inventory and an audit?

Paula:
Sure. And I think the easiest way to think about them, although I think this line is getting a little bit blurred, is quantitative versus qualitative. So, an inventory is the quantitative assessment of a set of content. So it’s typically something that’s generated by running some sort of a tool, like a website crawler, to gather a list, usually in spreadsheet form, of all of the assets on a site. So this is quite literally just an inventory of what is there. It’s a list of the URLs. It typically includes identifiers for images and documents and captures metadata and all of that sort of scrapable information about typically a website. But keeping in mind that if an organization publishes to other channels or also has print or other forms of content, an inventory and an audit might actually need to take those into account as well.

Paula:
But typically when we’re talking about an inventory, it’s most often in the context of assessing what’s on a website. So it’s literally the what’s on it, and you’re not necessarily yet doing any sort of analysis of what you find beyond gathering those numbers, those raw numbers and that raw data. An audit is where you take that information and then take a qualitative approach. So, you are starting with what you know about what you have, but then layering in your analysis of that information against what you need to learn from it. And so that what you need to learn is typically informed by what your business goals are for your content and for your site, for your product, for your services, what your users need and want, whether they’re customers or donors or readers, what they’re looking at, what they want, what their tasks are that they’re coming to your site to achieve.

Paula:
What’s your quality bar? How is your content written and presented? Both from an editorial standpoint of making sure that it’s well written and not full of jargon or not full of even things like typos or whatever. Excuse me. But also is it written in your brand style, tone of voice and so on? So the qualitative is when you start to apply those very custom criteria, and those criteria are custom because they’re very focused on what your business and your audience goals are. And so that will inform what you’re going to look at that content for and what questions you’re going to ask about that content. So the inventory gives you this foundational set of information. Sometimes an inventory may be all that you need. If what you’re doing is planning something like a content migration, you’re not planning to do anything in between old and new platform, you just need to know, are we moving 50 pieces of content or 50,000 pieces of content, that may be as much as you need to know.

Paula:
But typically an inventory is the starting point for an audit. And if nothing else, it gives you a format in which audits typically happen. And at least as I do them, I start with that output, put it into a spreadsheet, start to organize it, then begin to layer in what are the things that I want to start to capture about each of these pieces of content based on my audit criteria?

Paula:
And when I talk about inventories there, again, there are things you can learn from an inventory that can lead to content improvements. You can see if the tool that you use captures meta descriptions, just as an example, and you see that you don’t have them or they’re just duplicated from page to page. Those are some kinds of things that you can immediately see and fix, and you may be able to identify certain patterns in just that raw data. But the audit is when you start to layer in, not just do we have meta descriptions, but what should they be conveying about this particular page, just as a very tiny example.

Larry:
And you mentioned some of the auditing criteria, but you also talk in the book about there’s a whole lot of reasons that you can do an audit. I guess that opens up more criteria, or maybe constrains the criteria, like if you’re doing a competitive audit versus a migration audit. Can you talk a little bit about those different purposes? And I guess this gets at where do audits come from? And it’s typically just by an event like this, right?

Paula:
Right. Yeah, I mean, there are a number of things that can trigger the need to do an audit, and maybe we’ll get back to it at the end. But I mean, one of them is simply that you really should at any given moment know what’s on your site and what the quality of that content is. But there can be specific business objectives as well. So you might be, as we’ve mentioned, a content migration for example. That’s a very typical kickoff for an audit, because if you are planning to move your content into a different content management system, and you’re looking at, again, what do we have now and what do we want it to look like in its new home? What do we need to do to it along that journey from old to new? Do we want to take the opportunity to clean out old content, make sure we’re not carrying over any of the stuff that’s no longer serving its purpose?

Paula:
That’s one really typical trigger for an audit. You might also be talking about you’re updating your branding and your messaging. And so that audit would look at very different material, potentially, or different aspects of the site. Potentially might be much more focused on things like what’s the tone of the writing? How are we speaking? How are we conveying our brand through the imagery, the design, the content? Competitive audits, you might be looking at some of the same kinds of things, but in this case, you’re looking at how those aspects of your site compare to equivalent aspects of competitor or peer sites, if you don’t have direct competitors, or best in class for that matter. If you really want to learn how whoever’s best in class in your industry or your field, you might do a competitive audit of your site against theirs.

Paula:
And so you’re kind of choosing what are the things we care about? What are the things that are most important to us that are measurable across these other sites as well? And so that might be something like, are we going for the same audience and how do those sites speak to this audience compared to how we do? Or what’s the task flow on that site for signing up for something versus the way we do that? So again, the criteria, there’s a whole slew of criteria you could apply. And so the context in which you’re doing the audit, whatever triggered it and whatever you need to find out is really going to drive which of those criteria you’re going to focus on. Because you can’t look at everything and ideally you have some very specific things you need to learn that will help you get to whatever the objective of that triggering project is.

Larry:
Got it, yeah. And as you talk about that, I’m reminded that all that stuff you just talked about, that’s a lot of work and you got to get resources allocated to make it happen. So you get the business case for, okay, we need to understand this so we can do it better. Do you ever find… I know I’ve had to, but making the business case for conducting an audit as opposed to just skimming through an inventory and saying, “Oh, we’re good,” as opposed to doing the more… Because qualitative work always takes more time, but it’s worth it, I’m going to assume.

Paula:
Oh, yeah. Yeah. And I think one of the things that is emphasized, I think, even more in this edition of the book, for example, is all of that upfront work, which is selling it in, making the business case, assessing whether the organization is actually even ready to do what needs to be done with what comes out of the audit. So making that business case, again, you’re going to be spending time doing this, as you said, this is a lot of work. Sometimes you are involving other people in this work. Ideally, you’re involving other people in some aspects of it. It may be a team audit or it may just be that you need to get time and resources for yourself to do it, or you may need to fit it into other project work that’s going on if it’s part of a larger project like a migration.

Paula:
So you need not just permission to do these activities and take this time, but you need commitment on the part of the organization, to take it seriously, to do something with it when it’s done. And some of this comes from, to be honest, some of this comes from painful personal experience. I mean, I have done an audit where people weren’t bought in and didn’t really understand why we were doing it, and weren’t prepared for or particularly interested in making changes to the content as a result of it. And it’s a good way to waste a lot of people’s time and a lot of goodwill.

Paula:
And so, again, as I’ve said, making that case for change and making sure the organization is ready for it, making sure you have buy-in at every level. So definitely getting that stakeholder or upper management buy-in because they may be the people who not only are going to okay people spending time doing this, but if there are budget issues or budget implications of making change and maybe purchasing new tools, or whatever might be some of the recommended outcomes, they need to be prepared for that. And they need to have put that permission or that context in place that, yes, this is an important thing for us to do as a business. We also need to get buy-in from the people at the level of the people who are actually doing the audit as well. So if you’re bringing in other people, they need to be bought into it, too.

Paula:
And so, one of the things that I talk a lot about, and particularly this gets back to the criteria, is making sure that everybody understands, why are we doing this? What specifically are we looking for? How do we measure that? And making sure that everybody is really on the same page and understands what those criteria mean, and are prepared then to know that there may be some hard decisions to make or there may be some hard work to do to make these changes. And if you’re working with some of the people who’ve been the ones who’ve created and managed that function up till now, that’s when your pre-work may be really important.

Paula:
And I’ve seen that both in-house and as a consultant. I mean, sometimes consultants are brought in and sort of foisted upon a team and said, “Oh, we’re going to be doing this audit,” and they’re like, “What? Really? Why? I don’t want to change my content, I wrote that and I’m very proud of it.” So those soft skills, I think ultimately are as important or maybe even more, that preparation and communication and shared understanding and getting to a place where everyone is bought in is so critical to the success of an audit.

Larry:
I think that seems like something that we’re all much better at now than we were 10 years ago. I think we were all doing it and conscious of its importance 10 years ago, but it seems like we’ve really got a lot better at that. But there’s a bunch of other stuff that’s changed a lot. Because the last 10 years, there’s been a lot of change just in general in how we practice and what’s going on. But there’s also been… Just the fact that your book is now 100 pages longer, there must be some other stuff that changed too. So I’m assuming that that’s part of it, because you do a lot more, I think, in this edition about the preparation and a lot of the stuff you were just talking about. But what else changed in the second edition? What were the big themes or changes?

Paula:
Well, I think part of it is just incorporating, we talked about some of the types of audits or initiatives that might spur an audit. There’s a chapter now on doing a structural audit, for example, and this would be relevant generally to something like a replatforming project or something. So auditing for things like templates and content types and components and much more the underpinnings of the content. So there’s a new chapter on auditing content structure. I broke out auditing social media channels into its own chapter. A new thing that really wasn’t as much of an issue in 2014 were single-page sites or apps. And so there’s a chapter now for auditing apps and single-page sites that actually was somewhat spurred by a question that came to me. I teach in a master’s program in a university called FH Joanneum in Graz, Austria.

Paula:
I teach a content audits class. And one of my students came to me, after the class had ended, said that she had been asked to audit an app and did I have any advice about that? And that led us down a little bit of a path of, well, what would that be like? How is that different than auditing a website? And she actually, based on her experience, I actually asked her to and she contributed a little case study to the book about her experience of auditing that app. And so she and I worked together on that to figure out how different is that? I mean, very literally, how different is it? You can’t run an inventory on an app and get a list of URLs.

Paula:
So instead, you’re looking at screens and you’re looking at potentially even going to something like the underlying design files, because you might need to look at the differences between logged in and logged out states or after any particular action or whatever. So that was an interesting experience and addition to the book. I think that that’s obviously, at least in my experience, it’s a bigger area of opportunity now than it was nine years ago.

Larry:
Yeah, as you talk about that, I’m reminded that 10 years ago, or nine years ago when the book first came out, we were really focused on the web. That was 100% webpages. And now there’s much more, because you’ve mentioned the new chapter on social media and that product. And I glimpsed, I didn’t have a chance to read it in full, but that case study about a product-content audit. And it kind of gets at that omnichannel strategy, which is the umbrella term for that kind of stuff. How can we be prepared to address those challenges? Because that’s only going to become more of a thing, I think, is needing to audit more and different kinds of content. I guess your structured content chapter must be a good start at that, I’m going to guess.

Paula:
Yeah, and this is sort of a drum beat that I’m just going to continue to drum. That doesn’t make any sense. There are techniques, there are processes, there are tools. That entire aspect of doing this work is important and that is changing. There are different techniques for auditing an app versus auditing a website. There’s also a new chapter on auditing for accessibility. That’s different than auditing for something like brand messaging per se. I mean, for one thing, there are a lot more tools to help. You can run color contrast checkers and you can run language-level assessments, those kinds of things. So along with there being different reasons and different scenarios in which you’d run audits, the tools and the processes are evolving and will continue to. I mean, I’m sure AI is going to make a lot of this… That’s going to come to play even more so very soon, I’m sure.

Paula:
But again, I would always just go back to whatever it is you’re looking at, getting back to that upfront why: why are we doing this, and what do we need to learn? And spending that time, because I really do think it’s a little bit like the measure twice, cut once thing. If you haven’t done that upfront work, and that should be planned for, there should be time given to doing that upfront planning, which I recommend in the book, taking a almost traditional project planning approach to this, where you’re looking at time and budget and tools and staff and timelines, dependencies and deliverables to other projects. Spending as much, or I don’t know whether it’s as much time upfront as doing the audit, but certainly not skimping on that. Because whatever your scenario and whatever your intended outcomes, the better you have thought those through upfront then the more successful you’re going to be with what you end up learning.

Larry:
So Paula, as you were talking about all the changes and the scope of the work, one of the things I was reminded of is one of my favorite new things in the book, which is you talk about cultivating an audit mindset. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about that.

Paula:
Sure. So to me, this is both as an individual and as an organization, sort of speaks to adopting the mindset that first of all, your content’s a business asset that you need to manage as carefully as you do any other asset. But also sort of a culture of quality and a culture of constant improvement, so that you’re not every five years doing an audit and making some changes and then allowing content to go stale or get bad again. That you’re adopting this as something that is an ongoing process. We talked about things like rolling audits where you regularly assess content at whatever intervals make sense, but that you’re in this, you’ve adopted this thought mindset of always at any given moment being very aware of what’s on your website, what the quality of that is, how it’s performing, and that everybody has some investment in that quality.

Paula:
Everybody knows how you define that quality. So that gets back to the criteria and defining what does it mean to say that something is good or that it’s bad? How do you define those things? How do you measure? And the more that you can establish that mindset in your organization so that everyone is invested in that and understands and is involved in those ongoing improvement processes, then you’re both getting the immediate benefits, but you’re also not, as I said before, you’re not making one-time improvements that you’re going to have to do again once you’ve neglected your content again for a few years. So as part of governance, yeah.

Larry:
Right. I’m reminded of two things. Governance, and then like you mentioned a minute ago, the way this used to manifest was the best audits always include a rolling audit as an ongoing deliverable. But this is a pretty big evolution from that. This is almost organizational change. And so must be a lot of communication and stakeholder alignment involved in getting people to… Or can this be like a middle out kind of leadership around it? Because cultivating that mindset, are you modeling it or democratizing it and recruiting people, training people?

Paula:
Yeah. And I think one of the things that can be just in and of itself the outcome of doing an audit is that, first of all, just a greater… If you are involving other people in the organization, so you’re not just doing it as a solo contributor or a consultant, but if you are involving other people there’s an educational aspect of that as well. So not only does everyone involved have a much broader understanding of the content. What can happen often in an organization is that people are very familiar with the content that they’ve created or that’s very specific to their part of the business, but they may not have that horizontal view. And so an audit can solve for that, if you get everyone involved in looking across all the content, being aware, bridging those silos.

Paula:
So that in and of itself lays the groundwork then for if everyone knows what’s there and has a sense of that. And then if, as part of your audit, you have gone through this organizational process of defining what do we care about? What are the metrics we measure? What is the quality bar that we’ve set? How do we define that? How, when we read a page or read a paragraph or look at an image or whatever, how do we determine if that’s meeting our goals and meeting our users’ goals? If everyone comes out of an audit with that understanding and with that context, then it just becomes more natural to be able to spot something. If you’re looking at a piece of content and going, “I know that isn’t quite the way we want to talk about that these days,” or, “That description could be written in a more user-friendly way,” or whatever it is.

Paula:
And so you get this familiarity and understanding of, again, just how we think about these things and how we measure them. And then that just feeds into this day-to-day maintenance and management. And ideally, too, an outcome of an audit is making updates to any documentation around content, so making sure you’ve got a style guide and that everyone has seen it and read it and it’s up-to-date. If there are workflows that need to be improved so that content goes through the appropriate review cycles, or whatever, those kinds of things can be the outputs of audits too. You’re learning where maybe your processes or your tools have failed or not quite met the bar that you’re setting. And so take the opportunity to make those fixes as well. So it’s not just rewriting a piece of content or making content improvements, but also potentially addressing any of the systems and processes that led to it getting to the state where there were errors or old, stale content or whatever you uncovered.

Larry:
As you say that, I’m reminded this is how you’re operationalizing it. And you’re sort of modeling it in the process of doing the audit. I love that. Hey, Paula, I can’t believe it, we’re coming up close to time already. These conversations always go way too fast. And I could nerd out about audits and inventories forever, but-

Paula:
Me, too.

Larry:
Yeah, exactly. Well, and you have been for many years. But before we wrap, is there anything last, anything that we haven’t covered yet or that came up that you want to follow up on or is just on your mind about content strategy or content audits?

Paula:
Yeah, I think just as we’ve discussed, there’s no substitute for really understanding your content and the processes that you need to take to do that. And certainly, there’ve been lots of advancements and tools. I’m sure that they’ll continue to be developed. But you can’t, I think, overemphasize enough, there’s three pieces to any of these, at least, to these projects. And the first piece of that is that upfront planning that you and I now have talked about quite a bit in this conversation. Then there’s the actual process of doing the audit. And then I think, again, there just has to be an equivalent emphasis on the outputs and turning that analysis into the insights you need to make good decisions, feeding that information back into your systems, adopting it as part of governance. But even previous to that, there’s an important aspect of communication, communicating your results, and how do you turn, go from a spreadsheet with a lot of notes in it to a plan?

Paula:
And so I would say, again, getting away from the thinking of these things as deliverables, like, “Hey, here’s your spreadsheet.” But, “Here’s a plan. Here are the implications from this. Here are some very specific, page by page improvements you may want to make, but also let’s look at the bigger picture and make sure we’re addressing the systems and the tools and the processes.” And that we’re adopting this and that the process has been valuable and often has proved its worth to the extent that the next time you want to audit or the next time you want to kick off an improvement project, you don’t have to fight these battles over and over.

Larry:
I love laying groundwork like that. The fewer battles, the better, more clever. Hey, one very last thing, Paula. What’s the best way for folks to connect online, to follow you or connect online?

Paula:
Well, you’ll find me on LinkedIn, so just look for me on LinkedIn. My business, Strategic Content, you can find me at strategiccontent.com. I also have a little website that I set up just specifically for the book that is contentaudit.net, and I’ll be blogging there and adding, at some point I want to upload some templates and other resources there. So that’s another site to maybe keep an eye on.

Larry:
Great. Well, thanks so much, Paula. It’s so fun having you back and talking to you again.

Paula:
Thanks, Larry. Yeah, it’s great to talk to you. I appreciate the opportunity.