It’s a pretty sure-fire bet that if your website has heavily devolved authorship, or a model where lots of authors make requests direct to a central team, that you’re going to have duplicate content, incorrect content and altogether more content than you actually need.
This is usually because few people know the content really well, while those who do are seldom in a position of sufficient authority to enforce processes and guidelines to make the website a streamlined communications tool. The communications team in charge of the site are put upon by subject experts and non-web marketing managers who insist that they need a new page, often linked to from the homepage, that promotes their unique piece of content.
Unless you have a really tough manager taking charge of the site, this spells trouble. Content is added without an over-riding communication strategy and very little content is taken away. It’s a symptom that you see most often in the public sector, where people’s fear of breaching misunderstood legislation like FOI mean that content purges are rare. Consequently website management becomes unwieldy as more and more superfluous information is piled into the CMS repository. This creates its own content management issues, but the most significant problem is lack of focus on the website.
If this is the case for your website, you need two things:
- A clear objective for your site.
- A clear process for dealing with duplicate content.
When you find duplicates, or a request is made to add content that resembles content which exists already, you need to ask the following questions:
- Does the new content meet the website objective? If it does, process the request. If not, reject it.
- Is there evidence that your audience requires the information supplied by the new content. If so, process it. If not, reject it.
If the content exists already and is fulfilling its remit but isn’t being read by your audience, you have an information architecture issue. This is the justification for promoting the content as a feature on the homepage or elsewhere on the site.
These are all basic editorial issues, but if you’re suffering from them it’s probably not because you have bad editors but because your editors have little support. You need to help them develop and communicate this very simple process and ensure that it is enforced. The clarity of your process will translate into clearer content on your website.