What Is Structured Content Authoring? A Guide for Success

Structured content authoring is an important digital marketing tactic that any budding content creator should understand. With the recent rise of personalized, data-driven marketing, strategically structuring your copy during the authoring stage has become a crucial best practice.

In this blog article, we’ll explore what exactly structured content authoring is, why it matters for modern marketing efforts, and how beginners can incorporate more structure into their content to improve clarity and cohesion.

What is structured content authoring?

Structured content authoring is the practice of creating, managing, and publishing content in predefined structures or templates using XML and other markup languages. 

Unlike traditional, unstructured content creation, structured content is modular, so you can easily reuse, repurpose, and distribute it across different channels and formats.

Why having structure is crucial for scalable content creation

Enhancing your content presentations’ consistency and coherence can give you a serious leg up when producing content at scale – whether you’re a technical writer, subject matter expert, or marketing manager. By organizing information into standardized, reusable components, your teams can ensure that your technical documentation and other content maintains a reliable structure for readers.

Structured content also allows for more effective content management and scalability, especially for large organizations in life sciences and regulatory industries that need to ensure that their content is both accurate and easy to find. 

With structured content authoring, you can quickly search for and assemble individual components like product specs, safety warnings, and compliance information into new documentation.

The benefits of structured content for businesses

Investing in structured content won’t directly improve your content’s quality, but it will make your content easier to find, organize, and produce – and those are just the internal benefits. Here’s a closer look at how building structured content can benefit your business:

Greater content reusability and repurposing

One of the largest advantages using structured content is the ability to reuse and repurpose content components much more efficiently via single-sourcing.

For example, you can extract and reuse a product feature’s technical description in various pieces of downstream content like user manuals, support articles, product brochures, and even customer-facing blogs and social media posts.

You can also apply this to content localization. Your teams can quickly create localized document types to support your technical writing and ensure that users across the globe have access to the same level of support.

That’s one of the major pros of investing in structured authoring tools. Instead of having your writers create new copies from scratch across these formats, you can simply have them reuse structured content modules saved in a central component content management system (CCMS). 

This can save you a massive amount of time, effort, and resources while preventing duplication and inconsistencies across your content library.

Enhanced SEO and discoverability

Structured content also lends itself more to search engine optimization (SEO) due to its standardized format and built-in metadata. The ability to consistently apply keywords, descriptions, titles, alt text, and schema markup to reusable content modules enhances website and asset visibility to search engines and improves their crawlability and search rankings.

This content also helps automation and optimization scripts execute more reliably across site pages that share unified content structures. By analyzing the data on these pages, you can find high-performing content pieces that are ideal for repurposing using the templates your teams have already created. 

This also helps your authors see which key phrases and messages resonate with your audience, making it easier to create new content based on what’s already been successful in your business.

Streamlined workflow and collaboration

Now, let’s talk about time savings – or more specifically, how you can speed up your time to market with new content. The structured authoring process simplifies the processes of writing, reviewing, and approving new content by standardizing formats, components, terminology, and models across your teams.

Modern CCMS platforms also include intuitive collaboration features that can help you manage content versions, permissions, comments, workflows, and even translations to assist with content localization. By taking advantage of these tools, you can enable even large global teams to repurpose approved modules at scale instead of engaging in redundant review processes for every new piece of content.

Improved user experience and engagement

Since structured content separates format and structure from content using templates and modular components, it inherently creates a more adaptable and user-friendly experience. Your content will display clearly across devices and platforms with consistent presentation layers that use the same validated content source.

You can also improve your content personalization by mixing and matching content blocks that are tailored to different user segments’ needs and interests. By creating more targeted, relevant content instead of relying on generic one-size-fits-all copy across your pages, you’ll be able to more effectively engage your users.  

Tools to help you get started with structured content authoring

Ultimately, structured content authoring isn’t possible without the right authoring tools. And we don’t mean basic word processing software like Microsoft Word. There are several different authoring platforms that are available on the market today.

Here are some platforms we recommend you check out to start taking advantage of the authoring process:

Content management systems

Popular content management systems (CMSs) like WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla offer built-in structured content capabilities to support creators who want to make their content easy to find, publish, and index across search engine result pages. 

With common features such as custom fields, taxonomies, reusable content blocks, and templates, these platforms can help you quickly publish and organize your content in one place. 

The best CMS for your business will ultimately depend on your budget and personal preferences. However, we recommend that you find one that offers the features above for the most effective experience.

Metadata management tools

Tools like Schema.org, Yoast SEO, and Semrush make it easier to incorporate metadata into your structured content elements. Adding metadata to each new content page enhances its SEO and ensures that its components are more discoverable online, which supports the overall content lifecycle. You can automatically apply this metadata using the templates in your CMS of choice to speed up the publishing process.

Content authoring tools and platforms

Here’s where the tools start getting a little more hands-on. If you’re serious about structured content authoring, you’ll need dedicated content authoring tools that help you execute your content strategy.

For example, tools like Adobe Experience Manager, Contentful, and Kentico provide advanced features like automation and XML-based modular structures. These platforms also give content teams access to reusable content blocks, intuitive drag-and-drop interfaces, and integrations with other CCMSs. In other words, they’ll have everything your teams need so they can spend their time creating content rather than wasting hours on technical work.

In addition to these established platforms, another noteworthy tool that significantly aids in structured content authoring is our very own Colossyan. 

With Colossyan’s document-to-video feature, you can simply upload a document with the information for your video, and in less than 60 seconds, Colossyan will generate a video draft complete with a realistic AI avatar, images, and animations to get your first draft off the ground.

Whether you create videos from scratch, a template, or document-to-video, using Colossyan will ensure that your video content follows a clear and easy-to-understand structure. This modular approach to producing video content with AI is similar to using templates in written content and promotes both consistency and easy content reuse.

From there, you can export video content to your learning management system and quickly build your company’s content library for learning and development. It’s really that easy. Plus, Colossyan even offers an AI assistant that can help you write and edit your script.

How to ensure that your structured content is useful and high-quality

Even if you’re able to get started with structured content authoring and produce content at scale, it won’t matter if your content is ineffective. Fortunately, the same set of rules that apply to normal content creation also apply to structured content.

You can ensure that your content is both high-quality and scalable by following these tips:

Conduct thorough audience research

Understanding your target audience’s needs, preferences, and behaviors with thorough research will directly inform not only your content’s quality but also how you structure your content across your site. Research-based insights help you ensure that your modular content elements align with your users’ expectations and preferences.

Develop clear content guidelines and templates

Developing comprehensive style guidelines and content templates are essential for maintaining consistency and high quality across your structured content pieces, especially for technical documentation that needs to maintain a high level of accuracy at scale. Within these templates and guidelines, you can lay out specifications for tone, formatting, terminology, and metadata schema for your content teams to follow.

Implement consistent content audits and reviews

Now that you have guidelines in place, you can stop worrying about content quality, right?

Not quite. Even after applying these guidelines, your content teams should still conduct periodic audits to assess your structured content’s effectiveness. Does it provide actionable insights? And does it require continuous optimization on a quarterly or yearly basis?

Along with user feedback, reference quantitative analytics to help you identify poorly performing content that you need to refresh or rewrite. These insights will equip you with the information you need to ensure that your content is never subpar.

Start creating structured content with Colossyan

With the right tools, you can start producing structured content in no time. And if you want to start leveraging video content in your business, there’s no better tool for it than Colossyan.

Colossyan’s video platform gives busy teams everything they need to produce high-quality AI-generated videos at scale. With its prebuilt templates, interactive video features, and customizable AI avatars and voiceovers, you’ll have everything you need to get started with structured content authoring.

Now, think about the challenge of maintaining this kind of consistency across different languages and regions. Fortunately, Colossyan allows you to to automatically translate your video content into over 70 languages – all while ensuring that the content itself stays the same.

Want to unlock the full potential of AI video creation and create scalable, fast videos for your business? Get started by creating your first video today.