Content modeling checklist

Prerequisites for content modeling

1. Prepare a content strategy with your persona journeys across various channels.
2. Add your and customers’ goals and possible CTAs.
3. Identify friction points and touchpoints.
4. Review your analytics data and list top content items and search terms.
5. Perform a content audit to filter out ROT (content that is redundant, obsolete, and trivial).
6. Map content KPIs to company goals.

Determine the content model

1. Identify the semantics (the meaning and relationships) of your content.
   • Eliminate appearance.
2. Include all stakeholders in the content modeling process and ensure their buy-in.
3. Discover the content modeling toolset.
4. 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.
5. Change visual content types into semantic ones.
6. Reuse what’s reusable with linked items or content type snippets (find structures that are shared across multiple content types).
7. Connect content types with relationships and add validation rules.
8. Identify content snippets with the same functionality/same data and merge them.
9. Create content types for chunks and chunk your content items into reusable pieces to avoid content duplication.
10. Don’t nest more than 2–3 levels to eliminate negative impact on usability.
11. Set up yearly content model audits and reviews as content models may evolve, as do your and your customers’ goals.

Determine the metadata

1. Review your analytics data to see what taxonomy needs to be applied.
2. 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.
3. Remove not-required metadata for browsing content.
   • Optionally, add missing metadata categories at the end of the process.
4. Specify how CTAs (calls to action) are implemented.

Linking the content and form

1. 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).
2. Drive front end via taxonomies not representing the actual layout.
3. Create your sitemap and navigation while trying to reuse existing semantic relationships if possible.
4. Identify objects that will be displayed as “pages” and specify your SEO metadata elements for these via snippets.
5. If required, define the URL implementation.
6. Determine how translations are implemented.

Best practice for individual content types

1. Include only content types necessary for your content model.
   • Use as many types as you need, but not more.
   • Avoid excess granularity.
2. Ensure your content types are general, not channel-specific.
3. Use short and accurate names that are human-friendly.
   • Avoid names that look like code_names.
   • Avoid prefixing names with repetitive text.
4. Be consistent in naming your content types.

Best practices for individual elements

1. Use element limitations to provide validation rules and minimize room for error for content creators.
2. Provide guidelines for content types, content groups, and elements, using examples where possible.
3. Organize the elements in content groups for a better authoring experience.
4. Use content groups to restrict access to specific elements for increased content governance.
5. If multiple content types share common elements, use snippets to reuse the elements.
6. Use custom elements for specific needs, such as integrations.
7. In a multi-lingual setup, use non-localizable elements to share the same value across all languages.

Best practices for taxonomies

1. Aim for taxonomies that are no more than 3 levels deep and have up to 15 terms per level.
2. Use taxonomies to organize your assets by category and purpose.