One of my recent jobs was to convert existing documentation to the parent company’s brand and format. While I was reformatting, rebranding, and chasing down information, I saw that the existing documentation was outdated, with contradictory information and other problems with the content. I suggested planning and scheduling a content audit so we’d have a plan.
The documentation was the specifications “prettied up.” The documentation manager insisted that we didn’t need a content audit. The Validation group would catch anything out of alignment with the spec. But what about writing documents for the end user? What about finding out what they needed and giving that to them? That, I was told, wasn’t our job.
Any time a manager says writing for the end user isn’t part of your job, you not writing. You’re typing.
So, what is a Content Audit? A content audit is a process for collecting, analyzing, and reporting on your user manuals, online help, and other documents against specific performance criteria. Is it accurate? Does it follow the company style, brand, and layout? Is information contradictory from piece to piece? Conducting a content audit of your technical documentation is essential for ensuring clarity, accuracy, and usefulness. Here are some things to consider when planning to perform your own content audits.
Define Your Goals
What do you want to achieve with your content audit? Are you looking to improve readability, update outdated information, ensure consistency, or identify content gaps? You can do one, some, or all of these. Of course, the more tasks, the longer it can take.
Start with a one goal that is measurable and can quickly provide information you can report to stakeholders. This makes you feel the tasks are doable and gives stakeholders assurance that the content audit provides value.
Inventory Your Content
Gather all your technical documentation. Create a comprehensive list, including titles, authors, publication dates, and locations (URLs or file paths). Create a spreadsheet, Notion, or other document for this information and make it shareable among the team so they can quickly update it.
Develop Evaluation Criteria
Establish criteria for evaluating your content. Typical criteria include accuracy, relevance, clarity, consistency, completeness, and alignment with user needs. If some documentation was produced with different software, note if they need to be converted to your current authoring tool.
Assess Your Content
Review each piece of content against your evaluation criteria. Record notes and “guestimates” on content issues, such as outdated information, unclear instructions, or inconsistencies.
Content is more than words. Assess images, videos, and schematics as well.
Gather Feedback
Collect feedback from users, stakeholders, and team members. Ask them about issues they’ve had with the documents. Ask product support about user calls. All this provides valuable insights into how the documentation is used and what improvements are needed.
Analyze and Prioritize
Analyze your findings and prioritize the issues based on their impact and urgency. Create a plan for addressing the most critical issues first.
Update and Improve
Update your documentation as needed. This may involve rewriting sections, adding new content, updating links, or standardizing terminology. Sometimes, you might need to adopt a new documentation approach like Diátaxis.
Create a Maintenance Plan
Establish a regular schedule for reviewing and updating your documentation. This will help ensure that your content remains accurate and valuable over time.
Monitor and Measure
Monitor user feedback and engagement to track the effectiveness of your updates. If you use a system such as Jira to track product defects, use that to track documentation defects and improvement tasks. This creates a unified workflow that helps documentation issues receive the same visibility and priority as product issues. You can even link documentation tasks to related product features or bugs, providing valuable context and ensuring documentation stays aligned with product development.
Conclusion
Content audits represent far more than a technical checklist or compliance exercise — they are the bridge between documentation that merely exists and documentation that genuinely serves the user. While it may be tempting to rely solely on internal reviewers or to dismiss the work involved, these views fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of technical documentation. When we reduce technical writing to simply reformatting specifications, we miss the opportunity to create documentation that empowers users, reduces the support burden, and drives product adoption.
The systematic approach outlined above — from setting clear goals to establishing maintenance plans — provides a framework for transforming your documentation from a liability into an asset. Yes, content audits require time, resources, and organizational buy-in. However, consider the alternative: documentation that frustrates users increases support costs and damages your product’s reputation. By embracing content audits as a core part of the documentation lifecycle, you demonstrate a commitment to technical accuracy and genuine user success.
Remember: technical writers are not typists. We are user advocates, information architects, and communication specialists. Our job is not simply to record what the product does but to help users understand how to use it effectively. A well-executed content audit is one of our most powerful tools for fulfilling this mission.