Classic Content Audit Articles Resurrected
I've been writing a lot about content audits lately. See here, here, here, here, here, here... But Content audits and content pruning are not new concepts to SEOs.
There are often great resources that Google doesn't always show on the first page because they're not so fresh. Freshness can be overrated. Here are some classics that still provide a ton of value in 2016.
A damned useful content audit spreadsheet template from 2008
Maadmob's Content Inventory Spreadsheet, originally posted online in 2008, is still an extremely useful post, and template, for anyone who wants to do a basic content audit without messing with a bunch of KPIs. H/T @maadonna.
A Fundamental Concept We Use From a 2012 SEJ Post
A 2012 post by Erin Everhart published on Search Engine Journal titled How to Do a Content Inventory and Audit contains a fundamental concept that we still utilize today.
Minimizing Choice Maximizes Analytical Scaleability
By limiting the choices in our "Action" column to: Improve, Remove, or Leave As-Is we can sort and filter easily to see how many URLs are being pruned, how many need to be updated... and prioritize based on metrics like traffic, sales, Copyscape risk score and conversion rate.
Note: In our process, consolidating two pages into one involves marking one URL as "Improve" (if it's inheriting new content as part of the consolidation) or as "Leave As-Is" (if the other page is just being removed and the URL redirected to this one) and the other URL as "Remove".
We also have another column called "Strategy" that allows an area for the strategist and others to provide more details, such as what pruning method will be used (e.g. Robots Noindex, delete, redirect...).
Audit or Inventory?
This 2010 post on nForm by Scott Baldwin does a great job of explaining the difference between an "inventory" and an "audit" and how the two things are necessary parts of taking a holistic look at your content assets.
The Content Inventory is Your Friend
Kristina Halvorson wrote this post in 2009 on the Brain Traffic Blog. It really opened my eyes to all the ways the data can be used by many departments.
How to Plug the Holes in Your Content Funnel
This 2014 Copyblogger post by Mike King about "Quantitative" content audits, and how they can help marketers uncover content gaps along the buyer's journey.
How to Create a Content Strategy (in only 652 Steps)
We can always rely on Ian Lurie to bring his wit and experience to complicated issues in order to make them palatable for our morning coffee reads. He doesn't let us down in this relatively recent Portent post.
The Content Inventory: How to Conduct a Content Audit of Your Website
Luke Stenis shared his process back in 2010 with his CMS Wire post.
A content inventory is usually a spreadsheet that captures information for each web page you are responsible for creating, reviewing, or caring for.
How to Perform a Content Audit
Distilled is always putting out great content, and this 2013 post by Kristina Kledzik is no exception. It delivers on what the title promises from a high level overview.
I like how she breaks it down into buying stages (see above) which is partially responsible for inspiring me to do the same with our Persona-based Topic Matrix for Content Gap Analysis.
Whether for maintenance, marketing or to inform decisions, performing a full content inventory / audit and analyzing the results has stood the test of time. This post is an ode to those I've learned from.