Part of my motivation for this blog was to fill a gap I see in the current state of technical documentation strategy and how tech writers are trained in school, at work, and at conferences. 

Many tech doc writers publish to public-facing websites, yet I’ve seen ample evidence that few use up-to-date SEO techniques or common web metrics to create, track, and improve content. At the same time, most of us tech writers can accurately describe the benefits of the Oxford comma and other minutiae of writing style. 

Technical doc strategy and authoring practices lag behind other web content. Society for Technical Communication and similar organizations aren’t filling the gap and frequently continue to promote outdated practices.

To quickly update content strategy practices, tech doc writers should adapt the techniques of content marketing.

Why “revenge of the English majors”?

Let’s talk about some of things that hold tech writers back from adopting updated web strategies. “Revenge of the English majors” is my shorthand for tech doc strategy that values traditional forms or ideas of correctness over relevant, actionable web data. It doesn’t assign meaningful business goals to tech docs. It doesn’t consider customer intents or the greater web ecosystem such as competing content and search.

Your content strategy might not be your choice. A product team, executive, or other stakeholders might request olde-timey documentation. That’s a tricky situation. The best way to counter an ineffective or outdated documentation strategy is to propose an alternative strategy based on clear business goals and data. Then, publish some content using your strategy, measure results, and share them.

So, keep editorial standards and a good style guide, but validate them with data when possible and craft standards that are appropriate to your readers. Be aware that your audience reads at a mass-media level of comprehension. Your competition comes in large part from Stack Overflow, open source documentation, tech media, bloggers, and similar sources where the writing is, at best, informal.

What is content marketing, and why should a tech writer care?

Content marketing provides a framework for content strategy. It might not completely fit tech documentation business goals, but many of the techniques are useful for reaching and retaining readers. You might not think much of your marketing counterparts’ content—ew, it’s so “new, improved!” But, if you’re in a highly competitive business with public-facing docs, it’s in your best interest to care about content marketing and try to learn from your marketing colleagues.

Content marketing uses the medium of the web and other content assets to their best advantage. It speaks to its audience in their terms. It measures results and refines its approach. That all sounds great to me.

Content marketing means “creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action” (from Content Marketing Institute).

It’s not all the things your docs are doing, but it’s a lot of what they could do.

Attract, acquire, and engage

Your docs might attract more new customers than you realize. My marketing SEO pals tell me that tech docs often rank higher in search on common customer questions than the marketing content designed to answer those very questions. Your customers want authoritative, technically rich answers to their questions—the kind of answers tech docs are best suited to give.

Your documentation also helps with acquisition, sometimes by design (get started) and sometimes incidentally. Search queries indicate that customers use docs to see whether a product can meet their requirements or scenarios. Marketing content doesn’t answer those questions in a detailed way.

Finally, most tech writers want their content to engage customers, meaning it continues to answer customers’ questions and keeps them using your product.

The docs answer it best: What is Azure Search? 

Measure results

Use data to understand the success of your strategy. Don’t limit yourself to pageviews or your content rating system, if you have one. Those can be useful metrics, but their meaning—and what you need to do to improve them—isn’t clear. You need more specific answers.

Start with these metrics:

• % of referrals from search: Are you writing well for the web? Really. Google is the web’s primary content ecosystem, used to provide quick answers or to surface content with more information. For more on this topic, see Good SEO is good content strategy.
• Visits: A more accurate measure of traffic than pageviews. Rather than measure each hit to the page, visits measure each session during which the page is viewed. A page can be viewed many times in a user session, so visits deduplicate pageviews.
• Bounce rate: Was your doc page relevant? Bounce rate is the least ambiguous and most actionable metric. More on this in a later post.
• Unique visitors: A measure of content reach. Is your audience growing? Are you reaching new customers?
• Search queries: How people found your content. How they didn’t find your content may be more important than how they did. I’ll talk more about this when I cover keyword research in a future post.

Remember, search drives more than 50% of website traffic*

Your tech docs can attract a substantial amount of search traffic and contribute to your business. Claim your share!

My recommendation: For your next tech writing conference, try MozCon**. Don’t be put off by the references to marketing. MozCon provides a lot of great info about search strategy and creating effective content.

Besides, tech docs are promoting something, too.

*BrightEdge says so.

**I have no business ties to Moz, and I don’t get anything for recommending this conference.

Categories: A bit rant-ey, Content strategy