Content planning doesn’t have to be difficult if you take it one step at a time. The process can be completed in an hour or two for a small website. I recommend you already understand your goals, what an ideal client looks like, your unique value and a search keyword list before starting content planning, since all these things will affect what content you need.
Competitor & Market Research
Especially if you don’t have a clue where to start, you might consider starting with competitor research. Go to Google, and search using your keywords and phrases potential customers will use to find you. The local and national competitor websites that appear on the first two pages of search results can be a treasure trove of ideas for site content. Of course, any content ideas you find will need to be created afresh in your own words, specific to your business or organization. Use this research to brainstorm additional creative ways to provide information about your business, products or services and to help your prospective customers make good decisions. Sure, you may not be able to implement a slick interactive sales representative full-color map like your national competitor, but with some creativity and a customer service perspective, you can create content that serves the same need.
What do you need?
Just because a competitor has particular content doesn’t mean it’s right for you. You’ll want to consider the goals for your website, your ideal customer, and the buying process for your business and customers.
Buying Process
Consider your buying cycle – is it long, short or somewhere in between?
If you are a restaurant, your buying cycle may be very short. People look up your establishment and decide where to have dinner tonight. You can support the “I’m in the mood for ribs tonight” with mouthwatering photos of your ribs, a menu, and mobile-optimized map to your location. You may want to encourage return visits with some sort of loyalty program such as share-with-a-friend buttons, dining clubs, or social media with today’s specials.
On the other hand, a bride may be researching venues for a reception a year away, taking months to make a decision. You can assist her quest for the perfect wedding by providing planning checklists, photos of different table layouts, and names of caterers to encourage her to think of you as a “go to” resource. Take into account different customer types and their different needs for content.
If you are a big-ticket or business-to-business company, your buying cycle may be longer, with potential customers performing extensive research before beginning to look for particular vendors. In this case, you have an opportunity to help educate potential customers as they’re exploring and refining their needs — and to position yourself as a resource for information and expertise by offering a whitepaper or eBook. When they begin to narrow down their research to identify specific providers, you will be poised to be one of the vendors who comes to mind. At that stage of the buying cycle, provide content to help them differentiate between you and your competitors, including case studies, testimonials, assessments, and free trials or new customer coupons. Finally, you are poised to present a great proposal, based on the information you now understand about their needs you have gained over the entire buying cycle.
No matter the length and simplicity or complexity of your buying cycle, it pays to consider the what content will best support a potential customer in their quest for your product or service.
Keywords & Pages
As you begin to organize content, plan to limit a single web page to one particular topic related to an important search keyword or phrase, then plan to use this keyword and variations on it throughout the page for better search engine results.
Menus & Content areas: standard pages
I recommend sticking to a set of standard pages for basic content, including Home, About, Contact, Products, and Services. Website visitors expect to find this type of content – labeled as such, and creativity in labeling them otherwise may backfire.
Write it Down
As you develop your content needs, document them, noting the product or service, the specific target customer type, the stage in the buying cycle, and the media (web, social media, email, video) that could be used to convey the content. It’s helpful to note search keywords you will target with particular content. It can be helpful to create a site outline or diagram.
Continue generating content needs until you have covered all products, services, customer types and stages. The next step is to evaluate what you already have that may meet these needs.
What do you already have?
Review your current marketing assets to identify what you have that could be used, what will need to be updated, and what you will need to create.
- Do you already have branding for your company or non-profit – a logo, colors and perhaps a particular perspective from which the company speaks: formal, informal, cute or professional? Can you use it as-is or will it need updating?
- Evaluate print or video marketing you may have that could be repurposed for the website or social media. You may have television commercials that could become website videos, a brochure from which you could generate home page content, flyers for particular products or services, letters of recommendation, or a list of frequently asked questions (FAQ).
- If you already have a website, what content is there? Does it fit with your goals and needs now? What will need to be rewritten?
- Do you have web pages that generate a lot of traffic from search engines for particular keywords? If so, then you will want to document this in order to preserve the search rankings of these pages as you make changes to the website.
As you evaluate your existing assets, document them, too. This can be a simple document or a multi-page spreadsheet to record the content, where it is located and whether it needs to be updated or is OK as-is.
Content Organization
Once you have a list of what you need and what you already have, you can compare the two to identify what will need to be updated, what will need to be created, and identify resources who will do the work of updating existing and creating new content. If you don’t have resources to immediately create or update all content, you may need to prioritize according to content importance, available resources, or time needed to complete. Alternatively, you could consider outsourcing content creation.
Generally, I prefer to launch a website sooner with less content and add quality content over time. Consider the opportunities you may be missing today by not having good basic content available for potential customers when deciding how much content is “enough” for the initial launch. Just be sure to keep adding interesting content after the site launches – Google rewards sites with lots of quality content!
Content Writing
The next step is actually writing your content. Writing effectively for the web is different from writing for print. I’ll do a future blog post with tips on writing web content.
Close the Loop: Feedback
For best results, be sure to review your statistics regularly.
- Look at what content is most popular in terms of pageviews and length of time spent on each page. Consider adding more of that type of content.
- Look at what content received few pages views, didn’t receive much time or was a final page of a website visit. Can that content be rewritten to be better or can you replace it with something else?
- What keywords were used to find your site? Can you create more content around those keywords?
And so the cycle starts again. Owning a website isn’t a once-and-done project. To be effective and stay competitive, a website needs to be regularly planted, weeded, and fertilized, like a garden.
Why this is Important
Creating and maintaining content, done well, is a task requiring a significant investment in resources. Taking time to plan the content on your website to be relevant, interesting, helpful, and effective in helping you reach your goals insures that the time and money you spend on content is worth the effort and has a good return on investment (ROI).