Content audit of the Italian language version of an online shop from the beauty industry
Content audit lets you verify the quality of texts appearing on your company’s website. Whether you speak the language used for communication with the customer or the content in question is multilingual, an expert’s help may prove indispensable.
Read our article and learn about a content audit project for an online shop from the beauty industry!
Challenges and objectives
Our client – a cosmetics manufacturer – asked us to verify the quality of content on their online platform, including texts related to key products from their range.
The website content was delivered by a different translation provider, with whom a specific level of service had been agreed.
Seeing their Italian version’s poor results, they decided to evaluate the quality of published texts.
Step 1: Verifying the general quality of website content
First, we asked the client to identify the content and products on the website that were especially important from the business point of view.
They suggested a partial check of such pages as About us, Privacy Policy, or Terms and Conditions, as well as random category and product descriptions.
Subsequently, the selected pages were sent to our linguist – a native speaker of Italian – so that they could verify the quality.
Additionally, the audit was complemented by a tentative search-engine-optimisation analysis and expert recommendations regarding what should be done as soon as possible SEO-wise.
The content audit was a spreadsheet with:
- erroneous content from the website;
- suggested corrections;
- linguist’s comments;
- information on error severity;
- error type (style, grammatical correctness, terminology, etc.).
Together with remarks from the linguist and our own reflections, we forwarded the audit to the client.
Step 2: Verifying the quality of key product descriptions
Having received the general content audit, the client asked us to look into the quality of descriptions of their key products.
Conclusions
Thanks to the content audit of the Italian version of our client’s online shop, several flaws of the translation process employed by the initial provider were discovered.
Search engine optimisation wasn’t conducted correctly either. Low organic search visibility, combined with erroneous product descriptions and untranslated chunks of text, scared off potential customers in a market otherwise very welcoming towards the beauty industry.
The conclusions presented to the client included suggestions comprehensive enough to be implemented in online shops from other industries, e.g.: