Website Architecture Planning | Content Audit

Throughout this article we are going to talk about the importance of content inventories and content audits, especially when it comes to the success of your website as a whole, its maintenance and overall management.

It’s not uncommon for new (and quite often established) website owners to forget all about content inventories and how valuable they can be, particularly when it comes to the success of a website.

It is the desire of every webmaster to own a website that can meet their needs, serve and engage his/her visitors. Every webmaster has to develop a positive stance towards competition which many people dread. Competition should be given the right perspective and proper interpretation as you should learn from it in order to improve on personal services and products. Content auditing is aimed at auditing your website as a defense against competitors. It helps you to examine the effectiveness of your contents as well as bridging any technical flaws and gaps.

You know you need a content audit when you realize that your organic search traffic has been going flat in the recent past or the ranking of your keywords in vital search terms has been falling.  A content audit is an assessment that examines the web content assets of your company for SEO value, relevance, messaging and quality.  Taking a comprehensive approach towards examining the nature of your website’s content goes a long way in enhancing your website for significantly better results. An audit can be time-consuming and boring especially because you are not spending your time on content creation and promotion. However, when done appropriately, it can be very effective in revolutionizing your online presence.

If you are about to start re-designing your website, it is highly recommended to take a full account of your website's different content types and pages. You can do that with a content inventory template by review each pages content manually and entering it into a spreadsheet or you can simplify the process by using a content inventory tool like DYNO Mapper. Content inventories were very tedious in the past and left room for human error. DYNO Mapper does all the work and includes sitemap, analytics integration, and comments for efficient collaboration during the web design process. 

In this article, we will discuss and explain how to do a website content audit, why this is very useful, and how a content analysis tool can decrease your time and effort. But we will start first by answering the question “What is a content audit?”

What is a website content audit?

A content audit is a process that includes looking at all the content (data) in the website or a marketing funnel and determining the strong and weak points of it in order to maximize the marketing activities. This process is sometimes confused with a content inventory, which is just a list of all items on your website. When done in an effective way, a great content audit will help answer questions about which parts of the site an audience likes more and dislikes as well. It will give clear insight on potential issues that must be fixed in order to enhance the productivity of your website.