Content Strategy with Sitecore Experience Accelerator

When building a new site with Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA) there are many things to consider from a content strategy perspective. In this blog I will list 5 key attention areas to ensure you are providing your site visitors with the right content.

1. Content organization
   The way you organize your content for your website, also known as Information Architecture (IA), is very important. 
   
   First, Sitecore will by default make use of the item names to build a web page URL. Therefore, having the right path for an item will not just make it have a user-friendly URL, but it will also improve the SEO ranking by making it more relevant based on search terms. 
   
   SXA organizes content items under Tenants and Sites. Each tenant can organize multiple common sites underneath it. This makes it easier to separate sites by brand, for example. This kind of content organization, organized in a logical way, also improves the daily workflow of content authors and editors. 
   
   The path to a piece of content must follow an intuitive logic. As a content strategist you will want to validate your IA before it’s built in SXA. Are the different content groups organized in nodes that make sense to you? Will customers be just a couple of clicks away from key areas of your site from the home page? Will the URLs be short and user-friendly enough?
   
   
2. Tagging content for search
   Other than ensuring a URL path that is user-friendly, it is important to tag your content to improve its indexability and searchability. SXA provides out-of-the-box fields for that. These fields are Tags, Title, Page Keywords, Page Description, and Custom Metadata.
   
   
3. Social Media
   You will also want to ensure your content is ready for social media sharing. For that, SXA also comes with out-of-the-box fields available for content authors. These fields are separated into two groups:
   
   a. OpenGraph:
   • Title
   • Description
   • Image
   • Type (e.g., video, article, website)
   • Site name
   • Admins (used only if your page is a Facebook app)
   • App ID (used only if your page is a Facebook app)
     
     
   b. Twitter:
   • Tweet Text
   • Tweet Site
   • Tweet Description
   • Tweet Image
   • Card Type (Summary Card – shows a small image with summary text; Summary Card with Large Image – shows a large image with summary text; App Card – links to the app install in an app store)
     
     
4. Associate Content to Personas
   If you have a set of personas defined for your website, you will want to associate the right set of content to the different personas. Although this recommendation is not exclusive to SXA sites, with SXA it is important to remember that the content is distributed and combined from different components. These components can be shared to multiple different pages. Therefore, the persona association is not done at the component level, but at the page level. So, there is no need to do this association to all items in your content tree, but just to the right ones. 
   
   Associating content to personas will help you with your existing or future personalization plans.
   
   
5. Tracking Goals
   
   It is important to constantly check what is working and what is not to ensure you are providing the right content. For that, you want to use Sitecore Marketing Control Panel to create and associate goals with key pages. 
   
   A classic example is a ‘Thank You’ page after a user has submitted data using a form in your website. Tracking these goals and using Path Analyzer will help you to identify which path site visitors are using the most to get there. This will tell you which content is working, and which content is not.