Content Inventory for Content Strategists

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• Outdated Content: You can identify when content was last created and updated.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