I recently chatted with a colleague about the importance of unpublishing old and little-viewed content. The colleague shared that their strategy was to reach parity with the number of docs a certain competitor published. Deprecating docs meant they had to publish even more.

My dear documentarians, that’s not a content strategy. That’s a cry for help.

In this blog post, I’ll cover:

• Why less is more
• The 80-20 rule for tech doc planning
• A framework for cutting content
• Redirection guidance
• Reporting cut pages
• And your next step to sweet freedom from tech doc hoarding!

Less is more

If you read my post Write fewer docs and win the internet, you see a case for fewer docs that uses search visibility as a measure of success. Google is still the single greatest driver of web traffic, and this post is still worth considering.

There’s more customer benefit to having relevant and helpful docs than there is to having many so-so docs. Most doc sets I analyze have a relatively small percentage of high-traffic pages with a long tail of pages with much less traffic. From the long tail of low-traffic, low-engagement pages you can make strategic decisions about cutting content.

Plan tech docs by the 80-20 rule

I’m repeating this section from an earlier post, because I continue to find this rule crucial to planning tech docs. It’s also a rule that will resonate with your product development team, who often want you to publish lots and lots of docs.

When you plan docs, use the 80-20 rule (Pareto principle) that is also used in software development: Microsoft has reported that fixing the top 20% of bugs solved 80% of user issues in a system. (See the “In software” section of Pareto principle in Wikipedia.)

Similarly, consider that if you documented the top 20% of customer intents or scenarios, you’d likely cover 80% of customer questions. Further, the last 20% of customer questions often takes the greatest effort to document — yup, 80% of the effort. I’ve seen quickly diminishing returns as content sets grow, if planning doesn’t focus on the top go-to-market customer scenarios.

More content doesn’t mean more search presence. It can often mean you’re watering down rank for the 20% of customer intents that matter most.

A framework for cutting content

If you need help with cutting, check out this article from Moz.com: Clean your site’s cruft before it causes ranking problems. Moz’s audience is primarily marketers, so this process may be too much work for you. But it’s a useful framework and gives you ideas about the possible impact of cutting pages.

Start evaluating content to cut by looking at pages with the lowest number of pageviews and visitors, and then look at bounce rate to see whether people find them relevant.

Don’t redirect every page you cut

A marketing goal is to keep people on a site (engagement or “stickiness”), so marketers tend to redirect every page they cut.

On the other hand, tech doc publishers seek to answer customer’s product questions first. Engagement isn’t necessarily the site goal.

Only redirect a page when there is another highly relevant page to target. For more guidance, see Don’t fear 404s & avoid unhelpful redirects.

Report on what you cut

Cutting pages requires analysis, rewriting other content, and other editorial work.

Instead of reporting only on new and updated docs, report also on the number of docs you cut.

Teach your stakeholders and collaborators to prioritize cutting content.

Action: Admit you have a problem

If you don’t have a plan or resources for maintaining your content, you may have a hoarding problem.

It’s OK to say so. Reach out to a friend, like your documentation manager. Say, “I’m <name>, and I can’t stop writing new documentation. Please help me create a doc lifecycle plan and prioritize my time.”

Hello <name>. We’ve all been there, and we’re here to help.

Categories: Content strategy, Fun with tech docs