Performing content audits is an essential part of maintaining a website, but you cannot just jump right in and perform an audit. There are several important things that need to happen prior to starting the audit. Because some websites actually have thousands upon thousands of pages with their own text, images, applications, and documents, it is almost impossible to manually audit any website's content. Before even thinking of that, you will need to perform a content inventory. This will organize all of the information on the website into a format that will be easier to read and manipulate.

A content strategy is not a content audit or inventory, but it is the first step in gathering the information necessary to perform a winning content strategy. You must first inventory your existing content. The next step would be to analyze your content using any data available (Google Analytics). After analyzing your content, you can draw conclusions and plan a strategy based on those conclusions.

Step 1. Content Inventory

The content strategy process is a complicated one. One of the most intensive steps is the process is a detailed content audit. You need a detailed content audit to first realize the full scope of your project. DYNO Mapper simplifies this first step by gathering a list of all the items in your website by crawling your url or importing an XML sitemap file. DYNO Mapper returns a full list of all items contained in your website including the number of content levels, subdomains, pages, links, bad links, and site errors. DYNO Mapper will also group pages together based on URL group associations. Don’t worry if some of your pages do not have a parent. DYNO Mapper will create a parent bucket for items that do not hat a parent to save you time organizing your content.

A content inventory can come in very handy when starting a website redesign, migrating to a new content management system, or just trying to figure out what to charge for a website redesign. Content inventories were traditionally managed within spreadsheets, but when created manually, they are very time consuming and tedious. When dealing with a very large website, the spreadsheet method can be hard to maintain and difficult to update. Not to mention, this makes collaboration extremely hard to pull off.

Create a content inventory using DYNO Mapper

DYNO mapper offers a new online software solution for content audits that can save you many hours of tedious work. DYNO Mapper enables content managers, content strategists, and user experience professionals to quickly create a comprehensive site inventory of your pages, images, links, and files associated within a website.

DYNO Mapper can answer your content inventory questions

• How many sub-domains are contained in your website?
• How many content levels and number in each level?
• How many pages?
• How many images, videos, and documents
• Where each of your content items are located?
• What is the URL of each content type?
• How many links and bad links are in your website?

Save time performing your website content audit

DYNO Mapper can save you countless hours of your precious time. If you are trying to audit a large website using a manual inventory method, this can be next to impossible. With DYNO Mapper, you can easily search, filter, and export Microsoft excel documents to steam-line your project or just work within the software until your project is complete. Signup today!

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.