How we use Siteimprove to better and maintain product health

Content and Design · Oct 6, 2021

Here at TELUS Digital, we are big on automation. Using tools that take care of repetitive and time-consuming processes means more time can be spent creating better ways to serve our customers. That’s why a tool like Siteimprove is an integral element in our content and design platform.

Siteimprove is an all-in-one solution that ensures our site meets our content and tech standards for SEO, accessibility, and general industry best practices. From a technical perspective, Siteimprove is a web crawler and a service that houses data and visualizes it. Essentially, Siteimprove scans our site and tests our technology and content against a predefined set of audit criteria. It then visualizes what it finds in customizable dashboards. In short, it shows us where the problems are so we don’t have to go searching for them. This helps us easily take action on technical debt.

Measuring the quality of our products is a constant endeavour. We work hard to ensure that whatever we put in front of our customers is easy to understand, up-to-date, and accurate. To hold our teams accountable for the experiences they create, we assign each team a Product Health score. A team’s Product Health score consists of data pulled in via API from Siteimprove and other telemetry tools. This measure allows everyone in Digital to understand and prioritize valuable non-commercial work because it leads to higher quality, scalable products.

An excellent use case for the value of Siteimprove is the use of customizable content policies. By configuring Siteimprove policies to locate specific content, we save days of effort with extensive content reviews. For example, our business team needed to update every instance of a particular product nameUsing Siteimprove, we created a policy to search the indexed content from TELUS.com to identify every URL that matched our search parameters. As a result, Siteimprove surfaced over 50 matches within seconds.

Without Siteimprove, this would have required a manual process to go through potentially relevant pages with a risk of missing some of our content. The Siteimprove Policy provided a quick fix that allowed the content manager to quickly update the name across those pages.

Siteimprove also helps us prioritize accessibility for older content. This allows our accessibility champions to focus on building inclusive experiences. At the same time, our content and development team members reduce the technical debt. As a result, our customers win by consuming the content they want in the way they want.

Now that we have Siteimprove on telus.com, there is the potential to expand the crawls to other properties. And as on telus.com, once the debt is resolved there, Siteimprove will act as a guardian to ensure that healthy content stays healthy.

Authored by:
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Oskar Westin
Senior Digital Accessibility Strategy Manager
Oskar is a senior digital accessibility strategy manager. He is committed to helping people to understand accessibility and disability while to improving the digital experience. He is also a co-organizer of #a11yTO, a Toronto-based Accessibility group.
Daniel Crough
Daniel Crough
Manager, Content Centre of Excellence
Daniel is people leader on Platform Enablement. He cares a lot about empowering our teams to develop quality content and human-centred digital experiences. He manages the Content Centre of Excellence with a team of Content, SEO and IA practitioners.