How do colleges and healthcare centers keep their content fresh and relevant? Content governance is the key. But what is content governance, and why is it important?

Governance is an agreed-upon strategy for updating, making decisions about, and creating new website content. In higher education, governance typically incorporates input from MarComm, faculty, and students. All parties have well-defined responsibilities. As a group, they share accountability and action for updating their content text, layout, and calls-to-action.

Governance is critical to keeping your website working for you. And a winning governance strategy focuses on more than just content housekeeping. Maximize the value of your content governance efforts by integrating SEO- and AEO-focused optimizations into your governance plan. By taking this step, you can improve the discoverability of your content anywhere people search while addressing timeliness, brand standards, and accessibility.  

3 First Steps for Governance Success

1. Define a core strategy

Each person, department, and content-creating group must share a vision for the direction of the content based on a common set of values. Details of your plan should include:

• How often you will update content.
• Who is responsible for which sections and pages.
• What images, layout options, and components are approved (or not).

2. Train content creators, editors, & publishers

Writing for the web, making content accessible, and learning how to work in a content management system (CMS) are teachable skills. Before turning your content creators loose, make sure they understand these basic governance principles:

• CMS templates: Which templates are approved on which pages. For example, many sites have a special design for Programs, Departments, and the homepage.
• Media: How to appropriately add videos, audio, and images to site pages with appropriate alt tags for accessibility.
• Migration: Moving content from the old site to the new one. See 10 migration best practices.
• Nested headers: Headings and subheadings must be hierarchal and properly tagged to meet accessibility rules. This helps visually impaired site visitors successfully navigate the site.
• Scannability: Use of subheadings, bulleted lists, and components to break up walls of text.
• Shared content components: Content that can be updated in one spot, with rippled changes throughout the site. For example, a “contact us” block (or a Cascade Brick in the Cascade CMS) that lives on multiple pages.
• Writing for the web: Users should understand best practices for writing appropriate headings, calls-to-action, linked text, URLs, and meta descriptions. All these features will affect how well users can find and use your site.
• SEO and AEO fundamentals: Anyone who is making strategic decisions about how to organize, format, or rewrite content should have a solid working knowledge of SEO/AEO. Get the latest SEO/AEO best practices to empower your content team.  

3. Set up a content publishing workflow

We can’t all have the final say in what content or images should be included on the website. Many organizations set up workflows in which there are specific levels of access based on a user’s role in the organization, skill with the CMS, and understanding of the institution’s brand and digital guidelines.

Many workflows involve three general levels of users:

• Administrators: Full site access and can upload, edit, and publish content sitewide, as well as manage permissions for other users.
• Superusers: Similar access to administrators, except they can’t manage other users’ permissions.
• Users: Access to change specific content or pages but generally cannot publish content.

Following a workflow allows the central website team to keep the site content on brand without taking away all editing rights of the dispersed team. Email us today to discuss your governance strategy.

Integrate SEO & AEO into Content Governance

Think of SEO and AEO as the optimization layer within your content governance program. At Stamats, we’ve found plenty of overlap between tried-and-true SEO approaches and the emerging AEO best practices. It’s a good idea to apply these tactics at every stage in the governance process.

1. Content planning

Prepare yourself for SEO and AEO success during the content planning process by:

• Selecting topics based on keyword and query clusters that are relevant to your audience.
• Prioritizing topics where you can compete with authority and expertise.
• Highlighting and addressing key entities (people, places, and things) and the relationships between them.

2. Content creation

When it comes time to execute on your content plan, be sure to:

• Cite sources and include expert quotes and proprietary data whenever possible.
• Include internal linking considerations in your content drafts.
• Craft content around real user questions with concise, extractable answers.

AI systems favor recent and explicitly updated content over content that might be stale. Use your Analytics tools, such as Google Search Console or Data Studio, to breathe new life into your existing content:

• Consolidate content ranking for keywords around a single topic into a new hub-and-spoke model.  
• Target for optimization your content that ranks just outside Google page one.  
• Identify pages that have some traffic but provide only a surface-level or “thin” treatment of key topics. Add answers to relevant questions, experiential detail, and “EEAT” (Experience – Expertise – Authority – Trustworthiness) elements that users (and Google) value.  

SEO and AEO experts bring an array of jargon, tactics, and tools to their work that can seem a little intimidating to novices, but there’s a big secret to SEO and AEO success: the most valuable work SEO and AEO experts actually do is almost always refreshing existing content to match current users’ search intent.

3. Review & publishing

Editors and content approvers should:

• Use a comprehensive SEO and AEO checklist, such as a trained AI agent to find more optimization opportunities.
• Ensure the content satisfies user intent and provides detailed answers to the questions users are asking.
• Note any metadata or content that will need to be updated in the future, such as seasonal information.
• Add schema markup to make it easier for both Google and LLMs to understand and surface your content.

Good content governance can be achieved by competent program managers, but great content governance requires savvy strategy. This means assessing performance, identifying what is working and what is not, and finding data-backed solutions to issues that arise. Here are some of the key metrics that matter for SEO/AEO and content governance:

• AI citation frequency and relative visibility for different phrasings of the same query
• Traffic and click-through-rate (not just search rankings and volume)
• Engagement and conversion behaviors of inbound users 
• Topical authority 
• Content freshness

Organizations are struggling to get clarity on the value of their content and the sources of their traffic, and some marketers who used to rely on a simple set of metrics to assess these topics are scrambling to find new methods. 

By starting to refine your approach to measuring, analyzing, and reporting on the outcomes of your content governance work now, you can set up your organization as a trusted source of answers and information for years to come.