CHAPTER 1

IDENTIFY PROBLEMS
AND OPPORTUNITIES
Your company, organization, or client likely has problems with web content.
Those problems have probably led to decreased productivity and profit. Thats
why you bought this book. Or maybe someone gave you this book because
youve been entrusted to find and fix content problems.

Thats the bad news. The good news is that all of us who do work on the web
have the same or similar problems. And those problems are opportunities
to do something worthwhile, like make the Internet a better place.

In this chapter, I give you some ideas and tools for determining whats wrong
with your content, what role your workflow might play in whats going wrong,
and how to turn your content problems into opportunities to do great work
for the organizations you work with.

Excerpted from The Content Strategy Toolkit: Methods, Guidelines, and Templates for Getting Content Right by Meghan Casey.
Copyright 2015. All rights reserved by Pearson Education, Inc. and New Riders.
6 E THE CONTENT STRATEGY TOOLKIT

FIGURE OUT WHATS WRONG

WITH YOUR CONTENT
You might want to dig into whats wrong with your content for several common
reasons:
 Youre about to embark on a website redesign, and youve decided to take a
content-centric approach, starting with content strategy. Yay, you.
 Your website redesign is underwaylaunch is imminentyouve realized the
content is a mess, and you dont want to launch a beautiful new site with
crappy content. Im really, really sorry.
 Youre migrating to a new content management system (CMS) or using a CMS
for the first time, and you have to get all your content from where it is now to
the CMS. While youre at it, you want to fix the content youve wanted to fix
for a long time. Smart plan.
 Youre working on adding more structure to your content so it can be displayed
various ways and on multiple devices and screen sizes. So youre going to clean
it all up as you implement the content models. Structured contentexciting.
 You just know deep down in your heart that your content could and should
better meet the needs of your organization and its audiences. And you are
determined to make it so. Onward, content warrior.
Whatever the trigger, chances are you have a pretty good idea whats wrong at
a high level but havent been able to adequately document and quantify those
issues. Your hunches are usually the best place to startsort of like an experiment.

HYPOTHESIZE WHATS WRONG

The first step of documenting whats wrong with your content is to record your
hypotheses, just as you would in an experiment. Here are some example hypoth-
eses to get you thinking:
 The majority of the content on your site is for <audience a>, but youre really
trying to increase conversions with <audience b>.
 Your content isnt written in a way that represents your desired voice and tone,
or it doesnt elicit the reactions or perceptions you want your key audiences
to have.

Excerpted from The Content Strategy Toolkit: Methods, Guidelines, and Templates for Getting Content Right by Meghan Casey.
Copyright 2015. All rights reserved by Pearson Education, Inc. and New Riders.
 Chapter 1: Identify Problems and Opportunities F 7

 You dont think youve provided good enough meta descriptionsyour content
ranks well, but you dont get the clicks you think you should.
 Your calls to action arent very strong or dont always existusers arent doing
what you hope theyll do after visiting a page.
 You dont think your content supports the reasons people visit your sitepeople
come there most often to do <this thing>, but most of your content is about
<that thing>.
 Your site contains a lot of outdated content, such as wrong information or
links to pages that no longer exist.
 The content is not very readableits long, its not organized well, important
information is buriedand you think your audiences just click the Back button
when they get to most of your pages.
 Visitors cant find anything on your site, so you get a ton of customer support
calls and emails.
Documenting your hypotheses is super important because it helps you focus on
what you want to learn about your content and what method youll use to learn it.

CHOOSE YOUR METHODS

Once youve documented your hypotheses, you can decide how youll prove or
disprove them. Not all hypotheses can be proved or disproved using the same
method, which is why I recommend combining the methods from the following
three sections to get the broadest look at whats wrong.

CONTENT AUDIT
You can conduct a content audit yourself or hire a content strategist to help. In a
content audit, youll typically be looking for things you can evaluate objectively:
what audience the content is for, what the intended purpose of the content is,
whether links are broken or go to the wrong place, whether pages arent acces-
sible through the navigation, how long the content is, and how easy it is to scan
and understand the key message(s). See the Content Strategy Tool 1.1 for an
example audit.

Excerpted from The Content Strategy Toolkit: Methods, Guidelines, and Templates for Getting Content Right by Meghan Casey.
Copyright 2015. All rights reserved by Pearson Education, Inc. and New Riders.
8 E THE CONTENT STRATEGY TOOLKIT

CONTENT STRATEGY TOOL 1.1

AUDIT SPREADSHEET
Download the audit template workbook so you dont have to start from scratch. It contains
templates for the audit sheet (where you can collect your data) and a fancy summary sheet
with formulas that pull in data from your audit sheet(s).

TIPS
 If youre auditing more  Consider whether you need  You might want to use
than 1,000 pages of to audit every page of your more than one sheet in
content, use a site crawler website or whether a repre- your audit, especially if
such as Content Insight to sentative sample will give you are auditing more
import the site structure you what you need. than one property or if
and URLs. breaking down your data
by section will be useful.

WHERE TO GET IT
Download the audit template workbook with instructions included at
www.peachpit.com/register.

WHERE IT CAME FROM

Brain Traffic @petegale, (www.braintraffic.com)

ANALYTICS REVIEW
With an analytics review, you can look at things like pageviews, user paths through
TIP content, common search terms, devices and browsers used, and traffic sources.
Disproving your
hypotheses may
make you feel as USER TESTING
though you failed.
But really, the oppo-
oppo- Getting insights from actual users is a great way to add some subjectivity to your
site is true. Instead, assessment. You can look at things like how content makes a user feel, how easy
youve discovered
your content is to understand, and how findable key content is. See the Content
an area in which
youre doing better Strategy Tool 1.2 for an overview of a content testing method.
than you thought,
and you can focus
Table 1.1 includes a few examples from the previous hypotheses list.
your efforts on the
stuff that really
needshelp.

Excerpted from The Content Strategy Toolkit: Methods, Guidelines, and Templates for Getting Content Right by Meghan Casey.
Copyright 2015. All rights reserved by Pearson Education, Inc. and New Riders.
 Chapter 1: Identify Problems and Opportunities F 9

CONTENT STRATEGY TOOL 1.2

A SUPER SIMPLE USER TEST
The fine folks at GOV.UK have been rocking content strategy and content development for
several years now. This super simple user test gives some great insights about your content.

STEPS
1. Choose a few key pages the content that makes 4. Take a deep breath and
from your site, and print them feel <less confident, look at the intensity of
copies for each participant confused, hesitant>. the green and red high-
and one for you. lights to see where your
3. Once all participants have
content is doing pretty
2. Ask participants to read highlighted their pages,
well and where it really
the content. Have them start with a clean copy and
needswork.
highlight in green the con- highlight everything your
tent that makes them feel participants highlighted in
<confident, smart, ready to the corresponding colors.
act>, and highlight in red

TIPS

 Ask participants to highlight for only one set  When analyzing the results, pay more
of adjectives (such as more confident, less attention to the darkest highlights,
confident). Pick the set that is most impor- which represent patterns.
tant to your organization.

WHERE IT CAME FROM

Pete Gale, @petegale, GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

TABLE 1.1 CONTENT ASSESSMENT HYPOTHESES AND METHODS

HYPOTHESIS AUDIT USER TESTING ANALYTICS

The majority of the content on X X

your site is for <audience a>, but
youre really trying to increase
conversions with <audience b>.

Your content isnt written in a X X

way that represents your desired
voice and tone, or it doesnt elicit
the reactions or perceptions you
want your key audiences to have.

Visitors cant find anything on your X X

site, so you get a ton of customer
support calls and emails.

Excerpted from The Content Strategy Toolkit: Methods, Guidelines, and Templates for Getting Content Right by Meghan Casey.
Copyright 2015. All rights reserved by Pearson Education, Inc. and New Riders.
10 E THE CONTENT STRATEGY TOOLKIT

SET UP YOUR EXPERIMENTS

Now that you know what methods to use, you can get specific about what to
HINT measure and how to do the measuring. For each method, document what youll
You might be able look for to prove or disprove your hypotheses and how youll document or gather
to reuse some of
what you come up the findings.
with here when
you develop your AUDIT
scorecard for
measuring content You should start with the audit, but before jumping into it, get really specific about
performance later.
the criteria youll use to assess your content. I put together an audit charter with a
And the assessment,
or at least some of matrix that details the criteria and the evaluation scale. This matrix is especially
it, can be used as helpful when you have multiple people working on the audit. It also helps you
a baseline. More in
Chapter 12.
explain your findings to your stakeholders or clients.
Table 1.2 provides an example of an audit criteria matrix.

TABLE 1.2 AUDIT CRITERIA

TIP
Save yourself a ATTRIBUTE CELL VALUES RESEARCH QUESTION WHAT YOULL LOOK FOR
spreadsheet head-
head-
Audience C-Level Who does the content  Call to action (CTA) that
ache by setting up Manager appear to be written for? suggests a role
data validation for Media Level of complexity
the values in your Unclear Nature of the content
audit. Slicing and
dicing the data is Voice and tone Yes Does the content portray  Content that clearly
much easier when Somewhat the desired voice and tone? embodies our defined
the values are con-
con- No voice and tone
sistent throughout attributes of x, x, and x.
the audit sheets.
Clarity Yes Is the message conveyed  Descriptive title and
Somewhat clearly and effectively? headings
No Logical information
hierarchy
Plain language
Persuasive CTAs

Readability Yes Does the content employ  Simple, short sentences

Somewhat writing, style, and Little to no jargon
No formatting best practices? Headings and lists
Active voice

Excerpted from The Content Strategy Toolkit: Methods, Guidelines, and Templates for Getting Content Right by Meghan Casey.
Copyright 2015. All rights reserved by Pearson Education, Inc. and New Riders.
 Chapter 1: Identify Problems and Opportunities F 11

ANALYTICS
You can learn so much from your analytics that you may be tempted to just start
mining the data and hope you find some good insights. A better approach is to
decide what specific questions you want answers to first. Depending on what
you want to know, you might be able to use your audit sheet to collect the data.
For example, if you want to know which pages were viewed most, you can add a
column for that in your spreadsheet.
Once you know the questions, record how youll document what you learn.
Table1.3 provides an example of research questions and documentation details.

TIP
Im not an analytics expert, but the folks at Google are. Chances
are you use Google Analytics on your site, and it has a ton of
resources for using its tools online.

TABLE 1.3 ANALYTICS RESEARCH PLAN

RESEARCH QUESTION DOCUMENTATION

What do users do after visiting <key Percentage for each path of the
page from which you expect the total paths a user takes from this
user to respond to this CTA>? page during xx time period

What are people searching for Top xx search terms monthly

when they arrive on your site?

What pages are visited most frequently, Top xx pages and percentages for each
and how do people get to them? path users take to get to them

USER TESTING
Again, before sitting down with users, specify what you want to learn and how
youll get the answers from test participants. Examples of questions for which
you might want answers are
 How does the content make the user feel? For example, is he confident, at
ease, overwhelmed?

Excerpted from The Content Strategy Toolkit: Methods, Guidelines, and Templates for Getting Content Right by Meghan Casey.
Copyright 2015. All rights reserved by Pearson Education, Inc. and New Riders.
12 E THE CONTENT STRATEGY TOOLKIT

 What words would the user use to describe your organization after reading
your content? You want to see if these words match your brand or voice and
tone attributes.
 How well does the user comprehend your content?
 Is the user likely to take the action you want them to take after reading yourcontent?
 Can the user find key information on your website?

TIP
You dont have to do user tests with a jillion people. In fact, the
law of diminishing returns suggests that you really need only
five people.

Using your list of questions (that correlate to your hypotheses), write a user test to
walk through with your five participants. I recommend trying it with a colleague or
your mom first to determine how long it takes and to practice explaining the tasks.

DONT FORGET PEOPLE AND PROCESS

You probably think your content is a mess. Youre reading or referencing this book
because you want to fix it. What else do you need to know besides what specifi-
cally is wrong with your content? You need to acknowledge that your problems
with content stem from problems involving people and the processes they use
to do their work.
Keep in mind two important principles about people and processes. First, every-
oneor almost everyonehas good intentions and is trying to do good work. The
people involved in making content decisions and doing content work are doing
the best they can with the skills they have and the guidance they get. Second,
even the most pointless and cumbersome processes and tools were created to
solve the problem at hand. The problem is they didnt evolve or they were never
re-examined.
Why do I mention this? Well, mostly because I have to remind myself of those
two things every time I start a new project. Its easy to mutter under my breath,
What in the world were they thinking? or Do they have any idea what theyre
doing? But that doesnt help me or my client. Instead, I say, Help me understand
why theyre doing things this way? or Do you feel there are gaps in the skillsets
necessary to create content better?

Excerpted from The Content Strategy Toolkit: Methods, Guidelines, and Templates for Getting Content Right by Meghan Casey.
Copyright 2015. All rights reserved by Pearson Education, Inc. and New Riders.
 Chapter 1: Identify Problems and Opportunities F 13

OK, with that out of the way, here are some of the questions you should answer
at this stage of the project:
 Who is involved in efforts to create contentincluding subject matter experts,
legal/compliance reviewers, writers, editors, publishers, and so on?
 How much time do people spend contributing to content creation or publish-
ing that content?
 How long does it take to publish new content from ideation/request to publishing?
 How much content do you publish daily/weekly/monthly/quarterly/annually?
 How do you decide what content to publish?
 What are the pain points and roadblocks related to your content that people
complain about?
You likely dont want to spend a ton of time documenting processes and roles at
this point in your quest, especially if you dont have funding or the go-ahead for HINT
a content strategy project yet. Do some walkabouts, talk to people in the break- For now, just try to
get a handle on pain
room, buy folks coffee, and make some assumptions based on your experiences. points and oppor-
oppor-
You can validate and vet all of what you learned later. For now, you just want to tunities. Ill dig into
describe how people and processes affect your content. people and process
much more in Chap-Chap-
ters 9 and 13.

TURN PROBLEMS INTO OPPORTUNITIES

Problems are depressing. Opportunities, you can work with. And opportunities
are much easier to sell to your boss, your bosss boss, your coworkers, your cli-
ents, and even yourself. Fixing problems sounds hard. And seizing opportunities
sounds like fun. Right?
This next bit of work is going to be the foundation of everything that comes next.
So take some time to connect the dots between what you learned about your
content and your people and processes. Then, play around with positioning so
you can make a case for a content strategy project (more in Chapter 2).
Table 1.4 is an example of how you might summarize the problems and opportu-
nities youve discovered so far. In this format, you can set up the larger problem
and related implications you uncovered during the audit, analytics review, and
user testing.

Excerpted from The Content Strategy Toolkit: Methods, Guidelines, and Templates for Getting Content Right by Meghan Casey.
Copyright 2015. All rights reserved by Pearson Education, Inc. and New Riders.
14 E THE CONTENT STRATEGY TOOLKIT

TABLE 1.4 OPPORTUNITIES TO IMPROVE CONTENT

PROBLEM IMPLICATIONS OPPORTUNITY

You are creating half  Misuse of writing Do user research to better

as much content for resources understand users needs
your primary audience  Perception that you along the customer journey
as you are for less dont care about the so you can spend your
important audiences. primary audience writing time and budget
on fixing or creating the
 Primary audience unable
content most likely to
to find content that
lead to conversions.
is relevant to them

TIP
When writing opportunity statements, make sure they include
the desired end result. In the example in Table 1.4, the end
result is more conversions. Thats what your bosss boss and
your bosss bosss boss are going to care about most. If it
makes sense, also include some context for how the end result
will make things run more smoothly or save the company money.
For example, spending resources more wisely also directly con-
con-
tributes to the bottom line.

READY? LETS GO
You know a lot about whats wrong. Youve turned those problems into opportuni-
ties. Now you need to convince the people in charge that your organization needs
content strategy. On to Chapter 2.

Excerpted from The Content Strategy Toolkit: Methods, Guidelines, and Templates for Getting Content Right by Meghan Casey.
Copyright 2015. All rights reserved by Pearson Education, Inc. and New Riders.