Content Strategy for the Web

by Kristina Halvorson

  • The players: A description of who is participating (direct them to some of your project champions, if you’ve identified them already).

  • The payoff: The benefits to them and the organization as a whole.

  Most people like to be helpful and will agree to participate at some level. If someone important turns you down, respectfully ask them why. Resistance is often about lack of clarity, so you may be able to change their minds if you clear things up. If they still say “no,” ask if they’d like occasional updates about content projects. Keeping them involved at any level is a win for you, if only a small one.

  Kick Off on the Right Foot

  Usually, there is a formal kickoff meeting at the beginning of any content strategy project. This is where all the agreed-upon stakeholders come together for the first time. We often wait to host that bonanza until we have some research and analysis (see Chapter 5, Audit, and Chapter 6, Analysis) under our belts. That way, we can use early findings to put the project in context and ask the stakeholder group to fill in any analysis gaps. So, from the beginning, people are learning and contributing—getting the information exchange off to a good start.

  As you’re working toward early alignment, here’s what should happen in the kickoff meeting.

  Explain Why you’re There and What you’ve Done So Far

  If you want to get people on board, you need to be sure they feel included in the conversation. Using lots of industry lingo and failing to tell them what to expect will burn you every time. You’ll need to:

  • Explain what content strategy is

  • Reiterate how content strategy will benefit the organization and the stakeholders

  And, if you’ve already completed any audit or analysis work, you can discuss:

  • What content exists today and what shape it’s in (your audit findings)

  • What the internal and external factors are that impact your content—highlighting user research, competitive research, and the content workflow process

  Help Everyone Get to Know Each Other and their Roles

  Probably the most important part of alignment in the discovery phase is to help stakeholders learn about each other. In large organizations, it’s not uncommon for people to meet each other for the first time on a content project. Even in small companies, people may see each other in a new light. Helping people understand and engage with one another is a huge part of the job.

  Set Clear Expectations for what Comes Next (And for Whom)

  Lastly, you need to set the stage for the rest of the work. People will want to know:

  • What is their role in the process?

  • How much and how often will you need them to participate?

  • What kinds of things will they be doing?

  • Who are the decision makers and what is the decision making process?

  • What are the immediate next steps?

  The more they know, the more they’ll feel some ownership in your content projects from day one. Remember, your stakeholders are your allies—or, if they’re not initially, it’s your job to find that common ground. You want them to trust you so they’ll share the stuff that matters.

  Engagement doesn’t Stop after the Kickoff

  At the beginning of a project, alignment is a major focus. But, it’s important to make sure you keep the momentum going. How and when you solicit stakeholder input during the remainder of the project is unique to your situation. But no matter what happens:

  • Communicate and encourage participation: Schedule regular meetings, host workshops, send regular updates, have Q&A sessions, etc. Be consistent as clockwork—it’s another way to inspire trust.

  • Listen and respond: Always take the stakeholders seriously. Respond to their ideas and insights in a respectful, timely way.

  • Distribute documentation: Make sure people always have documentation in hand—so they can follow along in meetings and have reference materials whenever they want to refresh their memories.

  • Celebrate milestones: Highlight milestones and other progress. Be sure everyone knows how he or she contributed in positive ways.

  • Set expectations: Make sure people always know where they stand. What is their role in the project? What do they have to do next?

  Alignment is a never-ending, but highly rewarding, process. Just think of the smart people in your stakeholder group. When you harness all that brainpower, you’re bound to meet—and exceed—your business and user goals.

  Go, Team, Go

  Alignment is a huge first step as you head into your discovery phase. Once you’ve rallied the players, you’re ready to tackle your content together.

  In the next two chapters, we’ll dig deep into your content (audits) and examine the world in which it lives (analysis).

  Are we aligned on this plan? Terrific. Onward.

  5. Audit

  SOMETIMES, WE’LL ASK a conference audience, “How many of you know exactly what you have on your website, where it lives, and who owns it?”

  Inevitably, even in rooms of several hundred people, only one or two people raise their hands.

  This, friends, is a problem. To make even the most basic decisions about your content—like deciding where to focus your resources and budget—it’s good to know how much content you have, where it lives, what it’s about, and whether it’s any good.

  And to know these things, you need to do a content audit.

  Seeing is Believing

  A web content audit is an accounting of the content your organization currently has online. More often than not, when you’re finished (or even midstream), the results are unbelievably valuable. As we said in the first chapter, an audit can be one of your most powerful tools when making a business case for any web content project.

  When you finish this chapter, you’ll understand:

  • Why audits are important

  • What kinds of audits are most common

  • How to record your audit findings

  • How much content you need to evaluate

  • How to share your results

  Let’s get to it.

  Thinking about Skipping this Chapter? Don’t

  “We know the basic gist of what’s on our site.” “Somebody else in our organization must have done this before.” “I hate spreadsheets and don’t want to waste my valuable time on this.”

  Here’s the deal. No matter how unnecessary or unpleasant an audit may look to you, don’t skip it. This process isn’t just about building up a nice spreadsheet of URLs and page titles. Audits can:

  • Help you scope and budget for a content project

  • Give you a clear understanding of what you have and where it lives, even if only to begin thinking about maintenance or content removal

  • Serve as a reference for source (or existing) content during content development, making it a highly efficient tool for writers and other content creators to keep track of what they have to work with

  Can’t Robots do this for Me?

  At this point you may be thinking, “An audit sounds awfully time-consuming. Surely there are widgets that can audit my website automagically!”

  The answer is yes—there are “audit tools” that can crawl sites and capture basic information, such as titles and links. Some CMSes have audit-like features, too. During the audit process, this kind of technology can be extremely helpful and, in some cases, necessary. But beware. Technology doesn’t replace the context provided by human review. If you really want an in-depth understanding of your content—substance, quality, accuracy—people power is the best way to go.

  * * *

  Case Study: The Value of an Audit—Saving Time, Saving Money

  Carrie Hane Dennison works for a full-service web development firm called Balance Interactive in Springfield, Virginia. She says that her clients are starting to realize they need content strategy, even if they don’t know what it is.

  Although clients aren’t always looking for a line item
called “strategy,” Carrie finds ways to address content strategy. She prefers to do so early in a site redesign, but sometimes works with clients after content requirements are already in place. At either stage, using an inventory is one way Carrie helps her clients understand and address strategy. She explains to clients that, for every 5 hours they spend auditing near to the beginning of a project, they might save 20 hours at a later stage, preventing project delays.

  After conducting an inventory of existing and needed content, Carrie asks her clients to spend time thinking about messaging, or considering the number of hours needed to complete the writing or content migration. She recalls one client who took one look at the inventory and said, “There’s no way I can get this all done.” Rather than setting up her own staff to fail, the client hired Carrie’s team to help migrate the content. The result was an on-time launch of the new website, rather than a month late.

  That’s really the point of an audit: You can anticipate problems before they arise, and avoid derailing your project. All of that time and money may seem daunting at the beginning, but Carrie’s clients are impressed when the investment means they’re able to launch a better site, on schedule.

  * * *

  Technology can help you get:

  • Quick wins: When you have a very limited timeframe to build a business case or to prepare for an upcoming web project, technology can help. For example, if you want to understand the total volume of content on a website, an audit tool can give you a ballpark estimate in a hurry.

  • A head start: Auto-audit tools can save you tons of time by creating a complete list of all of your content, as well as some basic info about each content piece. Additionally, in sites without traditional navigation, CMS-driven tools may be the only way to get a complete list without going totally insane.

  • Neutral data: In organizations large and small, content discussions can get political. In this case, technologically generated, raw, undisputed data about your content can be your best friend.

  Even with all of the technical shortcuts available, many content strategists prefer to do audits by hand. There is simply no better way to fully comprehend all of your existing content.

  Common Types of Audits: Choose Your Own Adventure

  Here’s the single, most important thing you need to know about audits: The kind of audit you do depends on what you want to learn. There is no one perfect format, size, or timing for an audit; there are many different (and totally valid) ways to audit your content. What you pick depends on your goals.

  Here are a few of the most common content audits.

  Which Audit is Right for you?

  There’s no hard and fast rule, here. You can choose to do one of these audits, all three, or create your own audit format. No matter what you choose, doing a thorough audit will give you priceless information about your content.

  Start by setting clear goals for your audit. These will help you determine which audit(s) you choose and what information they capture. Think about:

  • What you want to learn (and why)

  • What you need to prove (and to whom)

  • How long you have to get the audit done (be realistic)

  • Where you are in the content strategy process (if you’re not sure, see the next five chapters ...)

  Let’s take a closer look at each of the audit types.

  Quantitative Inventory: Just the Facts

  The goal of a quantitative inventory is to learn what you have, where it lives, and a few other basic stats. No frills. Just objective facts.

  A quantitative inventory is the quickest and easiest way to get some insight into your content at the beginning of a project. BUT. By simply cataloging the number of pages, downloadable PDFs, dynamic content modules, video clips, and other “live” web content for which your organization is responsible, you can wake up stakeholders to the magnitude of your content—and the budget you need to create/maintain/fix it. Cha-ching.

  What to record

  Here’s a list of the most common bits of data recorded in quantitative inventories. Title/Topics is a must-have. The other factors you choose depend on—you guessed it—your audit goals:

  • ID: Assign an identification number or code to each piece of content. (See page 57 for more information.)

  • Title/Topics: For a web page, this is likely the title of the page. For a content module, you may choose to use the heading or subhead. If there is no title of the content piece or page, include a short description of the key topics or themes covered.

  • URL: Record only where applicable.

  • Format: Make a note of the technical format of the content, such as text, video, PDF, etc.

  • Source: Specify whether the content is created in-house, by a content partner (newsfeeds, articles, blog posts, and so on), or by your users. Note: For content created by your internal team, if you can, note who creates, approves, and publishes each piece of content. This information can be enormously helpful when you begin to ask questions about why certain content was done a certain way, or when you want to confirm it’s okay to change or remove the content. We’ll examine this topic in detail in Chapter 9, People.

  • Technical home: If you’re dealing with a very large site that’s hosted on a number of different servers or platforms, take note of where the content lives within your technical infrastructure. For example, is the content in a content management system (CMS), inventory system, or fed to the site via an API? Sometimes content may be stored in very strange places, so be prepared to do some digging.

  • Metadata: Metadata is “data about data.” In this case, we’re talking about attributes (such as keywords and tags) assigned to each piece of content. These valuable data nuggets help people find content on search engines, on your site, and in your CMS. When planning findable, functional content during the strategy phase, you’ll need to know what metadata exists. If you don’t know where to find your metadata, your friendly IT colleague, web developer, or SEO consultant should be able to help.

  • Traffic/usage statistics: There are analytics available for almost any kind of online content. If it’s feasible, get the skinny on how people are using (or not using) each piece of content. An internal analytics person or a representative from your analytics provider can often help you get the information you need.

  • Last update: When was the last time somebody in your organization paid attention to this piece of content? Most CMS systems record a “last update” date—and that information can give you hints about the significance of the content, the content workflow, and more. Just don’t make any drastic assumptions—keep it in context.

  • Language: If you have content in multiple languages, you’ll want to record the language or dialect used on each piece of content.

  Note: robots welcome here

  While it’s always helpful to review your content personally, quantitative inventories are where the robots really shine. Because quantitative inventories are about collecting raw data (no human judgment required), the right technical tools can save you time and energy.

  Qualitative Assessments: Deeper Dives

  Seeing what content you have and where it lives is helpful, but only to a point.

  Many a site map has been constructed based solely on page titles. But when it comes to qualifying the usefulness of content, a page title doesn’t tell you what the content actually says, or if it’s useful to your audience. That’s where a qualitative audit comes in.

  A qualitative audit analyzes the quality and effectiveness of the content.

  The key distinction between quantitative inventories and qualitative audits is human judgment. Qualitative audits are a robot-free zone. An actual human being has to look at each piece of content and evaluate it based on defined characteristics.

  In our chart on page 50, we listed two kinds of qualitative audits. Both take the quantitative inventory and go a few steps further:

  • Best practices assessment: Usually done early in the pr
oject, a best practices assessment looks at your content from an outsider’s point of view. It measures your content against best practices and user needs. It helps you understand if your content is useful, usable, enjoyable, and persuasive to your audience—or what you need to do to make it so.

  • Strategic assessment: A strategic assessment is the most full-featured of all audits. Once you have a strategy in place, a strategic assessment gives you an idea of how your existing content aligns with it. Where are the gaps? What needs to change? What’s terrific as it is? A strategic assessment can combine factors from a best practices assessment with strategy-specific criteria. Note that this is often informed by analysis and recommendations—we talk about a lot of this in the next chapter.

  Sample qualitative audit factors

  In addition to the information gathered in a quantitative audit, there are dozens (if not hundreds) of possible subjective factors you can review during a qualitative audit. We generally choose 5–6 factors based on the situation. The table on page 55 shows a few of our favorites.

  Create your own factors

  As we mentioned, the table only includes a few sample audit factors. Feel free to be creative and think of your own. Just be sure you can:

  • Evaluate the factor by looking at individual pieces of content (not groups or categories of content)