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Our content auditing process

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At Peterborough City Council, we have a content auditing process to review and optimise all pages on Peterborough.gov.uk to meet our corporate and digital strategy, website standards and user needs.

We have over 975 pages that we check. As part of the audit, we monitor:

What is a content auditing process?

Content auditing is a review or evaluation of existing content. Our aim is to assess the content's quality, relevance and performance. It allow us to understand what to keep, update or remove on our website to improve site traffic and user engagement. It also provides us with a starting point of what to ask service content champions to look at when supporting our updates.

Benefit of a content auditing process

Introducing a content auditing process is useful because it allows us to focus on quality content, building relationships with service content champions, developing our SEO to encourage more users to find our site and continue a high standard of accessibility.

Quality

Reviewing tone, style and messaging of our website means that we are able to improve consistency and accuracy. We remove or update any outdated content and we use these insights to make better decisions. All of these actions, helps us to build trust and authority with users. 

Relationship building

Regularly updating our content shows both the service content champions and our users that the information we host on our website is reliable. Having access and good relationships with services encourages engagement.

The biggest benefit is that it encourages communications across teams. We have found that by checking in about pages, services are thinking about ways that they can optimise webpages or about updating our team when changes occur. 

SEO

Along with working with services to change content, we optimise this technically to help us boost our search rankings. We do this by looking at broken links and duplicate content. Other ways we look to increase organic traffic is by optimising metadata and meta descriptions.  

Accessibility

Accessibility is a legal and ethical standard, which also improves readability and the inclusivity of our website. As part of our audit check we monitor and update alternative tags, unclear language and review documents. We do everything we can to ensure that everyone can access the information on our website. 

Each step in the auditing process

To improve our content auditing process, we make use of Microsoft Planner and Silktide. One platform helps us to track and monitor the content under review, while the other flags any technical issues that needs to be addressed. 

Using Microsoft Planner

We took a manual process that required a team member to access and update a spreadsheet. Now, we can simply set a date on a task, and the system automatically sends an email reminder to update the page. With less time spent on admin, the team spends more time collaborating with services and refreshing webpage content.

Using Silktide

Instead of using separate systems to monitor content quality, accessibility, SEO and user experience, we have one tool to monitor our website. The platform provides scoring and we are able to track our progress to show improvement over time. 

We've created an outreach schedule which features quarterly, six monthly, annual and ad hoc checks. These checks are based on the need to update the page. Fee information, event listing and contact details are some examples of why we may regularly check a page. 

This process is continually reviewed and we will adjust the frequency of our outreach to service as needed, increasing or decreasing it depending on content requirements. 

We have a list of content champions for each service area. As part of our audit, we request that these champions review pages for:

  • Outdated content
  • Service updates
  • New policies and documents
  • Contact information
  • Fee updates
  • Any other information related to their service

It is important that all champions are included in this process so that we do not make any updates that could impact the service.

We understand that services are often under pressure and may not always be able to respond promptly. We have put in place a tiered approach to help manage follow-ups. We allow two weeks before sending the first follow-up, followed by another two weeks before the second. A final follow-up is then made either by email or via Teams. If we still do not recieve a response, we record that the service has not responded and we mark the check as abandoned. 

We use Microsoft Planner to track and manage our audit process. Each time we reach out to a service, we will update the Planner to document the interaction and schedule the next follow-up in line with our contact strategy (typically two weeks later). 

If a service responds, we document the information provided in the comments section. This allows for any team member to easily understand the conversation and progress, even if someone is on leave or unavailable. 

We also make use of the tagging function to categorise each page by check type and timeframe. Tags are further used to show the content check progress, the type of check (annual, monthly etc.) or if a task has been marked as abandoned. 

Once a page has been reviewed, we mark it as complete. Each task (page) includes a recurring due date for the next review, ensuring that when a task is ticked off a new check is scheduled. 

In addition to monitoring tags on Microsoft Planner such as abandoned pages, we can use our content audit to track the number of pages updated as part of this workflow. 

We also use data from Silktide to produce reports on accessibility performance and improvements. 

Last updated: 30 October 2025