Content Audit and Taxonomy — Canada Business

Canada Business (CB) has a collection of over 3000 documents, including summaries of government programs and services, fact sheets, and business guides. However, clients were having difficulty finding the information that they need. There were also concerns about the quality and readability of the documents. As such, CB engaged Re-Think Strategic Consulting to develop a new taxonomy for classifying the documents and to conduct a quality assurance audit on the existing content.

This process involved first developing a strawman taxonomy using taxonomies in use by CB, research on client needs and, and a review of taxonomies used by other government portals for business. Re-Think then conducted an audit of 1/3 of the content holdings (1008 documents) in the Business Information System (BIS). Each document reviewed during the content audit was classified according to the strawman taxonomy (using existing terms or proposing new ones). The resulting taxonomy made recommendations for classification and terms in several facets, namely subject, audience, industry sector and geographic area.

In addition, each document was reviewed for quality and appropriateness, looking at the currency of content, applicability to business, use of document templates, quality of writing and other issues.

The results of the audit and recommendations were compiled into two reports and presentation decks – one on the new taxonomy and one on the content audit. The results of the content audit were presented to the team of content developers at their national training meeting in Toronto and Re-Think facilitated a working session to come up with solutions to the quality problems.

Contact us to find out how to conduct an audit of your content or develop a taxonomy for your Web site.