My name is Vanessa Stuivenvolt Allen, and I am a seasoned director-level content strategist with 8+ years of experience. I’ve led Content Strategy for everything from small websites with niche audiences to billion-dollar brands’ sites that garner millions of visitors a month. In some roles, my goals were simply to improve brand awareness, engagement, and time on site, whereas in others there was a heavy focus on click-through rate, conversion rate optimization (CRO) and improving revenue per visitor (RPV). For more, check out vanessastuivenvoltallen.com.

From Chaos to Clarity: How to Surface Strategic Insights from Content Inventories and Audits

Hello Lavacon! As content inventories and audits have always been an essential part of my role as Content Strategist, I’d be thrilled to speak at Lavacon. My session would help to practically guide other content strategists through content inventory creation and maintenance, how to perform an audit, and what kinds of audits might make sense for different websites. Attendees will leave my talk with not only a clear understanding of the importance of a well-maintained content inventory (I’ll give specific examples of all the different functional areas outside of just content strategy that can benefit from a content inventory), but a step-by-step walkthrough of how to create one, and all the most imperative fields to maintain. Once we’ve covered content inventory creation, I’ll cover a few different types of content audits: how and what to audit on a site depending on your business and content goals, key tips for not getting overwhelmed (and never completing the audit) and what a good “outcome” of a content audit looks like.
A few case studies I’ll touch on:

Audit of 100 URLs that resulted in clear recommendations that were estimated to have $124K in quarterly revenue potential.
Audit of 40 top traffic and 40 low traffic intranet pages that uncovered a clear trend in editorial style,  title length, and format that was contributing to lower-viewed content.

In this session, attendees will learn:

• Why creating and maintaining a content inventory is good your site’s business
• Basic fields you need to maintain in a content inventory and how to gather them (hint: not everything is manual!)
• How to organize a content inventory & what formulaic fields to include (tools and tips)
• Why (and when) content audits are necessary, and what kinds of content audits to perform (hint: engagement audit, conversion audit, UX audit, editorial audit)
• How to action on content audit findings