Content modeling checklist
If you’re currently modeling your content or already have one set up, regularly auditing the model is a good practice.Use this checklist to ensure your content model is set up for success and follows best practices.
Prerequisites for content modeling
- Prepare a content strategy with your persona journeys across various channels.
- Add your and customers’ goals and possible CTAs.
- Identify friction points and touchpoints.
- Review your analytics data and list top content items and search terms.
- Perform a content audit to filter out ROT (content that is redundant, obsolete, and trivial).
- Map content KPIs to company goals.
Determine the content model
- Identify the semantics (the meaning and relationships) of your content.
- Eliminate appearance.
- Include all stakeholders in the content modeling process and ensure their buy-in.
- Discover the content modeling toolset.
- Write down your core content and content types based on analytics and/or business and customer goals and add structure to them. Skip formatting & form of any kind.
- Change visual content types into semantic ones.
- Reuse what’s reusable with linked items or content type snippets (find structures that are shared across multiple content types).
- Connect content types with relationships and add validation rules.
- Identify content snippets with the same functionality/same data and merge them.
- Create content types for chunks and chunk your content items into reusable pieces to avoid content duplication.
- Don’t nest more than 2–3 levels to eliminate negative impact on usability.
- Set up yearly content model audits and reviews as content models may evolve, as do your and your customers’ goals.
Determine the metadata
- Review your analytics data to see what taxonomy needs to be applied.
- Associate metadata categories with content types or content attributes.
- If more elements have the same metadata, this likely indicates a reuse potential by creating a separate content item or content type snippet.
- Remove not-required metadata for browsing content.
- Optionally, add missing metadata categories at the end of the process.
- Specify how CTAs (calls to action) are implemented.
Linking the content and form
- Consider replacing form-related objects with semantic objects and let their display be handled by the presentation or business layers (for example, Page vs. Topic).
- Drive front end via taxonomies not representing the actual layout.
- Create your sitemap and navigation while trying to reuse existing semantic relationships if possible.
- Identify objects that will be displayed as “pages” and specify your SEO metadata elements for these via snippets.
- If required, define the URL implementation.
- Determine how translations are implemented.
Best practice for individual content types
- Include only content types necessary for your content model.
- Use as many types as you need, but not more.
- Avoid excess granularity.
- Ensure your content types are general, not channel-specific.
- Use short and accurate names that are human-friendly.
- Avoid names that look like
code_names
. - Avoid prefixing names with repetitive text.
- Avoid names that look like
- Be consistent in naming your content types.
Best practices for individual elements
- Use element limitations to provide validation rules and minimize room for error for content creators.
- Provide guidelines for content types, content groups, and elements, using examples where possible.
- Organize the elements in content groups for a better authoring experience.
- Use content groups to restrict access to specific elements for increased content governance.
- If multiple content types share common elements, use snippets to reuse the elements.
- Use custom elements for specific needs, such as integrations.
- In a multi-lingual setup, use non-localizable elements to share the same value across all languages.
Best practices for taxonomies
- Aim for taxonomies that are no more than 3 levels deep and have up to 15 terms per level.
- Use taxonomies to organize your assets by category and purpose.