Vanessa Stuivenvolt Allen, Director of Content Strategy at Resolute Digital explained the different between a content inventory and an audit. Inventory is a living, breathing log of content on your site, and that includes metadatra. Key to a content inventory ias that it should be kept up-to-date. Amount of effort required depends on business needs.
Basic content inventory can be just a spreadsheet. Should be collaborative. Can also use a database solutions. Can be helpful if there is more data you want to track. Can be your (C)CMS.
Content inventories save time, are the basis for future audits, and has info to pull into reporting.
If you don't know what's there, you're not managing it.
Content audit is a qualitative/quantitative evaluation against a set of defined criteria. Allows measure content against business goals. It is a point-in-time artifact and ins not maintained.
Audit tools are typically spreadsheets. Whiteboarding tools are also useful.
Audits insights, gaps, and opportunities fo optimization.
Steps to create a content inventory.
Use technology. And teammates. Crawling tools, exports, and collaboration.
Set up a site crawl. So much you can get, will extract a lot of data you need for an inventory. Also set up custom extractions, such as authors, publish and modify dates, and comment counts.
Then you clean the export. You get a ton of information, not all of it needed. (Don't lose your original crawl file.) Clean out pages hat aren't required for content inventory, such as CSS, JavaScrpt, and redirect pages. Object it to capture content.
Build the inventory. Non-crawl columns that could be needed include original and last-modified date, refresh date, template, author or content source, technical home.
Some might need to be filled in manually. This is where teammates come in. But also let the technology help where possible. Use text to columns. Can help with URLs to understand where content lives.
Why maintain an inventory? Know thy content. Avoid redundancy.
Tools and software are not the solver bullet. It's aligning people and processes.
Document a usable and scalable process for maintenance. Important to document who owns the fields. Make this part of your content team's onboarding. Educate them why inventory maintenance is so important. Delegate inventory owners and check in regularly.
For content audits, why not audit everything? You likely don't have the time. Determine which content you care about to get the insights you need. Identify audit criteria and stick to it. Can always go back and audit later. Resist the urge to fix things along the way.
High value actions audits can help identify inconsistencies, uncover patterns for highest conversions, and uncover areas of opportunity.
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