Is your company thinking of updating their website and you need to figure out what content already exists on your site?

AND what new content they want to include?

AND what old content should be carried over in to the new site?

Then is sounds like you need to do a content audit.

What is a content audit?

According to Wikipedia a content audit is the process of evaluating content elements and information assets on some part or all of a website. 

In a related term, content inventory, is a quantitative analysis of a website. It simply logs what is on a website. A content inventory will answer the question: “What is there?” and can be the start of a website review. A content audit will answer the question: “Is it any good?”

Specifically, Slater states that the content audit can answer five questions:

• What content do we already have?
• Who is making this content?
• How do people find it?
• How is it performing?
• Is the content current (accurate) or outdated?

I came across a great, and very in-depth resource to assist you with your content analysis. On The Moz Blog there’s a great article called “How To Do a Content Audit – Step-by-Step” and it chock full of great resources to help you get started.

Here is a breakdown of some of the topics covered:

A step-by-step example of our process

• Step 1: Assess the situation and choose a scenario
• Step 2: Scan the site
• Step 3: Import the URLs and start the tool
• Step 4: Import the tool output into the dashboard
• Step 5: Import GWT data
• Step 6: Perform keyword research
• Step 7: Tying the keyword data together
• Step 8: Time to analyze and make some decisions!
• Step 9: Content gap analysis and other value-adds
• Step 10: Writing up the content audit strategy document

Enjoy and good luck!