Everyone wants to own a website that conclusively engages, serves and meets their customers and web users' needs. This includes competitors, who are definitely drooling for a slice of the cake. One secret to any business is to comprehensively understand the competition; learn from them to improve on your products and services. The same translates to content auditing, which should stretch to auditing your site against the competitors’, earning you a chance to weigh the content’s effectiveness and identify any gaps and technical flaws.

Auditing a competitor’s website is not any different from your own. Just bear in mind that the baseline to a comprehensive audit is pegged on a website content inventory. The first thing to take note of, prior to auditing the competition’s content is to quickly asses the content of their websites, it will familiarize you with their online strategy. If you would like a general purpose competitive content audit, then you should monitor;

• Audience (s)
• Formats
• Nature and content quantity
• Publishing frequency
• Language, especially the voice and tone
• Contributors, preferably their numbers and names
• Unique features
• General impression

Gathering data is only the first step. The main work lies in comparing your content against what your competitors have, while carefully identifying strengths, possible weaknesses and what sets the two sites apart from each other.

Draft a Scorecard

Every content audit has to be backed by properly defined goals and modalities that will be used to measure and score the websites. Using the same attributes, measure the websites against each. The measurements will however be dependent on the website and your objectives for carrying out the audit. Example; when auditing a blog, you definitely should be more interested in frequent fresh content that is published, commented or shared on various social networking sites. On the other hand, you will want to look at how much information each product carries in an ecommerce website, and how well the content is synchronized to encourage a new user from making the first contact with the product to making a purchase. Other factors of interest in an ecommerce website might be ease of finding various products, how they are categorized, and various user tasks like ease of comparing more than one product, among others.

Be Specific

You must ensure that the comparison criteria is very specific so that it can be measurable but some personal judgment will come in handy. For a broader view about how you compete in the niche, consider conducting up to three competitive content audits targeting the top three players in your niche. Multiple audits will also reduce bias; you can as far as seeking third-party reviews about the websites and ask for recommendations on how best you can improve on yours. In your scorecard, rate various elements on a scale of say 1-5 and thereafter work on averages. Try to avoid simple checkmarks or No/yes because this will give very minimal qualitative data that won’t be useful for your analysis later. If you cannot easily score the content, then consider creating a written appraisal of each site and address the criteria used in the audit. In as much as doing this might make side-by-side comparisons difficult, the qualitative aspect will be best captured.

What to Assess

There are several elements that you need to focus on during the assessment. You can however include some more at your convenience for a more comprehensive assessment.

Breadth and Depth of Content: How broad are the topics? If you are looking at a product website, how many products are there and in which categories? How about the product descriptions, are they informative and sufficient?

Consistency and Quality: Is all the content on the site in a consistent voice for the right audiences? Do we have a similar content construction? How consistent is the quality of the writing?

Completeness: This should focus on whether the content is comprehensive enough to enable a user make a decision. Pay close attention to help functions, ease of access to information, among others. If there are loopholes, take note.

Frequency: How frequent is the content published on the site?

Usability: Pay attention to the use interface. Do we have navigational and categorization structures in place to guide the users without much hassles? Do we have a search button? Are there features such as support for misspells or synonym matching? Is some content reserved for those who log into the website?

Competitive Analysis

Once you are done with the above, your competitive audit is complete. It is now time to compare the scores. Revert to your initial goals that necessitated the content audit. What is it that they have that you currently miss on your site? Do they have how-to articles? If you think they add value, then you should consider adopting that approach as well. What sets their tone and voice apart from yours? Do you think users find all necessary content and products on the website as fast as they should? These are only but some of the questions that you have to bear in mind. The fact is, ensure that it is as comprehensive as possible, and don’t leave any stone unturned.

When carrying out the analysis, maintain a clean and objective eye for areas on which you need to improve on, or determine if you are getting your content right. Be cautious when you identify huge gaps or differences lest you are tempted to move from your own style and adopt the competitors’. Never lose your style, tone, voice, personality and unique point of view. Get rid of the bad but keep the good ones. 

Additional Resources:

How to Perform a Content Audit, Kristina Kledzik

How to Conduct a Content Audit for Quality and Audience Experience, Sonia Simone

Content inventory is an amazing tool for establishing a solid base for a successful content audit and content tracking. However, it can also serve as the foundation for yet another important content strategy deliverable; the content matrix.

Content Matrix Defined

Content matrix can assume a number of forms; it all depends on the producer and the project. Generally, this is a document of every piece of content like data, images and content modules contained in a site design and presented in an Excel spreadsheet. The content inventory can be converted into a content matrix by adding a few columns, depending on the structure of a content inventory spreadsheet.

Moving From Inventory to Matrix

Typically, you have to start with the content currently available in an existing site, unless you are designing a brand new website with all fresh content. Start off with an automated inventory like the ones generated by the DYNO Mapper content analysis tool as the shell for your matrix and some important pieces of data available.

The organization of a matrix is pegged on the location of every page in the sitemap. Therefore, if the current site’s URL structure is well organized, you can start organizing the pages by sorting by URL. Also included into the matrix are all images and related media associated with every page. The content analysis results brings out comprehensive data for every page that has been crawled including real file names, number of images, videos, documents, and the ability to click and view, and if you wish, you can even download. With this, you can review every image and file so that you can decide whether it should be removed or retained in the new design currently being developed.

Because the matrix is mostly relied upon by people updating current content or generating fresh content in the CMS, extra elements to be included into templates like every page’s metadata. The DYNO Mapper reports include descriptions, titles and keywords, and meta data which are both available on the .csv export as well as the dashboard. This simplifies copy-pasting into the new template.

How to Add Value to the Data

A matrix is more comprehensive than the typical inventory because of the extra data that is included, which typically varies based on the site’s design and project but cells filled with content owner names, copy guidance, review status are included. You can always include extra information using the notes field which is available on every page captured by the content inventory. All these are included in the final export which means that you have direct access to all the information the moment you start working on the Excel file.

Updating the Matrix

You should always keep the matrix, just like the inventory updated since it is a living document. As the current website evolves, ensure that the changes you make on the site are reflected on the matrix, especially what has been deleted and what has been added.

You can also re-fresh the inventory using DYNO Mapper by just clicking the re-fresh button on the sitemaps page. You can therefore see files that have been freshly added, modified or removed, information that should be used to keep the matrix up to date.

Additional Resources:

The Long Happy Life of a Content Inventory, Paula Land

Rethinking the Content Inventory: Site Inventories, David Hobbs

Taking a Content Inventory, Donna Maurer

Website management requires proper understanding of the site’s content; its freshness, how it is likely to affect the site’s performance, and how it is intertwined. A website content audit tool offers comprehensive inventories of your content, enabling you to properly manage the content on the site and keep tabs on the changes made over time. Site managers can use the content inventory to;

• Accurately track the site’s content; the quantity of content and their respective locations
• Keenly monitor the content’s upkeep; when is the last time the content was updated?
• Ensure content standards are maintained; Does your content contain proper Meta tags and descriptions? Do you follow standardized URL page naming requirements
• Prepare for content re-use: Identify what content type you have to work with like sound, text, video, images, among others.

You can use the DYNO Mapper website content audit tool to regularly analyze and update the content inventory, carefully keeping tabs on fresh content added, any changes and what has been removed with time. Using the tool, you will easily asses the nature of content on the website, its location, the last time it was updated with the option to overrite or maintain metadata informaiton. If you frequently update the inventory, then you sure will be best placed to plan when and how to generate fresh content, if there is need for any revisions, re-use and what should be archived.

How Does the Website Content Audit Tool Help?

• It provides an all-inclusive list of all the files on the website, sorted by their MIME type
• Enables you to periodically run crawls and spot whatever has been changed, deleted or added with the aid of the job comparison feature
• You can track how fresh the content on the site from the date last updated provision
• Provides a comprehensive list of all files on the site, by MIME type
• Allows you to run periodic crawls and use the job comparison feature to identify what's been changed, added, or delete
• Provides date last updated so you can track content freshness
• A list of all inbound and outbound links of every page is provided. Using it, you can manage redirects and cross-linking
• You get access to each page’s screenshot for tracking of the site’s design over time and understand when the last time the page or template was last changed
• Using the file size data, you can recognize pages with possible performance problems
• You can asses possible ranking of the website for SEO using the URL structure presented
• Effectively focusing of quality and assurance and testing resources because changes can be tracked

Why You Should Regularly Update Content Inventories

• Content development of fresh content, re-use and archival scheduling
• Types of content on the pages and component templates
• Content audits for inbound and outbound linking relationships and SEO
• Content audits for brand standards, tone, voice and style

In short, a content audit will ensure that the content manager maintains content that meets the company’s target audience’s expectations. 

Additional Resources:

Taking a Content Inventory, Donna Maurer

Taking a Content Inventory, Janice Crotty Fraser

Rethinking the Content Inventory: Exploration, David Hobbs

The DYNO Mapper’s website content analysis tool will enable you to identify the scope, organize and manage any content strategy project for your site. Content inventories are very important in the work of a content strategist as it ensures a careful assessment and understanding of the breadth and depth of the site and generate a baseline on which the site redesign or content development can be measured against. In the end, you save a lot of time because less time is spent on creating the catalogue. Instead, you focus more energy on doing the analysis and working on the perfect content strategy to beat the chasing competition.

Use of Content Inventories By Content Strategists

• Project Scope: Understand the volume of content on the website, including the type of each.
• Evaluate URL Structure: How is the page labeling done? Is it done in the most appropriate and easy to find manner?
• Content Pattern: Using the URL structure, you can determine the hierarchy and relationships of the content.
• Outdated Content: You can identify when content was last created and updated.
• Duplicate Content: Do you have any duplicate content, say with a similar name?
• Metadata Assessment: How is the content tagging done?
• Content Tracking: This is important during migration; decide what content you need to keep, kill or revise.

How the DYNO Mapper Content Inventory Helps

The website content analysis tool populates information about every page on the website, including date, images, videos, metadata, documents and various downloads the page is associated with and inbound/outbound links of every page. Furthermore, you can also;

• View, review and save screenshots of each page to maintain a visual reference for future use
• Keep track of changes in the content over time, carry out periodic crawls and make use of the job comparison feature to identify the differences; understand new content added, altered or deleted in an instant.
• Make brief notes about every page right there on the website content analysis tool’s dashboard and possibly share with colleagues for comments
• Swiftly export the crawl information to an Excel sheet or a different application for more analysis.

Website content inventories are highly recommended for content audits because they cover a broad range of content-related details like accuracy, ownership, credibility, and even search engines optimization aspects of your content. You also get to generate website content migration worksheets as well as the website’s content development planning and tracking. 

Additional Resources:

Taking a Content Inventory, Janice Crotty Fraser

Rethinking the Content Inventory: Exploration, David Hobbs

Content Inventories, Audits, and Analyses: All part of benchmarking, Rahel Anne Bailie

The Content Inventory is Your Friend, Kristina Halvorson

If you are an information architect, using a content analysis tool will enable you strengthen the understanding of the website’s structure; especially the key sections, pages and how the content is distributed. A properly done inventory lays the ground for website redesign because you can assess what content currently exists, the quantity and its organization. As a result, you can use content inventories to;

1. Identify the project scope; what is the quantity of the content on your site?
2. Establish the various types of content on your site
3. Understand website structure; what is the location of the content? Can the hierarchies or patterns be viewed in the URL structures?
4. View Metadata: Have you tagged the pages appropriately?

For a better understanding of your content pages, the templates and the real content and how they relate, use a content analysis tool. Using an automated tool will save you time because you don’t have to copy and paste page links, it gets this done fast and right.

How the DYNO Mapper Content Inventory Helps

• Enables you to understand the website’s URL patterns
• Brings out an all-inclusive list of all files on the website; HTML, videos, images, audio files, documents, among others.
• Captures metadata like page titles, descriptions and keywords, all necessary for SEO gap analysis.
• You can visually identify page templates with each page’s screenshots
• Provides in/out links of all the pages and therefore you can analyze cross-linking on the website
• Export with ease to Excel or a different tool for comprehensive data analysis.

How to Use the Data After an Inventory

An inventory enables you to;

1. Create content audits based on website pages
2. Populate sitemaps and content maps
3. Prepare a content migration worksheet
4. Apply metadata tags and taxonomy to pages prior to content migration.

Armed with this information, you can proceed with your sites’ redesign with a high level of accuracy. 

Additional Resources:

Content Inventories, Audits, and Analyses: All part of benchmarking, Rahel Anne Bailie

The Content Inventory is Your Friend, Kristina Halvorson

Building the Mother of All Content Inventories, Sue Davis

The content inventory, Rahel Anne Bailie