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Seattle Meowtropolitan

Background

This project is a content analysis and strategy project for my Content Strategy course. It analyzes the website of my client, Seattle Meowtropolitan, from the perspective of content strategy. The purpose of the project is to identify problems on the current website and propose solutions to help the client in achieving their business goals and customer needs.

My Role

Throughout the course of the project, I created a content inventory and conducted a technical audit, competitive analysis, and content audit on Seattle Meowtropolitan’s website. I identified issues with the site navigation and content structure and made several recommendations from the perspective of content strategy.

Project Details

Tools: Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word

Deliverables: Content inventory, technical audit, competitive analysis, content audit, final client report

The Goals

This project analyzes the website of my client, Seattle Meowtropolitan, from the perspective of content strategy. The purpose of the project is to identify problems on the current website and propose solutions to help the client in achieving their business goals and customer needs. It is set to address three main business goals of our client: (1) support online booking and sales, (2) engage new and returning customers, and (3) educate customers about cats.

Throughout the course of the project, I created a content inventory and conducted a technical audit, competitive analysis, and content audit. Using the results from the audits, I discovered several problems with the client's practice and made corresponding suggestions to solve them.

Content Inventory & Technical Audit

I started the project by creating a content inventory and conducting technical audit. From the content inventory and technical audit, problems on the site’s search engine practices are found. The page titles, meta descriptions, and use of keywords are almost, if not all, the same across different pages. This repetition in the page elements does not describe the content of the page properly and may lead to lower ranking in the search engine, especially due to keywords spamming. The technical audit reveals that the meta description is outdated, as it still says the café is coming soon. It also shows that there are multiple duplicate URLs for some pages and broken links to the online store.

Competitive Audit & Analysis

I conducted a competitive audit to assess Seattle Meowtropolitan’s strengths and weaknesses in comparison to its competitors. My method started by producing usability metrics and performance indicators (called heuristics) and grading the client and competitors on a Yes-No-Meh scale.

From the results of heuristics rubrics in the competitive audit, I found that Seattle Meowtropolitan underperforms in effectively delivering content on its website, especially on its home page. The heuristics show that, in comparison to the competitors, the client excels in font legibility and its use of images, but primarily due to the flaws in its content. In particular, it (1) has unclear calls-to-action, (2) has too much unnecessary duplicate of content, (3) uses same title tags, keywords, and meta description for many pages, (4) does not have enough content to inform or persuade audience, and (5) has outdate content on its site.

Qualitative Audit

I also created a qualitative audit to assess the qualitative aspects of an organization’s web content, specifically relating to its business goals, customer goals and needs, and taxonomy and organization. This helped identifying issues of quality with the current content on the web pages and determining the next steps, including keeping, consolidating, removing and updating the content.

From the qualitative audit, of the 43 pages analyzed, I found that most of the content are redundant, trivial or incomplete. Key pages, including the home page, café and reservation pages, all have very thin content that aren’t effective in informing and persuading the customers to take the next action. The online stores are set up on different platforms with different design layout and do not clearly articulate the message of purchasing a product to help cats and for a meaningful cause. Blog and social media channels other than Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have been inactive for a period of time, while the active channels do not generate attractive or sharable content.

Core Model

The last bit of the project is to create a core model for my client. A core model, or a content model, is an approach to map out the content of the pages. It is essential for identifying the business objectives and customer tasks for each page and answering the question, “What core content can help both the business and customers?” It helps me and the organization identify the most important pages on the site to focus on and informs the UX designers which are the most important elements to emphasize in their design.

The proposed site map makes two major changes to the site structure of the original site map. First, it consolidates similar content into one page to create a flat navigation. Industry benchmarks, such as KitTea and Meow Parlour, have limited their site structure down to two levels. This approach allows the customers to get to the information they want quickly. For Seattle Meowtropolitan, this solves the problem of duplicate or similar content and allows quicker content updates for the site developer. FAQs are also moved to be included in the corresponding page, which may exist in its own section or a modal.

Second, pages are reordered to match the order of Seattle Meowtropolitan’s three business goals. For instance, “Visit” and “Shop”, which match business goal #1, come before the “Menu” and “Cats” pages, which fulfill business goal #2 and #3. This helps better capture customers’ attention when they navigate through the site, as the number one goals is to support online booking and sales. Industry’s best practice, KitTea, also uses the same approach for their website structure.

Overall Content Strategy

Using the results from the above audits, I made several suggestions to Seattle Meowtropolitan. These include:

  1. Technical areas, such as page title and meta description tags, should be rewritten to match the page content.
  2. Missing content needs to be filled in to help engage new and returning customers, and content should be revised for clear and persuasive wording in order to make the calls-to-action more actionable.
  3. Pages/site structure should be consolidated for a flat navigation.
  4. The target number of calls-to-action per page should be set to around two to three to effectively direct customers to the next step while they are navigating on their site.

See the full content strategy report to my client.