Content strategy is an evolving area. Overall, the consensus is that content strategy is a whole life cycle of content including creation, revision, publishing of approval, and the content (Clark, 2016).
Content Inventory
It is highly integrated with technical and business requirements. So that content strategy is an enterprise-wide project rather than a sub-set. Through the content strategy, content is identified as a business asset and used to increase efficiency and effectiveness. (Clark, 2016). To be able to create a unified and comprehensive content strategy, it is essential to understand the existing content and audit it against the business goal, user goal and best practices (Land, 2014). A content inventory is a quantitative method to access and list all the related content including pages, images, metadata, content type etc. (Land, 2014). Hence it is a great tool to have a comprehensive understanding of a website.
Content Audit
Paula Land (2014, pg. xii) wrote that “By transforming a content inventory into a content audit, you gain a powerful tool in further understanding your content’s strengths and weaknesses.”. Unlikely content inventory, a content audit is a qualitative assessment of the content. There are some measurements that you can audit content to as such quality, depth, and breadth. Additionally, an audit aims to check consistency, consistency, content duplication and cross-linking. Based on the audit, content recommendations can be put forward to plan the company for the planned future state. A content audit can be sued to solve business problems as well if applied in a systematic way.
Combining Content Strategy with Six Sigma
The DMAIC is a Six Sigma method used for problem-solving (de Mast & Lokkerbol, 2012). DMAIC will be used to framework improve, optimise, and stabilize the content audit process. DMAIC stands for define, measure, analyse, improve, and control. Define is documenting customer needs, business, and project goals. The measure is to collect and gather data in a meaningful way. Analyse is searching for reason-effect relations meanwhile listing potential problems and potential solutions. Improve is listing the findings, learnings, and improvement ideas during the analyse section. Lastly, control is to create a future-proof project to avoid and found problems from happening again (Land, 2014).
Overall, it will be helpful for an auditor to follow DMAIC framework. Here is an example of framework I personally used to audit a marketplace site:
Define: The goals of the audits are:
- Learn more about current on-page SEO
- Audit title elements
- Audit HTML header elements
- Audit meta descriptions
- Learning about site structure
- Identify the page categories and levels as well as their relations
- Check keyword density
- Content Depth
- Find out the potential patterns for brand and editorial guidelines.
- Is there any notifiable problem with UX?
- Is the message clearly communicated?
Measure: During the content audit the following will be measured
- How many pages the marketplace has.
- How many pages needs improvement regarding SEO?
- How many pages are there for each use (each community).
- What is the existing content quality regarding depth and breadth?
Analyse: During the phrase followings will be analysed.
- Is there any metadata guideline?
- Is there any editorial guideline?
- Is there any brand guideline?
- Does content support users, sellers and business goals?
- What is the content gap between current state and the desired future state? (GAP Analysis)
Improve: This stage will use the insights gathered on the analysis stage and offer an improvement plan to be able to reach desired future state. Also, it will give potential expected results after improvement.
Control: This stage will give supply guidelines and standards to ensure on-going optimisation.
If you would like to learn more about Content Inventory, I highly suggest to read this article written by Freya!
If you would like to learn more about content strategy, You might want to consider a FH Joanneum’s Master’s Degree Program tailored for people who are in the field of communication/marketing. The program increase knowledge of students (mostly working students) for both technical and editorial elements of content including Landing Page content? If you enjoy this article, I am pretty sure that you will also enjoy “Content Audit” course as the part of program.
Reference:
Clark, D. (2016). Content Strategy: An Integrative Literature Review. IEEE Transactions On Professional Communication, 59(1), 7–23. doi: 10.1109/tpc.2016.2537080
de Mast, J., & Lokkerbol, J. (2012). An analysis of the Six Sigma DMAIC method from the perspective of problem solving. International Journal Of Production Economics, 139(2), 604–614. doi: 10.1016/j.ijpe.2012.05.035
Land, P. (2014). Content Audits and Inventories. Richard Hamilton.
