Content inventory and audit: what we have and what to do with it
A content inventory lists everything on a site; the audit assesses its quality and decides what to keep, update or remove. Columns, scope and maintenance.
What is each one?
The inventory is the quantitative part. It is a list, usually in a spreadsheet, of every page, document, image and video, with objective data such as the URL, the format and the last-modified date. Content Marketing Institute (CMI) describes it as a quantitative spreadsheet listing all content assets across channels and formats.
The audit is the qualitative part. It assesses each piece against what people need and what the business is seeking, and detects what to update, which gaps to fill and what to retire. NN/g defines it as an evaluation of the quality of that content, and reminds us that inventories and audits are assessment frameworks, not an exact science. That is why it recommends doing both together: an inventory shows the scope of the content but says little about its quality.
Why does it matter to a designer?
Because almost every navigation problem has content behind it. A confusing menu may be a sign that three nearly identical pages cover the same topic. A search that returns useless results may be caused by texts nobody updated. Without an inventory, those problems are fixed in the interface rather than at their source.
The inventory is also the foundation of information architecture work. You cannot decide on a new structure without knowing what exists. And the audit shows which content truly serves each persona and at which point of the customer journey.
How do you do it, step by step?
Following NN/g’s recommendations, a reasonable process is:
- Define owners and involve authors and stakeholders early.
- Start small. With the most visited content, or with the content that supports users’ main tasks.
- Choose a familiar tool, usually a spreadsheet, and automate data collection where you can.
- Set the scope and the criteria. One site, one section or one user journey.
- Complete the data for each piece, both for the inventory and for the assessment.
- Decide the fate of each one: keep, update or remove.
- Maintain it over time.
NN/g suggests timeboxing the first effort, for example to six weeks, so it does not become a project with no end. It also warns against over-analysing: when unsure about a piece, flag it and ask the people who created it.
LogRocket adds a useful nuance: before inventorying, define whether the goal is only to organize the content or to prepare an audit, and in the audit look for content gaps, redundancies and improvement opportunities. Its recommended frequency matches CMI’s: once a year.
Which columns should you use?
NN/g suggests as inventory columns the name or title of the piece, the URL, the author or owner, the topic, the format, the creation or last-modified date, the metadata and where the original files live. For the audit, it adds a quality rating (high, mediocre or low) and the action decided.
CMI proposes a more detailed inventory for websites: type, publication date, metadata title, metadata description, page title, H1 headings, word count, image alternative text, analytics data and inbound and outbound links. As custom columns, she suggests the author, the business owner, the stage of the customer journey the page serves, the personas it applies to and a recommendation: keep, revise or remove.
What matters is that each column has a definition and that the values come from a controlled list. “Update”, “Update” and “upd.” are three different categories in a filter.
How do you decide whether to keep, update or remove?
The most used categories are keep, update and remove. Four questions help decide: does anyone look for it, is it accurate today, does it serve a task the person has, and is there another piece that does the same job better?
CMI suggests a practical way to start when time is limited: use analytics to find pieces with high traffic and few conversions, pieces with very low traffic and pieces with high bounce rates. Those three signals are usually enough to choose where to begin.
One warning from CMI: the biggest mistake is analysing without moving to action. A tidy inventory that nobody uses does not improve the site.
Scope and maintenance
The scope can be small: the home page, the landing pages and the blog, for example. If the change is large, such as a site redesign, CMI recommends reviewing every asset. Outside those moments it recommends a rolling audit, at least once a year, and NN/g insists on assigning owners, restricting editing permissions and keeping backup copies of the inventory.
A line from CMI is worth remembering: machines are great at gathering data, but humans are better at evaluating it. So the tool helps gather the information, and human judgement decides what to do with it.
Example
Illustrative example: a university has more than two thousand pages on its website. The communications team starts with the admissions and scholarships pages, which receive most of the enquiries. It creates a sheet with the basic columns and adds the stage of the student journey and the persona each page serves. It finds five different pages about the same scholarship, with conflicting data. It decides to keep one, update another with current data and remove three. The work takes six weeks, and the team repeats it every year with a review checklist.
For your next project: open the site, take ten pages at random and fill in four columns in a sheet: title, topic, who maintains it and whether it is still correct. That sample will tell you whether a full inventory is worth doing.
When should you NOT run a full audit?
- When the content is very small. A five-page site can be reviewed in an afternoon.
- When the content changes so fast that the audit is out of date before it ends. Then audit the section that matters.
- When nobody is responsible for acting on the decisions. Auditing without acting is the most expensive mistake.
- When the problem is structure rather than content. Before auditing, review the architecture.
Common mistakes
- Auditing without deciding what to do with each piece.
- Using action categories without definitions or with free-text values.
- Doing the inventory and forgetting quality.
- Treating the audit as a one-off rather than a continuous process.
- Over-analysing and never finishing.
- Leaving the sheet without an owner and without clear permissions.
Related in the wiki
For the structure that organizes content, read about information architecture. Site maps show the resulting structure. And if content is measured by its role in the journey, customer journey maps provide the framework.