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Ah, the content inventory. Such a fun, yet maddening exercise. There really is no other way to become an authority all the stuff hiding on your website – but wow – it can be one amazingly dull process.

For the uninitiated, the content inventory is an information architecture and design tool used to index the pages of a website. This index is then analyzed for improvement opportunities, content additions/removal, etc. It’s basically a big spreadsheet outlining each page of your website and a number of associated attributes, such as the URL, page title, type of content, etc. You create one, you guessed it, by starting at the homepage of a website, clicking through all the links – all of them – and documenting the attributes of each page.

Now, the standard IA content inventory is a great tool, but for SEO purposes it’s lacking some of the on-page elements you’d want to include and optimize. I modified Mr. Veen’s approach some time ago, and it’s proven immensely useful for not only reviewing existing website content for optimization opportunities, but for properly integrating SEO into the website planning process.

What specifically would you document in this content inventory, and how would you optimize it? Well, that’s what this post is all about.

The Structure of a Proper SEO Content Inventory

Pretty basic – each page has its own row in the spreadsheet, starting with the homepage. I’ll typically give each page a number, and indent those page numbers as we get deeper into the site structure. This make it easy to scan and quickly determine where you are in the overall scheme of things.

The columns can get pretty deep, as each one will be dedicated to either an attribute that currently exists or what you’ll be replacing an attribute with. If you’re optimizing all 12 relevant on-page factors you could have 24 different columns to track. I’ll typically gauge how deep I need to go on this by the competitiveness of my targets.

If you’re trying to tackle “mesothelioma lawyer” you’ll be getting very, very deep on this.

Tackling Current Attributes

Generally I’ll document the meta data associated with a page first, followed by all current attributes. The last section of a row is where I’ll document all the attributes in their new, fully-optimized form along with 301s, departments or people responsible for the content and any notes:

I find grouping these attributes like this makes it easy to jump around within the document and constantly know where you are, and simplifies the process of rewriting each of these when you’re actually in the code.

Once you’ve taken stock of the elements your site, rewrite these existing elements by integrating the focal keywords and their relevant variations. You certainly don’t want to stuff these with nonsense, but with a little thought it’s pretty easy to theme these attributes in a meaningful way (without getting spammy) by working though them linearly.

Optimizing Attributes You Don’t Yet Have

Here’s my favorite part of this exercise – planning further on-page optimization. If you’ve taken stock of what your site has in terms of attributes and quality, you’ll also know what your site doesn’t have. Maybe you’re missing images across a whole section, or the site has 100% duplicate description tags. Whatever the case, you can really quickly plan out the optimization of remaining attributes, and work those into the on-page.

You can also spot duplicate content with ease and note where these pages need to be redirected.

Hopefully you can see the power in this tool, and that the time spent building it is a worthwhile investment. It’s certainly time-consuming, but there really is no other way to get such a firm understanding of your website. I tend to think if more site owners did annual content inventories the web would be considerably better organized.

But I’m not just slinging lip service – I’m doing my part! Feel free to download this handy content inventory template and use it!