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