Content Inventory – the Foundation of a Successful Content Strategy

Steps in a Content Audit

Let’s start with a clear definition: a content audit is a systematic process that evaluates all of an organization’s content to ensure it aligns with business goals, meets user needs, and is both accurate and effective. As Paula Land emphasizes in her work, a content audit is not just about reviewing content but about creating a strategic roadmap to improve and optimize it. It helps organizations understand their content landscape, identify strengths and weaknesses, and make informed decisions about future content strategies.

The content audit process can be broken down into several key steps:

1. Define objectives: Start by clarifying why the audit is being conducted. This might include improving user experience, optimizing SEO, or aligning content with business goals.
2. Inventory existing content: Create a detailed list of all content, including pages, documents, images, and videos, to understand the current scope.
3. Evaluate content: Select and define the criteria which will be used to analyze the content. Deciding - based on what your objectives are - what you need to look at and how you will measure it, is one of the most critical aspects of the whole process. With your defined criteria, you can assess the quality, relevance, and performance of each piece of content, identifying what works and what doesn’t. 
4. Analyze findings: Look for trends, gaps, redundancies, and opportunities to enhance content.
5. Develop recommendations: Create an actionable plan to address issues, improve content, and align it with strategic priorities.

Laying the groundwork before jumping in

Prior to diving into the audit process, it’s important to lay a groundwork that sets a direction for the project. As a consultant (internal or external), ask yourself - why are we doing this and how will we know if/when we succeed?

This initial line of questioning brings to the forefront a clear understanding of both the organization’s business goals and the needs of its users. 

Business goals help guide the project by showing what content and features support the organization’s success. These goals also keep the work focused, consistent, and tied to measurable results. You can identify business goals by talking to key stakeholders, using different tools to sort must-haves from nice-to-haves, and looking at both short- and long-term priorities. Having clear goals ensures the content serves the overall strategy.

At the same time, you need to focus on what your users need. Start by asking key questions: Who are we creating this for? What do they need? How can we tell if they’re finding what they’re looking for? You can figure this out using data like analytics and user research, as well as feedback from surveys or observing how people interact with your content. Understanding user needs shows what’s working, what’s missing, and helps you make decisions based on real tasks and experiences. This step ensures you’re creating content for real people, with real needs, and real challenges that your organization can help solve.

Laying this groundwork before diving headfirst into a project is important as it sets direction and ensures that you are getting the right deliverables out of a content audit project. 

At the end of the day, our goal is to design websites that are structured, functional, and user-friendly. Paula Land illustrates the impacts of not defining outcomes by comparing it to customers ordering a meal at a restaurant they are not satisfied with. While they might feel let down after paying for a disappointing meal, the stakes are much higher when we deliver underperforming websites to clients, accompanied by invoices worth six or seven figures.

Why conduct a Content Inventory?

Just like baking a cake requires knowing your ingredients, tackling a content project begins with understanding your existing assets. A content inventory acts as your recipe’s ingredient list of all your digital assets, from web pages to images, videos and PDFs. It's the foundation you need to understand what's currently available, what is working and where there is room for improvement.

Here are some reasons why you should conduct a content inventory:

• Scope your project: Whether you are planning a simple site refresh or a complete redesign, knowing what content you have makes it easier to estimate the resources and effort required. For example, if your inventory reveals hundreds of outdated PDFs, you will know how to prioritize updating or removing them during your project.
• Spot patterns and issues: An inventory provides critical insight into your content. Are certain topics over-represented while others are under-represented? Are some sections riddled with broken links or missing metadata? By identifying these patterns early on, you can focus your efforts where they are most needed.
• Track progress: Establishing a baseline will help you measure success. For example, you might want to see if your content updates are improving SEO rankings or reducing bounce rates. By comparing your 'before' inventory to your 'after' metrics, you can get a clear picture of what is working.

In short, a content inventory lays the foundation for the content audit and the strategic recommendations that will come out of that.

Key elements to include in your Content Inventory

Not all assets are created equal. To get the most value, you will want to capture the right data points that provide both the big picture and the finer details of your content.

Here is a breakdown of some essential elements:

• URLs: The location of each asset – webpages, images, videos, or documents.
• Metadata: Page titles, descriptions, and keywords that impact search engine optimization (SEO).
• File types and sizes: From HTML to PDFs, knowing what formats exist and their sizes helps with performance evaluation.
• H1 tags: The page headlines that should ideally include keywords and describe the content clearly.
• Analytics data: Metrics like page views, bounce rates, and time on the page tell you what is engaging (or not) your audience.
• Links: Connections within your site and to external pages reveal cross-linking strategies and potential updates.
• Word count: Great for spotting overly short or unnecessarily lengthy content.
• Media assets: Images, videos, and documents – organized and tracked for relevance and usability. Their presence or absence indicates the variety of content types on the site and highlights the different ways information can be presented.

Each of these elements provides valuable insights, whether you are evaluating SEO performance or enhancing the user experience.

What can we learn from a Content Inventory?

A content inventory is more than just a list of assets. It is a tool for discovery, helping you discover key insights about your digital landscape. Here is what you can learn:

1. What you have: An inventory might reveal hundreds of forgotten pages, outdated resources, or duplicate content on your site. 
2. How it is structured: Analyzing URLs and navigational hierarchies highlights strengths and weaknesses in your site’s architecture.
3. What is working (and what isn’t): By combining content with analytics data, you can identify high-performing pages and those that need attention.
4. Consistency: Are your metadata, headings, and word counts consistent across similar pages? A content inventory will show you where improvements are needed.
5. Gaps and opportunities: Spot missing content types, outdated information, or areas where you could expand to meet user needs.

A content inventory is the cornerstone of a successful content audit, providing a comprehensive overview of an organization’s digital assets. By cataloging all existing content, it sets the stage for deeper analysis and strategic decision-making. This foundational step is critical whether the goal is to declutter, improve SEO, or enhance user engagement, as it establishes the groundwork for an online presence that serves both the business and its audience. However, the inventory is only the beginning.

The next steps in the content audit process involve a qualitative audit, where the quality, relevance, and performance of the content are assessed, and a competitive audit, which examines how your content compares to that of competitors in the market. Together, these steps build upon the foundation laid by the inventory, helping organizations not only optimize their current content but also identify opportunities to strengthen their position in the competitive landscape.

With a solid content inventory in place, teams are equipped to take these next steps confidently, ensuring their content strategy is data-driven, impactful, and aligned with both business goals and user needs.

Where to go from here #

References #

Land, P. L. (2023). Content audits and inventories: A handbook for content analysis (2nd ed.). XML Press.