Author authority audit & optimizationsFranchise program publishing systemsConsent ManagementEmail CaptureAudience infrastrucutre
- Add missing data to author pages. A full audit of the database showed basic elements like a bio and social media attributions were missing from top authors. This was a quick fix the editorial team could start to solve for immediately. We organized a shared spreadsheet in order of authors who had posted most recently, to help them visualize priority in who they might want to update first.
- Update missing author schemas Following clear guidance from Google, some could be made at the article level and the author page level structured data to bring us more in line with best practices.
- Author URL structure During the audit, it was more easily surfaced that authors were being created in multiple ways, and URLS were inconsistent. Also, from an editorial brand perspective, the request was made to look in discovery for changing “user” in the URL to “author.”
For example, my URL could have been: user/klenz
- user/kristin-lenz
- user/kristinlenz
- The problem traced itself back to how new users were being onboarded to WordPress. Depending on the type of user (FTE, contributor, freelance writer, editor, etc.) one of three teams could be setting users up in the system. Internally, there was no clear documentation on how to establish a new user or the permissions they required.
- An additional problem that surfaced was the inability (or understanding of capabilities) to change the name of the author, including in the URL when that person experienced a life change.
- The final audit suggested, as part of the upcoming CMS migration, a full review of the WordPress VIP author tooling to better understand user types, roles, and permissions, refine or redefine field mapping to the frontend, and provide definitive onboarding requirements and clear documentation to the operations, editorial and marketing teams.