Content Inventory

What This Is

Before we can make meaningful recommendations about your website: what to keep, what to consolidate, what to retire, and how to structure the new experience, we need to understand every piece of content that currently exists.

The Content Inventory answers that question.

We examine every URL on your website: how it is structured, whether it is visible to search engines, how users are engaging with it, how it performs in organic search, and what role it plays in your overall content ecosystem.

The result is a clear, data-driven picture of your current content landscape: what is working, what is underperforming, what is invisible, and what needs to change before any meaningful redesign or optimization work can succeed.

Why This Matters

Most website projects run into problems that trace back to decisions made without a complete picture of the existing content.

Common examples we find:

Pages with strong organic rankings that get accidentally removed or redirected during a redesign, destroying traffic and leads that took years to build.
High-traffic pages buried in the wrong place in the navigation — users are finding them through search, but they are disconnected from the conversion path.
Thousands of auto-generated pages consuming crawl budget without contributing traffic, diluting the authority of the pages that actually matter.
Content that performs well in search but converts poorly — strong visibility, weak messaging.
Duplicate or near-duplicate pages competing with each other for the same search terms.
Pages missing titles and meta descriptions at scale, leaving organic CTR to chance.

These are not edge cases. They appear in nearly every site we audit.

The Content Inventory surfaces these issues before the redesign begins, so decisions about information architecture, content strategy, and template design are grounded in evidence, not assumptions.

Three Phases, One Through-Line

The Content Inventory is not a one-time report. It runs across three phases of the project, each building on the last.

Phase	When	Purpose	What We Deliver
1 Scope	Business Development	Understand true content volume and flag structural issues before scoping the project	Summary findings and BD scoping notes
2 Audit	Discovery	Assess how every page performs across traffic, search, and content quality	Enriched Excel workbook + synthesis document
3 Design	Design Phase	Categorize pages by template type and map new URL paths for IA and redirects	Design-ready Excel with page types and redirect plan

What We Examine

The inventory draws on four data sources and examines each URL across multiple dimensions.

Data Source	What It Provides	Why It Matters
Screaming Frog	URL structure, indexability, titles, meta descriptions, word count, redirects, response codes	The foundation of the inventory, every URL and its technical state
Google Analytics 4	Page views, active users, engagement, conversions by URL	Shows which pages are actually getting traffic and driving action
Google Search Console	Clicks, impressions, CTR, average position by URL	Reveals organic search performance, visibility, gaps, and opportunities
SEMRush	Estimated organic traffic, keyword count, top keyword, search intent by URL	Adds competitive keyword context and intent signals beyond raw click data

For each URL, we evaluate:

Technical status: is the page indexable, redirected, returning an error, or blocked from search engines?
Content signals: page title, meta description, word count, readability
Traffic performance: how many users are visiting, how engaged they are, whether they are converting
Search visibility: how many clicks and impressions the page receives, average ranking position, click-through rate
Keyword context: what the page ranks for, estimated organic traffic, and the primary search intent it serves
Content type: what category of page this is, which informs template design and migration planning

What You Get

What You Receive	Description
Content Inventory Workbook	A structured Excel file with every crawled URL, enriched with performance data, search visibility data, and content categorization
Summary Tab	Aggregated counts for indexability, performance categories, discoverability categories, and content averages, the snapshot view of the site
Synthesis Document	A written findings document covering methodology, key insights, technical issues discovered, and recommended next steps
Phase 3 Additions	For design-phase work: page type classification, new URL paths, and redirect planning notes added to the workbook

How We Categorize Content

We classify every URL across two dimensions: how it performs with existing visitors, and how discoverable it is through organic search. This classification drives prioritization decisions throughout the project.

Traffic Performance
Based on GA4 page view data over the audit period:

High: pages receiving the most traffic; your most important digital assets
Medium: meaningful traffic with optimization potential
Low: limited traffic; evaluate whether the page earns its place
Limited: minimal visibility; candidates for consolidation or improvement
Inactive: no measurable traffic; often candidates for retirement

Search Discoverability
Based on Google Search Console click data over the audit period:

High: strong organic performance; protect these pages through any redesign
Moderate: meaningful organic contribution; optimization opportunity
Low: some search presence; may benefit from targeted SEO work
Minimal: very limited organic traffic; assess whether content matches search intent
None: no organic clicks; not ranking or not indexable

How This Connects to the Broader Project

The Content Inventory is not a standalone deliverable. It is the foundation everything else is built on.

It informs:

Information architecture: what content needs to exist, where it should live, and how it should be structured
Content strategy: what to keep, what to improve, what to consolidate, and what to retire
Template design: how many page types the site actually needs and what each one must accomplish
SEO strategy: which pages to protect, which to improve, and where organic opportunity exists
Redirect planning: a URL-level map from the current site to the new one, so rankings and traffic are preserved at launch

You cannot design a better website without understanding the content you already have. The Content Inventory is where that understanding begins.