Content Inventory and Content Audit

Inventories and audits are a great way to identify, record and assess content and information architecture on an existing website.

Content Inventory

A content inventory is the process of identifying and recording all pages or assets on a website. This is a qualitative exercise that does not issue any judgments about the content. Instead, you may record factual information about each page and asset such as:

• Publish date / last updated date
• Author
• Owner / responsible party
• Full URL to each page (which tells you the underlying information architecture)

A content inventory is often recorded in a spreadsheet.

Content Audit

A content audit is the process of judging existing content in order to determine what content needs to be created, updated or removed. This is a qualitative exercise that will require reading all of the existing content and issuing a judgement on its effectiveness.

One way of recording a page’s content effectiveness is to decide whether it needs to be updated, modified, removed, or if it is fine to remain as-is. It can be helpful to use these definitions when assessing your content:

• Find as-is: the correct type of content is present and is presented in an effective way. No edits or modifications necessary.
• Needs updating: the correct type of content is present and the content is presented in an effective way, but is out of date. Updating the parts that are out of date (such as deadlines or other dates) is all this page needs.
• Needs modification: the content present is incomplete, inaccurate or not presented in an effective manner. Serious edits and modifications need to be made.
• Needs removal: the content on this page is not needed and the whole page can be removed. When a page is marked for removal, be sure to review the content for anything that might need to be moved to a different page.

It is often helpful to have a birds eye view of the changes needed to site content in a spreadsheet version of your content audit, though you may have more detailed notes for pages and sections of your website in word documents.

Getting Started

Content audits are incredibly difficult to do without first conducting a content inventory.
Texas A&M University websites can use Siteimprove to help generate a content inventory by using the Inventory tools under “Quality Assurance.” This tool will generate a spreadsheet of all pages and files on your website that you can export as a spreadsheet.

Learn more in Nielsen Norman Group’s Content Inventory and Auditing 101