Wow, a content inventory is an excellent idea! Yes, creating a content inventory helps you assess the current status of your website, how you can improve the content and what you need to do to take your website to the next level. The biggest benefit of having a content inventory is that you can use it to enhance the SEO of your website or blog. So, how do you do it?
First of all, you need to know what a content inventory is. Well, a content inventory is an information architecture which is used to list all the content (whether text-based, images or videos) on your website so that no single piece of content is hidden from your sight.
Content has been the king for a long time now. It rules even today. If you want to enhance the SEO of your site, creating a content inventory is just the perfect way to go. After you've created the same, you'll become an authority on what your website contains. With this in-depth knowledge, you'll be all set to use the SEO tactics and strategies that your website badly needs.
What Does a Content Inventory Look Like?
Initially, creating a content inventory looks like a maddening exercise. Once you get started with the same, it can be a lot of fun. A content inventory is actually a spreadsheet, which contains information about each page that you have on your website or blog. The number of columns in the spreadsheet may vary depending on the number of on-page factors that you want to optimize for.
A content inventory, meant to improve SEO, looks a little different from a standard information architecture content inventory. Such an inventory does a great job to keep you abreast of all the individual content pieces on your site as well as help you plan your SEO strategy for future.
For example, the inventory can include information like the page title, URL structure, targeted keywords (or phrases), keyword density, meta description and image file name, for every web page in the spreadhsheet.
The Process Can Be Easier If ...
If you have a big website or blog, you may find the task of creating a content inventory quite cumbersome. It's, therefore, advisable to include other people (or employees) from your company so that you can assign each one of them some specific chunk. That means you'll first need to break up all the components of your website in smaller chunks that you can easily manage. Once everyone completes their assigned tasks, you can draw up the entire spreadsheet and start analyzing the data to work out your future SEO strategies.
So, It's Time to Analyze!
It's a good idea to provide everyone (who was involved in the process) access to the copy of the content inventory (spreadsheet). Then, you can all get together to analyze the data collected in the spreadsheet and share inputs and suggestions among one another. During the content audit, you can also add notes about deleting, rewriting or optimizing various pages, according to specific SEO requirements of your site.
Take Action
Now you are ready to take action! You can delete the pages that have zero performance or you don't really need. It's a good idea to take appropriate action first on those pages that are most popular with readers. You can prepare a list of all the actions that you want to take in terms of on-page optimization. Delegate the tasks to responsible people (or parties), set deadlines and improve the visibility of your website or blog in search engines.
How does creating a content inventory for a site sound to you? Please feel free to talk back in comments.