The best way to efficient website content maintenance is first having a proper understanding of your current content and how it serves the business purpose.  You may be familiar with different ways of administering a website but the inventory presents a key way to understand content.

A quantitative content inventory is a document that highlights all your web pages as well as data about those pages. Even though the document has previously been seen as time consuming and mind numbing, it has been of great use to website designers, information architects, site managers and content strategists. Auditing content manually is time-consuming and can be costly, that is why it is recommended that you speed up the process with a website content audit tool. The tool is able to provide an accurate highlight of your website data and thereby makes it possible for you to focus delivering a quality service to your customers.  

Questions Answered by Qualitative Content Inventories

• How many pages are in the website?
• How many and what are the other types of contents (images, videos, documents) and what pages are they associated with?
• What is the location of the pages, identified by URL?
• How is the URL structured?
• How many inbound and outbound links are there?

What is the Importance of Conducting Content Inventories?

For many years, web professionals have been manually conducting content inventories, by clicking through web pages and recording content resources in separate worksheets or by using tools designed for other purposes (like web crawlers) for easy copy and paste work. The advantage of using software to automate some of the work is that the software provides a comprehensive list of URLs without much effort. In addition to this, the software can run in the background while you are working on your website audit.

Role of a Content Inventory in the Management and Maintenance of a Website

Content inventories have numerous uses. First, they ensure that you have the information you need to understand your content catalog and make sound decisions based on the evidence. A well-defined assessment of the pages you have enables you to come up with a strategy for your content lifecycle from continuous maintenance to future development, re-use and migration of the content in your website. Content inventories are very important in projects like fresh designs, redesigns, or migration. Using software tools, you can effortlessly build content inventories to ease the process of gathering content with just one tool, communicate to stakeholders about website size and speed up the content audit processes.

Why Should You Use a Tool when Tracking Website Content?

There are common issues that you might face when conducting a content inventory. First, not all content management systems have automated inventories. Also, creating a manual inventory is close to impossible for a website with 200,000 or more URLS. Furthermore, we use different tools to gather and store data; all of them require manual manipulation to represent the actual page structure of the website.

All of these factors affect the ability of the management and staff to make informed decisions concerning website content. Having a clearly structured inventory can double as an important factor in communicating between many parties. Since most content inventories are collected in spreadsheets, a software that enables you to instantly display information to multiple parties and easily export into Excel as well as other spreadsheet software will give you great flexibility in customizing reports for different audiences.

Advantages of Content Inventories

Website content inventory software goes a long way in saving time when working towards discovering the breadth of your content. Working with websites routinely makes it easy to know the amount of content contained and how it is structured.  A content inventory can appear to be a redundant activity but it helps in communicating the breadth of websites to stakeholders.  If the main decision makers do not know and wish to know what there is, all you need is a quantitative inventory. Content inventory software like DYNO Mapper makes it easy and possible to work from a more accurate understanding of website content.

Content Inventories are the Foundations to Content Audits

Armed with a content inventory, it becomes possible for you to build content audits, documents that enable you to review page-by-page how content measures against the set quality and effectiveness measures.  The DYNO Mapper tool measures up as a web content inventory that forms the basis of an informed content audit by returning the most crucial information about your website: how much of the information there is, the types of content you have (pages, audio, video, and documents) and the URL structure, which can provide valuable hints to content types (eg.  Product pages on an e-commerce site will have similar URL patterns), and the structuring of the website (from URL structure perspective).

Use the tool to quickly identify important information about each page in your website such as:

• Location (URL)
• Text:html, xml
• File Type
• Application: pdf, doc,xls
• Web files:js,css
• Images: jpeg, tif, png
• Media: swf, mp3, mp4
• Path
• Size
• Level

With a basic comprehension of your content’s breadth, you can set up measures for the evaluation and analysis of content. Build up your skills on using software tools for better time efficiency when carrying out a content audit or tracking content overtime. 

Additional Resources:

The Rolling Content Inventory, Lou Rosenfeld

How to Create a Content Strategy, Ian Lurie

Use a Content Audit Tool to Boost and Speed Up Information Gathering

By turning your content inventory into a content audit, you get access to an authoritative tool that can help you understand your website better. With both qualitative and quantitative information, auditing your content lets you scrutinize and analyze deeper pages and gain a clear understanding about the organization, display and maintenance of your content. Using a dependable website content audit software such as DYNO Mapper, you can build the website content inventory, and start the analysis of various areas as you prepare for a comprehensive audit process.

Everyone in the organization that deals or manages content can conduct a content audit. The following are however the most frequent content auditors;

• Content managers and developers
• Marketers and content strategists
• Website designers and managers
• SEO managers
• Taxonomists and information architects

It is important to involve a multi-disciplinary team during a content audits because content audits can stretch beyond data collection. Rather, it is more about having the information sufficient enough to guide the decision making for the organization. You should therefore break down areas of expertise and engage a team that understands systems, technology and standards that are involved in a typical content lifecycle. Whoever is involved in the process gains much better understanding of the content and works towards improving the user experience.

How Important is Content Auditing

Content audits enable you to comprehend and evaluate how a website performs against set business goals, various user needs, editorial standards and various performance indicators like SEO, web analytics and content use. They therefore add value to the site and maintenance assignments by letting you to document and scrutinize content organization, patterns and consistency. You stand a high chance of getting the highest possible volume of targeted areas of content improvement if the content audits are customized to the company’s content goals.

They are very useful for helping you recognize whether the site’s content follows a specific template consistently, metadata guidelines, editorial styles, among others. They also lay the foundation for proper gap analysis between the content that you currently have on site and that you would like to have. Finally, it sets the pace for content revision, deletion and migration.

Content inventories and audits are important in a site’s lifecycle. They may appear as usual documents, but they are useful in connecting designers, stakeholders, technologists and content managers. It is therefore essential to cautiously document all aspects that you can derive from the DYNO Mapper content audit tool like types of content, quantities, content structure, and many more. The audit should serve as a tool to further look into the relevancy of the content, how they perform against the business and user goals and areas that require improvements. Gain more insight into web users’ interaction with your site’s pages by combining content audits with website analytics.

Content Auditing Duration

There is no specific time duration for conducting a content audit; it all depends on the size of the website, basically the number of pages. However, comprehensive and meaningful content audits are mostly time-consuming because the analysis section consumes most of the time as opposed to information gathering. However, you can cut the amount of time you use by strategically planning ahead. Also, make use of content audit tools like DYNO Mapper for data collection automation and set goals for evaluation of content long before the audit. In addition, determine the nature of quantitative and qualitative data you would like to gather from the audit beforehand.

Using Tools to Build Content Audits

You can use software to collect crucial data regarding web pages resulting in comprehensive analysis using automated content audit software. You can gather a myriad of information from a content audit using DYNO Mapper such as page urls, page titles, metadata, inbound and outbound links, and complete list of images, videos and audio files among others.

Website Migration and Content Audits

Moving a site to a different platform or simple website redesigns or any serious changes on the website is a great chance to take stock and get rid of waste. Irrespective of the reason you are migrating to a different platform, it is important that you understand what you currently have, what you would like to retain, delete or modify. Migration will not be a hassle if the content audit is up to date and you can also use it to keep tabs on your content over a period of time.

Finally, it must be stressed that frequent audits will go a long way in ensuring that you deliver the customer promise whenever they check out your site. Consistency is very important because you definitely don’t want to confuse your visitors. If you get this right, your business growth will be more definite than blinding keeping content on the website without proper understanding. 

Additional Resources:

How To Conduct A Content Audit, Rebecca Lieb

How to Conduct a Content Audit on Your Site, Neil Patel

Proper website creation and management takes time and serious financial resources . It is said that content is king, and therefore you definitely should treat it as royalty if you are to remain relevant online. The very first step towards a fruitful content planning, website-related project scoping and estimation as well as content auditing is a content inventory. There are many reasons why the use of time-tested and professionally approved tools like the DYNO Mapper content audit tool is highly recommended. You obviously require a comprehensive information gathering process which can be time-consuming especially for busy content strategists, website managers, information architects and even a personal website owner.

Ideally, you will proceed from content gathering of data to a comprehensive analysis swiftly if you are well organized. Using DYNO Mapper will enable you establish various factors important to your site such as;

• Different types of content and their volumes on the website
• Number of pages on the site
• Complete size of the site’s content
• Metadata and their usage on the site
• Inbound and outbound links
• Other forms of media content like images, documents, videos and downloads linked to each page.

Using the content inventory tool, you can identify each page and even make short notes either while working on the summaries of the job or right there on every page for future reference. DYNO Mapper is cloud-based which makes it possible for you to access the inventories from anywhere, update them by clicking refresh whenever you wish.

Creating a content inventory is fast and can be done in five simple steps listed below. Note that this process can be started at any time where you can let the automatic settings to crawl the whole website fast or highlight some advanced settings that will focus the crawling on a number of parameters outlined.

1. Click create sitemap which will create your content inventory which can also be displayed within a sitemap
2. Copy and paste your website’s URL or a specific section of your site you would like to audit.
3. If you would like to exclude or include some links or directories, indicate so
4. Adjust the advanced crawling options for special cases
5. Submit

With that done, sit back and relax as you watch the progress of your content inventory right there from the tool’s dashboard. Retrieve it when complete and start sorting the content based on column headings. To limit the results, use filters. Patterns in metadata like date, size, titles, keywords, page descriptions and URL patterns will be shown instantly. You can then quickly take note of the number of inbound and outbound links, media types and even available downloads.  

The DYNO Mapper content inventory tool is user-friendly. Feel free to download the data, specify your own audit criteria and evaluate the content against your project goals and specifications. With a content inventory in place, it is now much easier for you to design strategies for content evaluation, in-depth analysis, migration, maintenance, modification among other activities you might be interested in. With a tool, you will save time and only have to worry about the content analysis; let DYNO Mapper take care of the content audit. 

Additional Resources:

The Rolling Content Inventory, Lou Rosenfeld

How to Create a Content Strategy, Ian Lurie

The Long Happy Life of a Content Inventory, Paula Land

Rethinking the Content Inventory: Site Inventories, David Hobbs

When you transform a website content inventory into a content audit, you get to understand your website on a wider scope through the tool. With both quantitative and qualitative data, a content audit tool enables you to critically analyze your site’s content structure, from one page to another, how it is displayed and managed. For a comprehensive audit process, you need a tool like DYNO Mapper, that will not only help you create an inventory, but also proceed with the analysis of different areas for more evaluation in a complete audit process.

Who Should Carry Out Content Audits?

Almost anyone involved in creation, organization and maintenance of content would find great benefit from a content audit. In most cases, content audits are performed by content strategists, marketers, content managers, developers, information architects, SEO managers and taxonomists. Even though the whole auditing process can be handled by an individual, the best results are realized if conducted by a multi-disciplinary team. The purpose of an audit is to enable you to gather sufficient data so that you can make sound decisions. Therefore, the more experts you bring on board, the better for the overall results.

Significance of Content Audits

It is very important to understand and measure your content’s performance against user needs, business goals, editorial policies, performance factors such as SEO and use or overall web analytics. They add value to the site’s project and progressive maintenance activities by making it possible for you to strategically catalog and scrutinize the structure, consistency and patterns of your content. You will identify different definite opportunities to improve on content.

Content audits are especially useful for;

• Understanding whether your content follows the organization’s template, editorial guidelines, style and metadata guidelines.
• Establish a base for gap analysis from what content you already have and the content you would like to have
• Plan for content revision, deletion or migration.

Inventories and audits allows for consistent communication of a project throughout a site’s lifecycle. This way, they connect designers, stakeholders, technologists and content managers. Documentation aspects critical to a business survival like content type, structure, volume, relevancy and their performance against the business goals and user requirements are best realized through website content audits.

How Long Does an Audit Take?

The duration of a content audit varies depending on the website’s size and how comprehensive you would like the audit to be. A comprehensive and meaningful content audit is mostly time-consuming. You definitely will want to spend more time analyzing the data as opposed to manual information gathering and collation. You can significantly reduce the content auditing time by planning ahead, which will make the whole process even less painful with better results. Consider the following factors before you commence with an audit:

• Decide which website content analysis tool you would like to use, DYNO Mapper is highly recommended for this
• Outline the goals and expected outcome from the audit
• Determine what data, both qualitative and quantitative you want to gather in the audit

The data gathered from the audit can be analyzed based on a number of factors such as audience, goals, budget and timeline. It can be a simple process or a more complex one that will involve a myriad of factors.

Building Content Audits With Tools

You can carry out an effective content audit with human oversight. However, the same way you can use content analysis tool to enable you to quickly create a comprehensive list of your site’s content, you can also use a content audit tool to collect important data about the web pages leading to perceptive analysis. Computers are really good at processing data fast which will automatically translate to a faster and efficient evaluation process. Using the DYNO Mapper content analysis tool enables you to collect data for a meaningful audit.

Using the tool, you can view all the pages, page titles, metadata details, inbound and outbound links, a comprehensive list of images, videos and audios, among other categories. You can then decide what areas you need to pay more attention to during your analysis to improve your overall website content.

Content Migration and Content Audit

Migrating a site from a platform to a different one, website redesign or any major changes you can make on a site is not only a great opportunity to improve on your brand identity, but also a perfect time to decide what should be removed, modified and retained. Weigh your content against your overall business objective. The reason for the migration is very important, but one overriding factor is that you will need to accompany the migration with a comprehensive content audit. Whether you are moving because of changing technologies or you just want to change from an outdated website design, think deeply about how you can improve the overall user experience and plan about better management, maintenance and track changes.

Content Auditing for Long Term Tracking

Website maintenance can be comparable to taking care of a garden. You have to plan upfront about what time to water, weed the garden if you are to enjoy a bountiful harvest. Create an environment for your content to flourish by using website content audit tools to reap more from your site. Keep tabs on content dates, modifications, other content like pictures or videos and compare with the ever changing market dynamics. Then decide if time is ripe for deletion, replacement or modification of some content. This will go a long way in enabling you to offer a more consistent, updated and meaningful content to your customers and prospects.

The number one secret to business success is to understand the customer need and setting out to fulfill that need in a way that no one else can. You will not only manage to create loyalty, but also attract new customers in the process. 

Additional Resources:

The Step-by-Step Guide to Conducting a Content Audit - Single Grain Team

What We Learned Analyzing 595 Buffer Blogposts: A Complete Content Audit and Spreadsheet Template, Kevan Lee

There are many attributes that define a good website; proper design, excellent user interface, quality content, among others. The quality of content is often defined based on the usefulness, relevance, timeliness, flawlessness, plus many others. A content audit brings out the quality of the content on the site. You can rely on the analytics to evaluate quality, but other factors you must consider include the brand guidelines, voice, tone and style guides. At this point, we are assuming that you already have an inventory and understand the audit’s scope.

Everyone is searching for quality. People want the best they can lay their hands on. Whenever a customer or prospect visits your website, it is a great opportunity to deliver the information and motivate trust and brand loyalty and engage the visitor even if you don’t close a sale. The way your customers will engage with you will depend on how you present the information to them and the experience they get from your website. If it is credible and consistent, you will overtime create that fundamental trust with the users. Today quality is characterized by the following features;

• Easy to read or scan
• Has an audience-specific tone
• It is engaging
• Presented consistently
• Facilitates important user activities
• Communicates the primary message as expected

Brand Consistency

Brand identity is important for any serious corporate entity. It is for this reason that every organization is governed by a set of brand guidelines that have to be followed by the content creators. This can consistently be realized via the use of a clear governance process that all must adhere to. It is therefore important to read and understand the brand guidelines even before you start your content audit. Understand the organization’s content creation rules, how the company name should be referred, such as the need to use registration or trademarks in the content, need for abbreviation, arrangement of company name and product names in the content, how taglines are used and any specific brand voice. Brand guidelines stretch all the way to the logos and graphics usage. You should partner with a colleague working in the creative department to get this right.

Tone and Voice

Most existing brand guidelines specifies a number of voice attributes; should it be friendly, upbeat, conversational, playful, energetic, authoritative, clear, respectful, and serious, among others. It is important that you don’t struggle to feed all the tones into each content piece because different content will naturally fit a certain writing style. Important product features or pricing information shouldn’t be conveyed playfully but it can be made reader-friendly by avoiding technical terms and jargon. On the other hand, promotional content is supposed to appeal to the inner feelings of the readers and therefore a playful, energetic and upbeat tone and voice is recommended.

Friendly: Content should be conversational and written clearly, uses short and simple sentences and familiar language.

Approachable: Make it possible for users to contact you. This content can be scanned easily.

Conversational: This is written as if you are having a chat with a friend and you really want the friend not to miss any details. This is basically informal writing, contractions are allowed and you are free to use second person: “yours,” “you.”

Energetic: This is written in active voice and implores the customer to take some action with verbs like find, shop, explore, among others.

Audience-Specific

The number one step to creating amazing content is to understand the audience. When writing, use a voice that communicates the brand attributes in a style that the customer will identify with. This should be duplicated in all the stages of the product’s lifecycle. Just ensure that everyone who will have contact with the product feels that the content is appropriate and approachable and take some action after visiting the website and going through the content.

Audience research is an important role that content strategists have to familiarize themselves with; it is not a reserve of the marketing team. You must communicate with them in a language they will understand and also understand how they like being addressed and why they come to the website. This way, you will critically evaluate how to meet their needs through the content. Just by understanding the keywords and key phrases used by customers will provide you an opportunity to incorporate the right phrases into the content, the titles and even links. Understand the personas for proper content creation.

Novice Vs. Expert

Understand both the expert and the novice is an important step to meeting different customer needs. A new user of a technology product might not be well equipped with sufficient information about the product to make the right decision. Their confidence can be boosted through guided experience enabling them to learn more through useful helpful content. Have content in various formats like text and video and can be accessed from various entry points. Another valuable content audit technique would be to search for the use of customer terms, preferably from search logs.

Writing for experts and novices has nothing to do with fragmenting your site into a novice vs. expert sections. Just write content in a way that will meet the needs of every user, experts can identify with content and provide extra avenues through which the new customers can get clarifications on murky areas. Experts obviously want to feel more informed and knowledgeable about a topic and therefore would be more comfortable with an all-inclusive, specific and on-point information, which they need fast. The copy and navigation should meet this need by the use of brief, precise, straight-to-the point language. Feel free to use technical specifications, industry-related jargon, consistent and accurate terminology if the target is a business audience. Make it easier for the customer to understand and decide by using features such as specifications, comparisons, expert forums, among others.

Simple Plain Language

Plain language is highly recommended for content creators who are not guided by brand guidelines. This is a style of writing that is clear and succinct to ensure that the reader easily understands the content and fast by making reading easy, understandable and user-friendly. Plain language steers clear of jargon, verbose and such.

Voice and Tone Based on Type of Content

The voice and tone of any content will depend on its type. Apart from user-targeting, there are specific tones for different content-types. For example, blogs will definitely be conversation, personal and informal. If you are crafting technical content, you should be serious and detailed while help content has to be friendly, supportive and encouraging.

Editorial Guideline

Most well established companies have an internal editorial guide that outlines content creation processes and requirements. You should therefore seek clarification from the client before you start a content audit about the existence of a style guide to ensure that your content complies with the editorial policies. If there is no guide in place, it is recommended to create one for easy documentation of the decisions you will be making as you review the content and remove any form of inconsistencies.

A style guide ensures that you deliver a consistently high quality reading experience to your visitors. You will be communicating important messages so as to influence the overall experience of the visitors.  It is through content that the overall company impression is shared with the customers and prospects. You risk portraying a negative perception about the company the moment you permit unclear, poorly-written and inconsistent content which will really damage the brand image. Even though creating the right impression is important, it is vital to think about the packaging of the message.

Consistency will go a long way in reinforcing the credibility of the brand and win your customers’ confidence in the brand, knowing that they are dealing with an organization that puts quality at the fore of their operations.

Requirements of Quality Content

Different content creation should be guides by appropriate styles. Organize your site hierarchy to replicate the perception of customers about the product as opposed to showcasing how it is perceived by the business. Think more about the user and not the people within the organization. You can understand your customer needs better with customer research. Organize navigation labels based on typical customer tasks and incorporate keywords based on your understanding of how users perceive or search for content on your site. Labels and links should easily suggest what a user should expect by clicking on them.

Bottom Line

We might not have clear content audit rules for carrying out audits and measuring them against voice and quality. Every piece of content should be crafted in a specific way, so long as it targets the audience. Evaluate your content based on guidelines, data and personas but above all, apply some common sense and your content creation experience to craft quality content. Whenever your actions are guided by your customers’ understanding, chances are slim that you will go wrong. 

Additional Resources:

What We Learned Analyzing 595 Buffer Blogposts: A Complete Content Audit and Spreadsheet Template, Kevan Lee

How to Perform a Content Audit, Kristina Kledzik