Content Strategy for the Web

by Kristina Halvorson

  • Use the factor to assess most or all of the content (i.e., not just one type of content)

  • Develop clear, specific guidelines for measurement (including ratings or categories)

  The More (Auditors) the Merrier

  If you’re auditing 1,500 pieces of content, one person can handle it. (Yes, really!) But if you’re looking at 10,000 pieces, you’re going to want some help.

  When you share audit responsibilities, it’s absolutely imperative that your audit criteria, ratings, etc., are crystal clear. In addition to defining and communicating the criteria, you may want to:

  • Have one person test the audit criteria before splitting up the work

  • Create some examples of each criterion or rating

  • Have regular check-ins with the audit team and spot-check each other’s work

  • Make sure that in addition to ratings and pre-defined lists, auditors have a notes field to jot down anything out of the ordinary or explain their thinking

  When it’s all over, you can commiserate about the agony of audit eyeball (where you can no longer look at the screen without seeing double).

  QUALITATIVE AUDIT FACTORS

  Audit Spreadsheets: Choose your Weapon

  Back in the old days (like, 2005), auditing was so easy. Web content = website pages. The format of audit findings was always the same: a simple list of pages, ordered by navigation, in a spreadsheet.

  Today, getting a handle on your content can be more complex. Content isn’t necessarily assigned to a single page on a website anymore—in fact, it might not be on a website at all. Even if it is, it might be displayed differently depending on the user’s behavior, preferences, or device (computer, phone, tablet, etc.).

  Spreadsheets are still the go-to format for most audits, but the tools are evolving to accommodate new kinds of content. Let’s take a look at a few of the more popular options and how they work.

  The Basic Spreadsheet: Old Faithful

  If you have a traditional website—where content is assigned to a specific page within a fixed navigation scheme (usually a home page with lots of neatly organized pages underneath)—a basic spreadsheet is the tool for you. Here’s an example of a basic spreadsheet for a fake plant nursery website:

  To audit your site, you simply click through every page of your site (usually in order) and record the information in an outline format. List major website sections as your top-level “parent” (or primary) sections. Then plug in pages and modules as “children” (or secondary, tertiary, and so on) sections or pages in each main section. Most of the time, the pages are numbered the same way you’d organize a document outline (1.0, 1.1, 1.1.1, and so on).

  A note about ID numbers

  If you don’t already have a numbering system for your web content, it’s a good idea to start one during the audit process. By assigning a unique ID to each page or component, you have an easy way to reference each piece of content, categorize content for analysis, and get an understanding of how pieces of content relate to each other. Lastly, a number system will help you link your audit findings to other web project documentation—the number of a specific piece of content can correspond to the content strategy recommendations for that content, etc.

  Spreadsheet 2.0: When Content Flexes and Changes

  As we mentioned above, today’s smarty-pants programmers have made it possible to customize website content based on who you are, your past behavior, or the device you’re using. (For example, people viewing a page on a mobile phone may only see half of the content available on a computer.)

  When your site has these bells and whistles, variations need to be included in your audit. If your site has a set structure (where the navigation is basically the same for everybody), you’re in luck. You can still do the inventory in an outline manner with some small adjustments. Start by choosing one version of the content to be the root of your inventory (the primary user group, the most common device, etc.) Then amend your ID system and spreadsheet to indicate variations.

  Back to our nursery example. Let’s say the nursery website has two audiences: the general public and professional landscapers. People who are logged in as professionals get expanded or different information. In this (very simple) example, we’ve added “:g” to the end of the ID numbers of pages targeted to the general public, and “:p” for versions of the pages for professionals.

  In these types of audits, consistency is key. Regardless of the numbering system you select, make sure it’s used correctly throughout the audit.

  Indexed Inventory: When Things Get Really Hairy

  Now come the sites, apps, and content channels that are so incredibly flexible it seems like there is no navigation at all. Or, there really isn’t any navigation. Just tags. Or facets. Or something.

  Whatever the situation, the content in question cannot be audited in an outline format. You can still use a spreadsheet for your audits, but you likely need to:

  • Get a list of content pieces from the backend. It’s really hard to get a complete list of content pieces by clicking around. So, if you’re unfamiliar with the backend system, it’s time to make friends with an IT or CMS-focused colleague.

  • Document (or find the documented) user characteristics or behaviors that cause the system to display each piece of content. Again, the backend people probably have this all worked out on a fancy model somewhere.

  • Categorize the content into groups for analysis such as topic, product type, audience segment, or internal content owner. Create a meaningful numbering/indexing system based on your categorization. (If the CMS does this for you, too, hooray! But, often the CMS numbering system is too abstract for the purposes of an audit analysis. Boo.)

  Our nursery audit might look like this:

  Now this is a simple example; things often get significantly more complicated. Indexing systems get tricky, and, in some cases, it’s easier to create an audit database instead of a spreadsheet. Make the choice based on your audit goals, the people working on the audit, and the size of the mess you might be in.

  Do you Really Need to Look at All of the Content?

  It depends. If you have less than 5,000 pages/pieces of content, you should probably look at all of it. Yep. All of it. Why? Because you can: it’s humanly possible to do so.

  But what happens if you have 25,000, 100,000, or 100,000,000 pieces of content? Or, you don’t have enough time to review 5,000 pages? When looking at every page is not an option, you have two choices: content sampling or rolling audits.

  Content Sampling

  One way to audit huge piles of content is to review a “representative sample” of your content.

  Choosing your sample

  The challenge with creating a sample is deciding what content should be included. Sure, you could just do a randomly generated selection of content items, but usually it’s better to make your sample more intentional by basing it on what you want to learn.

  Brain Traffic’s Christine Anameier suggests considering the following criteria when selecting your audit:

  • Content objectives: If 70% of the site content is designed to increase sales and 25% is dedicated to customer support, your sample set can reflect those percentages. The remaining 5% (such as job postings or corporate philanthropy information) can be sampled lightly or not at all.

  • User groups: Divide sample content by user group—ensuring content for each of your major user segments is represented. Better yet, prioritize the user groups and sample more pages for the highest priority users.

  • Traffic: Site analytics can show you which pages or sections get the most visits and which get the least. Depending on your business goals, you may choose to focus on the high-traffic content, low-traffic content, or a combination of all traffic levels.

  • Content ownership: It may not be possible to include work from all teams of content contributors, but it’s helpful to get a good mix from people that regularly create your content. If the sample consists most
ly of one group’s work, it may not reflect the content as a whole and other teams may not embrace the audit findings.

  • Update or maintenance frequency: Some content is maintained lovingly. Other content is left to go stale. If either of these two scenarios is over-represented in your sample, the results of the audit will be skewed—creating a false sense of pride or doom.

  • Depth: It’s tempting to audit only top-level pages of a website, but with today’s search tools, customers may never even see your top-level pages. The “deeper” content is often where your customers run into major problems. In his book, Killer Web Content, Gerry McGovern writes, “I come across many websites where there is a well-designed top level with quality content. However, when you click down a few levels, everything changes—it’s like walking out of a plush hotel straight into a rubbish dump.” So you may want to look at a cross-section from all content levels.

  When choosing your sample, how much content is enough?

  There’s no rule or benchmark for picking the perfect sample size. It would seem like the more content you could review, the better off you’d be. That’s somewhat true, but mostly you just have to look at enough content to see patterns emerge, answer your questions, or reduce uncertainty.

  On a relatively small site (i.e., 10,000 pieces of content), you might need to look at half of the content before the patterns become obvious. For a million-page site, you might decide to look at only 0.01% of the content. That’s still 10,000 pages ... so you’re not exactly off the hook. But, you should begin to recognize some kind of valuable patterns. You won’t have the same level of certainty about your findings as you did with the smaller site audit, but you’ll have some ideas. And you probably aren’t going to learn anything else by auditing another 1,000 or 10,000 items—comparatively, the percentage of items reviewed is still so low that the change in the margin of error is microscopic.

  Here’s a rough table of suggested sample sizes (based on common market research sampling practices):

  If you can’t make these benchmarks or just want to ignore them, don’t sweat it. Adjust the sample size to your resources and time. Just about any sample will tell you something as long as you (and the people you show your results to) understand what content you reviewed and why.

  Rolling Audits

  Another effective way to audit large sites is a rolling audit—an audit that basically never ends. Lou Rosenfeld (Rosenfeld Media) says an audit or inventory “shouldn’t be something that you allocate the first two weeks of your redesign to; allocate 10 or 15 percent of your job to it instead.”

  It works like this: In January, you audit one area of a website. In February, you audit a different area. In March, you move onto a third, and so on. Eventually, when all of the content of the site is audited, you start over with the first category again. (It doesn’t have to be monthly, either.)

  The benefit of a rolling audit is that more content gets looked at, in a more careful manner, more often. This works best when stakeholders can agree to focus the first phases of the audit—and the content strategy—on a few discrete areas of the site.

  And, guess what? On a super huge site, you can do a rolling sample of each area of the site instead of a rolling audit. It’s like a dream come true, really.

  Tabulate Your the Results

  When you’ve finished evaluating all of your content, stop and celebrate. Just bask in the glory of that completed spreadsheet. Have a cupcake! Take a nap!

  Okay, that was fun. Back to work.

  By this time, the audit team likely has a good idea of where your content shines and flounders. But, there’s nothing like cold, hard numbers to drive home the point. So, take the time to tabulate the results and look for patterns. You’ll be able to answer questions like:

  • How much content do we have, exactly? Do we have more in some categories than we would have expected?

  • Which areas of content score especially high or especially low on any specific factor?

  • Do we have a disproportionate amount of content for one audience segment?

  • How much of our content is out of date or inaccurate?

  When you crunch the numbers, you often find some pretty insightful stuff.

  Share Your Findings

  At this point, you may be totally enamored with your spreadsheet and raw data—we are, too—but chances are your business stakeholders won’t share your devotion.

  For them, you’ll need an audit report. Prepare the report in whatever format suits your audience: it can be a presentation or a full-scale document. You just need to convey the results of the audit and provide a reference for future discussions.

  An audit report usually has three parts: an overview of the audit process, a path to access the raw data, and the findings report.

  Overview of the Process

  First, your report should provide a brief description of the audit process. This will help make your findings more understandable and believable. You might want to include:

  • Goals of the audit: Why you did the audit, what you hoped to learn, and what you want to do with the results.

  • Audit factors and measurement criteria: A brief overview of what was measured and how.

  • Scope: What areas of content were audited and why. If the content is particularly time-sensitive, you may need to include a date range as well.

  Path to Raw Data

  Some people who see your audit report are going to want to see the data. If you so choose, you can provide them with a link to the spreadsheet. But, don’t just let them loose with it. Provide a spreadsheet guide that explains how the spreadsheet works and alleviates any confusion.

  Findings Report

  Third, and most importantly, you’ll want to provide your audit findings. Your findings can include:

  • A summary of overall conclusions and recommendations

  • A description of each audit factor

  • Data summaries per factor

  • Factor-based themes or suggestions (with examples, when possible)

  The report you create depends on the people who will see it. How much do they need to know? How much do they want to know? You may have different reports for different groups of people for the same audit. Here are some examples of what you might see in an audit report.

  Formal detailed report

  In this example, the auditor pulls out all the stops. This is a formal report made for an audience that craves details. In this example, the audit examined types of content formats used throughout the site. On this page of the report, you have:

  1. A description of the audit factor

  2. Graphic depiction of the results

  3. Data cross-referencing site section and format

  4. Key findings and analysis about the factor

  Casual summary report

  This report is more casual—possibly directed at a core team who is familiar with the audit and the content. It doesn’t go into the details, but gets the high-level messages across. This page includes:

  1. Summary of the key finding for this factor

  2. A bit of detail that clarifies problem areas

  Presentation-style report

  This slide is from a presentation that might summarize a report or may be the report itself. The slide headline summarizes the key finding, and the image provides some data for backup.

  It’s very likely that conducting an audit will earn you a huge promotion, a ton more money, and a year’s vacation. Well, that might be a bit optimistic. At the very least, it will get people’s attention. And once you have people’s attention, you have the opportunity to present a business case for your next project or initiative.

  But Wait, there’s More

  With a completed audit under your belt, you should have a clear understanding of the content you have. It’s likely you have lots of ideas about what to do next. Why not jump right in?

  Hold on there, chief.

  There’s more juicy info to be had about us
er needs, competitors, and the content team within your organization.

  Next stop? Analysis.

  6. Analysis

  CONTENT DOESN’T EXIST IN A VACUUM. There are forces—both from within your organization and from the outside world—that shape what your content is and what it could be. Business goals, resource constraints, user needs, and competitor activities are just a few things that influence your content in a big, big way.

  To make effective recommendations about content, you need to analyze the wild, wide world in which your content lives. So, before jumping into strategy, take the time to ask pertinent, important questions about all the factors that impact your content’s creation, maintenance, and ongoing success.

  In this chapter, we’ll discuss different aspects of ecosystem analysis, and why they’re essential to your content strategy efforts:

  • Internal impact factors: How does your organization impact your content?

  • External impact factors: What effects do users, competitors, and influencers have?

  • Communicating the results: How do you document and share what you’ve learned?

  Please note that just because internal impact factors come first in this chapter doesn’t mean you need to do them first. Want to start with external impact factors? Need to do external and internal simultaneously? Go right ahead. The choice is yours.