Manage content

How to make sure your content is accurate and relevant - keep a content inventory, schedule maintenance, watch users and feedback.

Summary: Make time to monitor how your content is used and make updates to keep it relevant.

Over time content can become inaccurate or misleading. And links can break.

Relying on your publishing system to help keep content up to date is not enough. We recommend to keep your content in good shape by:

keeping a content inventory
identifying maintenance intervals per piece of content
scheduling that maintenance
monitoring how your content is being used
collecting and reviewing user feedback.

Keep a content inventory

A content inventory records all the content you’re responsible for and the shape it’s in.

You can use a spreadsheet to record per page/piece of content:

address (URL)
title
format (web page, document, multimedia)
content owner or approver
date last updated.

You could also add updating details, usage stats and more.

If you keep an accurate inventory, you can pass it on when someone else takes over responsibility for your content.

Identify maintenance intervals

To keep content up to date, set a review date for each page. Add this to your spreadsheet. Usually, you’ll need to check content every 6–12 months. But check it more often when it includes:

dates — review the content on or the day after each date.
links — if your system doesn’t run broken link checks, you’ll need to check at least every 2–3 months.

Schedule maintenance time

Scheduling maintenance time can help that work to get done. It also helps you to understand some of the costs of publishing content. If you have more content than you have time to manage, you either need more people or less content.

Monitor use

Check how your content is being used. If you don’t have access, ask your web manager.

You could include in your inventory:

page views – is it under-performing? Do you need to improve the content or remove the page?
average time-on-page – what does the time tell you – is it valued by users?
bounce rate – is the rate acceptable? Are you expecting users to click through to content or complete their task on this page?
landing pages, exit pages – which pages do people first arrive on? From which pages are they leaving? Any surprises here?
search terms – are the search terms what you expected? Which topics are searched for most?

Monitor user feedback

Does your website include a ‘Was this page helpful?’ feature for users? If so make sure you get access to the information users submit.

Other feedback channels include: email, social, call and customer services centres. Use this feedback to look for:

problems with content
gaps in existing content
words users associate with a topic or task.