The top CMS features that help users find and use existing content

“No results found”: it’s a familiar frustration. Especially when you know what you’re searching for actually does exist. Enter the concept of content discoverability, or the ease with which users of a website, portal, system, or platform can find and access content within it. 

A content management system is one such system where the level of content discoverability can either delight or disappoint. A good user experience hinges on whether content can be well-organized, tagged, and optimized for search and retrieval. While a modern CMS should provide capabilities to help on this front, unfortunately, not all do.

Here, we’ll dive into why content discoverability should be a priority in your CMS, then share the features in Kontent.ai that help our customers manage and organize their content repositories in service of that simple, but often elusive, goal: content that’s easy to find and use.

Why content discoverability matters in your CMS

Consider the painful scenario: you’re a content author who is spending way too much time looking for a piece of content that you know you just saw. And if you can’t quite land on it (you really tried everything!), what are your options? You may find yourself creating another version. 

If every user has the same struggle, over time, the unnecessary duplication of content and assets can lead to inconsistencies or errors in your message, like a game of telephone. This can erode the trust customers have in your content and in your business. 

Companies used to be able to get away with a little mess in their CMS. As the volume and complexity of content grows, that’s no longer the case. More users, more content, and more assets can turn into a headache for both individual users and the project as a whole if your CMS can’t accommodate these complexities of scale. 

A CMS that prioritizes content discoverability improves the efficiency of content operations and the quality of outputs. How? By cutting down time spent searching, discouraging duplication, and making sure everyone can fully leverage what’s already there. When every user that logs in can get what they need to do their job, without causing undue bloat or inconsistencies, you’re in good shape.

Find what you need with powerful search and filtering

Kontent.ai empowers teams to work smarter in a content repository that is clean, organized, governed, and totally user-friendly. The first feature call out we want to make is the platform’s search capabilities, a cornerstone of strong content discoverability. In Kontent.ai, it’s easy to search through content and assets using full-text search and filters. And now freshly available in our Innovation Lab? Semantic search. 

Users expect search engines to understand short queries (2-3 words) accurately. Traditional search has always struggled with context, focusing primarily on keywords. Semantic search, powered by AI, solves this by comprehending query meaning and finding relevant matches through similarities in content.

Chris Janning

Director of Presales and Content Strategy, Kontent.ai

Rather than matching exact keywords in results, semantic search connects the dots between search terms, their context, related concepts, and the user’s intent to deliver more relevant results. With natural language processing, semantic search can work with potentially vague or incomplete queries. A bonus? Semantic search also drives new opportunities, helping users discover valuable insights or resources they might have otherwise missed.

Learn more from Chris how semantic search will delight content authors in this video snippet from Product Talks: Can’t-miss product releases and activate semantic search now.

Reuse content confidently and cut down on duplicates

A content repository that is well-organized is much easier to navigate, allowing users to find and discover only the content they should be working with. In Kontent.ai, how your repository is set up and accessed is based on your specific requirements. Collections are a popular way to create discrete groups of content only available or editable by specific users responsible for specific projects, regions, brands, or teams. Additionally, it’s possible to have a global set of content that is meant to by easily used by everyone. 

Using collections helps organizations bring multiple teams and initiatives into one CMS and one project, rather than having to maintaining multiple projects or, in many cases, multiple CMSs. Explore different options for setting up your Kontent.ai experience with the right mix of projects, spaces, and collections.

One major benefit of having an organized and active content repository is the opportunity for content reuse. Find something worth using? Before deciding to modify an existing piece of content, it’s critical to confirm how that piece of content is already being used. In Kontent.ai, this check can be done easily from the informational side panel of a content item under the “Used in” section.

When I do updates to a content item or want to reuse copy from a content item but not verbatim, I check the Used in reference to see which pages will be affected, and if I need to create a copy of that content item so that it won’t affect anything I don’t want to. It is extremely helpful to make sure unwanted changes don’t go unnoticed.

Lucie Simonova

Creative Writer, Kontent.ai

Reusing existing content improves content quality and consistency. It’s a major tenet of a content-first mindset. Learn more about the benefits of reusing content.

Build content relationships using taxonomies

Another important aspect of content discoverability is categorizing the content in your organized repository. Teams use taxonomies to group and tag content based on characteristics or uses. A good content taxonomy takes the guessing game out of search, allowing content to be found from more than one entry point or perspective. It also helps govern how content or assets should and shouldn’t be used. Strong taxonomies enhance searchability, allow users to filter and navigate content efficiently, and ensure consistency in how content is labeled. 

Taxonomies can range from broad categories to detailed terms and relationships. Examples include: tagging content related to specific campaigns (Singles Day, Black Friday, Cyber Monday), time-sensitive topics (music festivals, conferences, trending news stories), organizational structures (brands, departments, units), or geography (regions, languages, purposes, licensing agreements). 

At Kontent.ai, the AI accelerator Suggest with AI can assign appropriate taxonomy terms based on an items textual content. 

For assets, taxonomies and classifications are also useful. Users also have the option to use taxonomies and for AI to step in to do things like classify images based on what is in them, making your asset library just as navigable as the rest of your repository.

Serving both admins and users, taxonomies are an important way to simplify content management and create a more intuitive experience, especially as the CMS scales. This structure ensures content remains organized, accessible, and relevant.

Discover content that needs attention in Mission Control

Last but not least, let’s touch on content discoverability from an additional angle: content that should be on your radar and may, in certain cases, require urgent action. You may not be actively searching for these pieces by keyword, topic, or author; instead, you may jump on these content items based on data and signals such their status, publish dates, or recent edits. 

In Kontent.ai, all this data lives in Mission Control, the CMS industry’s first content operations dashboard to help you keep tabs on everything that’s happening. Some useful widgets that may help you discover content that requires attention include:

• Unchanged published items, which shows content that has remained unchanged since it was last published after 90 days, useful for assessing content freshness
• Unchanged unpublished items, which displays content items that not been in the past 30 days, useful for reviving past ideas that may still be relevant
• Content progress, which groups content items base on due dates, including content that’s delayed, useful for planning and prioritization
• Overdue tasks, which displays a list of assignments and their respective due dates for each contributor
• Content recently edited by you, which displays content pieces that you can easily jump back into

Using these data insights can help your team identify gaps or areas where updates are needed to maintain relevance and accuracy. This insight can guide resource allocation, ensuring efforts are focused on refreshing high-performing or strategic content. 

Make life easier with a CMS designed for scale

A CMS that makes it easy to find and use content is a huge differentiator when you need to scale your operations. By centralizing your content, assets, and users in one single hub, you’ll experience greater efficiency, faster time to market, and better content quality. For Kontent.ai customers like The JG Travel Group, Kontent.ai is more than just a place to store content, but rather a dynamic content hub that makes it easy for users to find, update, edit, and reuse what already exists. 

The reason why we wanted to go with Kontent.ai over any other CMS, and the biggest benefit, is that Kontent.ai is more than just a storage facility. With Kontent.ai, we can keep documents alive, keep them in one space, and customize them as they need to be.

Andrew Bate

Studio Manager, The JG Travel Group

Want to experience the same? Learn more about how we help customers get a handle on their content and assets by scheduling a demo with one of our experts.