Doing Data-Driven Content Maintenance¶
Description
Doing maintenance or updates to existing content can be challenging to justify to your organization. There’s even a community who call themselves “The Maintainers” who identify as being “interested in the concepts of maintenance, infrastructure, repair, and the myriad forms of labor and expertise that sustain our human-built world”.
On our writing team, we had a robust process of evaluating whether, when, and how to update our legacy tutorials. We selected tutorials for maintenance in essentially two different ways: one (“Tech Debt”) is if we wanted something to link to from our newer content, and the other (“Opportunistic”) is metrics-driven.
In this presentation, we’ll share some of the metrics we used, explain the thresholds we used for determining whether to update our older content, and demonstrate the measurable results we have from increasing traffic to the content. We used several of our own top-of-funnel traffic metrics, comparing against customer conversions – our goal was to do maintenance that consistently shows an improvement on all of these metrics. You’ll learn how we pitched, scheduled, and edited our own submissions to maximize their value to our audience.
You’ll also learn about the team that authored and edited that content, and how we prioritized and undertook that work. From an SEO perspective, this maintenance is a great way to improve deep linking across our community site, and from an everyday work perspective, it’s a great way to balance the need to always be publishing new tutorials with the time to look after what we already have.
- Conference: Write the Docs Portland
- Year: 2023
