Yes, You Need a Content Inventory

You may notice your website traffic is dropping off, bounce rates are rising, or your calls to action aren’t leading to conversions. Maybe your business focus has changed, but your content hasn’t caught up. Maybe you have years of blog posts, downloads, landing pages, and resources, but no clear view of what’s still useful and what’s just taking up space.

Before you start creating more content to fix the drop in traffic, higher bounce rates, or lower conversions, you need to take an inventory of your content. You need to know what content you already have.

Freshness check: Updated 2026

Why is a content inventory important?

A content inventory serves as the foundation for establishing a successful content marketing strategy, scheduling, and tracking progress over time. It identifies areas that can be improved upon while acknowledging successes critical in helping reach larger goals like more qualified traffic or conversions.

It also highlights any topics where gaps or redundancies need addressing. With this information in hand, you have the power to develop tactics tailored specifically to your business’s specific needs and goals, as well as create more effective plans for driving digital success.

Without a content inventory first:

• You can end up with so much information on a topic that it becomes redundant.
• You can end up with not enough information on a topic, and people look elsewhere.
• You can miss important parts of a topic altogether.
• You can end up covering things that have no importance or informational value whatsoever.

Most importantly, if you’re going to spend the time to improve your content offerings, you want to make sure you’re improving in the right place.

Have you ever tried to cook something that sounded really good, but tasted like something even your dog wouldn’t eat? Despite my Italian background, I will admit that there are a few times I’ve screwed up the sauce. Worse is when you start to cook something you know is delicious and then realize you’re missing half the ingredients – or at least a few of the more important ones.

This is why every good cook checks their cupboards and pantries first. It’s not just to get the ingredients together – oh, no. It’s so you don’t end up with something like whatever this is supposed to be, because you didn’t have all the right ingredients, so you substituted and voilà.

Okay, so what exactly is a content inventory?

A content inventory is exactly what it sounds like. It’s an inventory of the content currently available on your website. For that matter – and for the really ambitious – you can add in any content you have elsewhere, as well.

Content can be defined as anything that goes out from your business. So your content could include:

• Blog posts
• Web pages (normally informational or sales pages, not to be confused – at all – with blog posts)
• Videos
• Images specific to the company
• Infographics
• Graphs and charts
• Podcasts
• Press releases
• Documents
• White Papers
• Product Brochures

Content is ANYTHING that goes out from your company. It all tells part of your story, it all helps to further create a specific impression, and it can all go royally wrong if you don’t pay attention to what you’re streaming into the content mill.

What’s involved in creating a content inventory?

A content inventory looks at each of your company’s site pages individually. It will examine specific aspects of the site’s content and design, including (but not limited to):

Completeness

Your website should be complete—anything you mention or link to should exist. While Google doesn’t have an issue with “proper 404s,” broken links and bad user journeys are well worth fixing. Soft 404s and error handling can cause issues with wasted crawl resources.

Site structure

Optimizing your site for users relies in part on the structure you’ve used to build it. Some sites are better suited to multi-access paths, but others need a more straightforward and basic hierarchy. Either way, your content inventory should ensure your site is structured appropriately for your users and the content it hosts.

Consistency

Consistency is key to the user experience; your page structures should be consistent for users so they can understand where to find information about your product. Standardizing your hierarchy can make it easier for search engines to discover new pages, as well.

Navigation

Users think about content differently and need to be able to access your content in different ways. They should have plenty of paths to your content, coming both from within your site and externally. One link buried deep in your site simply isn’t enough.

Relevance

Your audience is most likely made up of several different segments of users, each wanting to know there’s something relevant to them on your site and that they can access it easily. Grouping content by segment is another good way to simplify the search for them.

Timeliness

Although your content strategy may be built on evergreen content, nothing’s really evergreen forever. Outdated content is frustrating to users and may erode the trust you’ve built with them. Even product catalogs, user instructions, and blogs should be kept as up to date as possible.

Topical Alignment

Related topics and terms help users recognize that they’re in the right place and make it easier for them to find the information they need. Grouping connected ideas together creates a stronger, more useful content experience.

Differentiation

You know your site needs to have unique content for users and search engines, but you should be different from your competition, too. The content you generate should have its own voice, a style all its own. You’re not generic, and neither is your company.

Sold! So, how do I build a content inventory?

First, understand that this is a systematic approach to content development. –But, it’s our systematic approach. You may find that something works better for your website once you’ve seen the principles, so read on with an open mind.

Excel sheets are your friend. Before digging in, open an Excel file (or equivalent, whatever). It makes it a lot easier to keep track of your inventory this way. List the name of the page and the main topic.

Pen and paper are your friends. As you go through the inventory, make sure to jot down any ideas that come to mind. Content inventories are often a great way of coming up with more ideas for the mill!

Inventory order:

1. Main site pages
2. Blog categories
3. Blog posts (you should be able to get an idea of the topic based on the title)
4. Site collateral (whitepapers, documents, brochures – any downloadable content)
5. Recorded collateral (videos, podcasts)
6. Visual collateral (branded images, graphs/charts, infographics)

By the time you’re finished with the above, you should have a strong idea of what topics you’ve covered. If you took my advice of having a notepad handy, you should also have a list of ideas to continue with.

Answer these six questions

So, you went to all the trouble of filling out the Excel sheet, and you’ve read this post up to this point. And I bet you’re wondering, “What the heck did I do all that for?” Well, you now have a list of everything you’ve put out. It’s time to find the holes – or missing ingredients, if you will – in your content grouping.

With inventory results in hand, answer the following questions:

• How many times have I covered each available topic?
• Which topics have I covered too much?
• Which topics haven’t I covered enough?
• What could I have covered that I haven’t?
• What new topic can I cover that would overlap the less covered and the too-much-covered?
• Has anything changed in my industry that makes some of this content outdated?

Turn the results into a useful content strategy

This is where it gets really fun and creative. Are you ready?

Can any of your blog posts be repurposed into a whitepaper or ebook? If so, make that repurposing part of your content calendar (and make sure you either redirect the old page to the new whitepaper/ebook, or that you advertise the whitepaper/ebook on the old page).

Are any of them outdated? Consider writing an updated version and redirecting the old page to the new one. Again, add this to your content calendar.

Are any main pages better off being merged, or should any be split into another? Sometimes you find there’s too much content on a page, but it’s really important content. In this case, it may be better to create another page and split the content.

What topics have you missed, and what’s the best way to cover them? Maybe the particular topic is better off being shared in a podcast. Maybe you think a white paper would do better than a post. Maybe there’s enough information that you can start with a Facebook post, go to a podcast, add a blog post, and then merge it all into a downloadable package.

No matter what you end up doing to fill in the holes and smooth out your content offerings, make sure you plan ahead. Be realistic, but think outside the box, and think ahead!

Next steps: After the content inventory, then what?

A content inventory gives you the map, but it doesn’t make the decisions for you. Once you know what you have, the next step is to audit it: what still works, what needs attention, and what should be updated, merged, redirected, or removed.

Next step: Move on to the content audit and start evaluating what belongs, what needs work, and what’s just taking up space.

If your content has grown faster than your structure, we can help you sort out what’s there, what still works, and what should happen next. We’ve spent years auditing content, finding the gaps, and turning content messes into workable plans. If you’re ready to make sense of what you have and decide where to go next, contact Level343 to discuss your specific needs.