Content prioritisation

What content prioritisation is

Content prioritisation is a method for putting a backlog you already have into an order you can defend. It assumes the list exists: fifty items from an audit, a redesign, three people's suggestions and a year of good intentions. The job is not to add to it. The job is to say what happens first, what waits, and what is struck off.

It is not the same as deciding what to write about. Choosing and ranking subjects is topic strategy, and it produces a list. This takes any list, including a messy one full of rewrites, fixes, new pages and things nobody can quite explain, and sequences it.

It is one chapter of the content strategy plan. Sold on its own, it is for the business that has already been told what to do and cannot work out where to start.

When you need one

The usual moment is the week after a content audit. An audit produces a long list of fixes and a person holding it who now feels worse than before. Prioritisation is what turns that document into a fortnight's work.

The other moment is when a team has been busy for a quarter and nothing important has moved. Small, easy items get done because they are small and easy. The three jobs that would actually change the business sit at the bottom because each takes a week.

You do not need this if the list is short. Under a dozen items, sit down for an hour with whoever pays the bills and put them in order yourselves. This is for a list long enough that ordering it by argument takes longer than doing the work.

How the order is worked out

Every item is scored on four things, and the four are weighted differently, which is the whole method.

• Distance to money. Would finishing this item plausibly affect somebody's decision to buy in the next quarter? This carries more weight than everything else combined, and it is why most backlogs reorder dramatically.
• Cost in hours, counted properly, including review and publishing. A job nobody has the hours for is not a priority, it is a wish.
• Dependency. What has to exist first. A pricing page that three articles are meant to point at goes before the three articles, however keen everyone is on the articles.
• Decay. What gets worse if it waits. A page with last year's prices on it costs you something every week it stands, and it takes twenty minutes to fix.

Items that score low on all four are struck off rather than parked. A backlog that only grows teaches everyone to ignore it.

What you get

The ordered backlog. Every item, in sequence, with its four scores and a one-line reason. Sortable, so a new person can see why item nine is above item four.

This quarter, above the line. The items the available hours actually allow, which is usually a quarter of what was on the list. This is the sheet that gets pinned up.

The struck-off list. What is not being done, and why, kept so the same suggestions do not come back every month and have to be argued out again.

A worked example

An illustration. A family-run flooring supplier finishes an audit holding sixty-one items. The instinct is to start at the top of the spreadsheet, which happens to be alphabetical, and the first fortnight goes into rewriting product descriptions.

Scored properly, the order changes. Four items go above everything: the installation page that quotes a discontinued product, the contact page that gives a phone number nobody answers, the commercial enquiry page that does not exist, and the fourteen product pages showing prices from two winters ago. Together those are about nine days of work. Nineteen items are struck off, including a long-discussed blog series on flooring history. The product descriptions, which were going to consume a month, drop to the second quarter behind the four fixes and a set of buying guides. The list stops being a source of guilt and becomes a fortnight with a visible end.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. Where the list came from, who is holding it, and what has stalled. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Scope and number agreed before anything starts.
3. The list, gathered in one place. Your audit, your spreadsheets, the notes in three inboxes, and the things people mention on the call that were never written down.
4. Scoring and sequencing. Three to four working days, with read access to your analytics so the money question is answered from figures rather than opinion.
5. A session on the result, because the struck-off list always needs a conversation, then the final sheet in whatever your team already opens.

About a week from first call to an ordered backlog.

What it costs

Quoted after the half-hour call, since the work scales with the length of the list and how much of it is already written down. It is a small fixed-price piece. The pricing page shows the four ways of working and their bands, so you can see the shape of it beforehand, and the number is fixed in writing before anything starts.

When prioritisation follows an audit I have done, it is quicker and the quote reflects that.

What happens next

Three things usually follow. The items above the line get dates and owners, which is a content calendar. The number of slots gets checked against real hours, which is the publishing schedule. Or somebody works down the list for you, which is managed content production.

None of that is assumed. An ordered backlog is complete work on its own. Take the sheet, start at the top, and it will have done its job by the end of the first fortnight.