There are different types of inventories, and you may have interacted with a number of them. Inventories are very helpful as they make retrieval and referencing hassle-free. For example, if you have a list of all dead stock, it is possible to estimate, let’s say the number of old shoes in your stores.
What is a content inventory?
A content inventory is similar to all other catalogs the only difference is that it is used to manage web or marketing content. Any web content you have, whether audio, text or video, a content inventory helps in maintaining. It is also right to consider a content inventory as a virtual repository.
Just like other inventories make it easier to manage different products, a content inventory simplifies management of every content generated and that you plan to generate. This means even if you decide to travel back to the time your business began, retrieving any piece of content created will be a simple task.
If tracking your progress, let’s say in content marketing, a good inventory helps understand the far you have some, areas to make improvement and so on. For example, consider when you want to find which piece of content was helpful during a marketing campaign. When you have a content inventory, it is easier to pull such a post.
Why create a content inventory
If you’re looking to maximize your contents ROI, or find just how many articles you created to rank no.1. Or if you wrote enough about a particular topic, you can’t just keep going to your blog page and look for all the content to estimate what you would need.
The best time to create a content inventory is as soon as possible. If you manage to have one ready before seriously beginning to create content, the better. Waiting until your content has ballooned and hard to manage to create is not a good idea. The best thing is that you can build your inventory anytime but is advisable to start earlier.
Building a content inventory
You will appreciate the need of having a content inventory when you create one. Is there a standard way to make one? What are the steps to follow? How you create your content inventory can vary because of many things. For example, your business model plays a significant role. With that in mind, let’s quickly go through things to include in the design cycle.
Goals: Make sure to understand why an audit is necessary and what you intend to do with the results can help make the entire process less overwhelming.
Scope: Determining which areas of the site or particular date range to be captured is a big plus.
Often, when building an inventory, the following data must be captured;
- Keyword Topic or theme
- Title tag
- URL
- Meta description
- Publish date
- Word Count
- Ranking
- Image alt text
- Content-type
- Author
- File format
- H1 headers (H2-H6)
Content inventory template
Here are some examples of how you can store these data using Excel, Spreadsheet, or Trello Board/Asana:
Managing your inventory
Manually pulling all the content on your website, including the inventories you have is not only time consuming but also tedious. Luckily there are tools like SEMrush and SERanking (Die hard fan of the audit and Affiliate Link) that make your work easier. The ability of these tools to automatically crawl your website make them the best option. Here’s a screenshot of SERanking audit you can download as a .csv file that has most of it not all of the required data for each url that exists on your page.
Once you have most of the information, you can start creating your spreadsheet or board and organize them accordingly. There are different styles to creating the inventory, but as long as you have the necessary information per content you can now scan through your inventory to help identify and calculate your content marketing efforts.
Conclusion
Building a content inventory is a continuous thing. Every time you make changes to your content strategy, you equally need to make some changes in your content inventory. The best thing is that, if you know how to do it, everything else unfolds well.
Jay
I've worked for WooRank, SEOptimer, and working on a cool SEO audit tool called SiteGuru.co. Now I have build Linkilo and SEO RANK SERP WordPress theme. I've been in the SEO industry for more than 5 years, learning from the ground up. I've worked on many startups, but also have my own affiliate sites.
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