Why is a good content inventory important?

A content inventory is the result and process of creating a comprehensive list of all content within a website. All website assets, regardless of their use should be accounted for and also where each is located. Your content inventory should also include an inventory of all links, internal and external and whether the link is good or bad.

A content inventory of all of your website assets will help you decide what type of analytic metrics are needed for a website content audit. If you do not know what type of content is on a website, it is impossible to know what to measure. For example, if a website contains embedded video, some great analytics data can be retrieved from 3rd party video websites like YouTube and Vimeo. 

A content inventory is a registry of all the content of a site and previously, this was all done with the help of a Excel Spreadsheet. It was a time intensive and manual process. Not to mention, it was easy to make mistakes with the possibility of human error. Save yourself a headache and invest in a content inventory tool like DYNO Mapper that can make the process easy and fun. DYNO Mapper will audit your content and give you the ability to sort and export the information that you need.

The content inventory is also useful when a website is being redesigned or migrated to another domain. If a site is going to be migrated, a content inventory can come in very handy when things don't go as intended. It will give you a basis for comparison of the live website and the new development site. Without this, it would be impossible to know if you have completed a migration successfully. A content inventory can help organize the site so a similar navigation system can be implemented. The content inventory is also useful to track data transfer from one system to another. If your migration is unsuccessful, this could have a disastrous effect on your rankings in search engines. 

Content inventories should also include all the raw data of a website asset. Make sure to collect the following:

• Page title and subtitles.
• Page URL.
• File type (PDF, TXT, DOC, etc.)
• Content author or supplier.
• Meta description or phrase.
• Meta keyword.
• Categories of the content.
• Last edited, and creation dates.

After you have a comprehensive and effective content inventory, this will provide the information needed to proceed with a content audit and content analysis. A content audit will help you decide what pages should be removed or featured or how to reorganize the data for better website performance. Inventories are useful as a part of content creating, editing, maintenance, and analysis.