Feel like you’re not getting the business benefits your intranet promised? If so, you need to find out what’s going wrong. Performing an intranet content audit benefits your business by identifying the root causes of poor intranet performance.

For example, you might find that over-complex navigation is frustrating users, or that duplicate content is cluttering your file system.

By using an intranet audit to identify these issues, you will ultimately be able to:

• improve staff intranet engagement
• take advantage of unused assets
• free up valuable server space
• reduce intranet migration costs

Now let’s take a more in-depth look at the reasons to start your intranet content audit.

Troubleshoot before trouble appears

An intranet audit will help you identify problems that would otherwise go unnoticed. For instance, you might notice a lack of engagement with your content, content duplication and inaccuracies.

You can use a content audit to improve usability, including search functionality and content structure. At Influential, we often perform intranet audits for clients at the beginning of an intranet project. This helps our clients determine the best structural changes that will improve navigation and usability.

Improve staff intranet engagement

Content is there to be read, but if the workforce isn’t engaging with it then you have a problem. An intranet content audit benefits your company by helping you understand why your staff aren’t engaging.

To give one example, we helped an engineering company better engage its staff with our intranet development services. The problem was that the client’s workforce felt the intranet was more like “a company newsletter” than a space for positive collaboration. Our solution was to redesign the company intranet in a way that better reflected the company’s workforce. 

Organise content more effectively

Enterprises often have a hard time keeping track of every document, especially if many users have the freedom to create new documents. And over time intranet users can often forget about duplicated or outdated content. 

In the long-term, this poorly structured content will frustrate users who are trying to find information quickly. And as a result your intranet adoption may suffer, which means you won’t get the full value from your software.

An intranet audit will give you a full inventory of the content on your intranet, while identifying duplicates and outdated files. You can then decide what to keep and what to delete.

Cut content migration costs

An intranet content audit will help reduce your content migration costs. Instead of spending time migrating outdated or duplicated files, you will end up with only the content you need.

For example, when a merger left an insurance company with incompatible intranets, our SharePoint migration expertise helped audit and move content. During the intranet content audit, we were able to identify and remove unnecessary documents, keeping the cost of moving low.