The Importance of Content Strategy for Your Company’s Website

At the Los Angeles Users Experience meetup group held at General Assembly’s downtown Los Angeles location, Douglas Kincade, content strategy director at Huge, discussed the importance of content strategy for company websites.

Kincade explained that sometimes businesses need to learn how to be publishers, and Huge helps companies do this. “We help people figure out how to do things, and we need to get clients to focus on what’s working and not working on their sites.”

Some of the goals of good content strategy include getting content to emulate personal service, making it easy for people to conduct online transactions, and getting people quickly to their desired destination on a site.

Content strategy, Kincade said, divides into three broad areas: editorial, information architecture, and production.

Editorial:

In editorial, some of the questions to be answered are:

• Is your content valuable?
• Is it clear? Helpful? Intelligent?
• What is the “voice” used for content?

“Sites are about movement and circulation,” Kincade said. Guidance for website visitors is given in a series of small steps:

• Invitation
• Advice
• Instruction
• Feedback
• Support
• Checking in

Kincade also discussed whether the content on a site helps to meet a performance objective, such as getting users to “milestones” – actions that you want users to perform on your site such as registering for a newsletter.

One of the most interesting recommendations Kincade mentioned was: “If the content doesn’t contribute, you need the will to get rid of it.”

For example, he talked about websites that have years of old press releases on them. This kind of outdated content can interfere with the effectiveness of a site’s search engine results. Kincade did mention one way to deal with sites that insist on keeping large volumes of outdated content: have a separate search engine for such content.

In this editorial area, subtopics are content optimization, media and channel planning, content marketing, and new media, which includes wearables.

Tip: One of the most non-descriptive terms used frequently on a website: “learn more.” Obviously Kincade suggested not using this term.

Information Architecture:

In this area, Kincade discussed the following questions:

• Is your content available? Can it be used?
• Can both humans and machines understand your site?
• Do you have trouble delivering content to different people or devices?

Kincade explained that one way of dealing with too much content for a mobile device is to “hide” some of the content that is viewed on a desktop. The content is still there, just not “cluttering” the mobile screen.

Production:

This area includes the questions:

• Can you keep the content fresh on your site?
• Is your content maintainable?

The question of maintaining the relevance of content on a site is a very important one. Not only does a business’s information change over time, but a change in the target market’s expectations can require new modes of content presentation.

In terms of careers for content strategists, Kincade said that you must “sweat the details and love to learn.” He listed several backgrounds as appropriate for the different areas of content strategists: journalists, editors, copywriters, data analysts, consultants, UXers, strategists, planners, info scientists, CMS experts, webmasters, producers.

In conclusion, whether your company is building a new website or redesigning a current one, it is vitally important that the full range of content strategy considerations be taken into account.