What Is A Content Marketing Blogging Inventory

We’ve all wanted to revisit an old blog post or two that did well with readers in the past. And in content marketing, it’s not uncommon for your boss to request a random piece of content. Whether you want to do a follow-up post or just want to gush over the impressive article you wrote, it would be nice if there was an easy way to access old content.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could turn to a single document (like a spreadsheet) that contained the URL of every piece of copy on your website? That’s what content inventory does. It helps you find blogs and other copywriting assets on your site. It’s also the basis for SEO, website content, and even audits.

What Exactly Is A Content Inventory?

A content inventory is a list of the content on your website. Your inventory will usually include all the information assets on your website, like text, images, documents, and meta elements. A content inventory is essentially a quantitative analysis of a website.

To gain valuable insights from your content inventory, you’ll need to assess every bit of content. Doing so will allow you to better understand what’s on the site, if it’s in the correct location, and whether the content is up-to-date.

Over the years, techniques for creating a content inventory have been refined in the field of content marketing.

Why A Content Inventory Is Important

Most organizations have a valuable collection of content buried in the archives of their websites. By cataloging the contents of your entire site in an accessible format, everyone in your organization can easily find old content. It’ll also help them to understand the scope of the website and the type of pages you’ve created. Content inventories are also useful for several other purposes, such as…

• An inventory is helpful if you want to write a series of blogs about fashion but aren’t sure if that particular topic has been covered in the last six months. By checking your content inventory, you can avoid publishing content that may seem repetitive.
• If you want to restructure your website’s core landing pages but haven’t defined an internal linking strategy, a content inventory can help. By grouping assets in your inventory into categories, you can gauge how difficult it would be to update back-links or create new copy on existing pages.
• A content inventory can help to weed out low-quality content on your website. Doing so will also help to optimize your high-performing pages. An inventory allows you to identify which pages fall into these (low or high quality) categories.
• If your website was recently migrated, a content inventory is a great way to keep track of the location and type of existing content. This way you can make informed decisions about what to do with it going forward.

How Do You Decide What Goes Into A Content Inventory?

Before you create your content inventory it’s a good idea to consider the following:

• Goals: It might seem obvious, but knowing why you’re creating the inventory can help you to focus and make the activity less overwhelming.
• Scope: Deciding exactly which content or particular date range should be added to the inventory is essential.

Once you’ve decided on your goals and scope, you’ll know what information to include.  Although each inventory captures different information, most include the following data for each piece of content:

• Unique Content ID
• Title
• URL
• File Format (HTML, PDF, DOC, TXT)
• Author or Provider
• Physical location (on the server, etc.)
• Meta Description
• Meta Keywords
• Categories/ Tags
• Image Alt Text
• Publish Dates (created, revised, accessed)

You can add this information to a spreadsheet where it can be easily sorted and edited. Depending on how you’re going to use your inventory list, it can be a good idea to integrate relevant metrics from Google Analytics into your spreadsheet. This includes stuff like page views, unique visitors, bounce rate, and goal completions.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

If you are perhaps interested in partaking in a Content Marketing Course or to find out more about the different  Digital Marketing courses we have to offer, please reach out and we will here to assist!