Developing A Website Content Plan

Website content that is relevant and engaging is critical to growing and cultivating an online audience, but coming up with ideas for website content is a tedious task for many marketers. Developing a website content plan is a great solution. By working with a team and brainstorming, organizing, and scheduling the development of content, you have a roadmap to follow in meeting your content development goals.

Step One: Brainstorm Content Possibilities

Pull together as many people from as many departments as you can for an initial brainstorming meeting. First let people throw out ideas for what they would like to see on the company website. This is a great opportunity to get some really creative ideas and to see if anyone has noticed dated content that may not have been on your radar.

Record these on a whiteboard or flipchart and then list out what you see as the biggest content needs. Are you hoping to develop more educational content about your industry to establish credibility? Are you finally getting around to developing supporting content for a new business area? Have you realized that you need more content based on customer feedback?

Under each issue, invite participants to speak directly to that issue and give ideas for supporting content.

If your customers keep calling with the same questions, for example, you may want to create a series of instructional, FAQ, or “best practices” webpages or blog posts that answer common questions.

Potential thought leaders exist in every company. It’s a good idea for every website to have a series of expert advice from these leaders to improve credibility. What is trending in your industry? Getting your thought leader to comment on these trends is a great way to generate content.

Getting all of these ideas down on paper is a really great start. The more ideas you get, the more resources you have to pull from when it comes time to get the content written.

Step Two: Organize The Content Brainstorm

After your brainstorming meeting, prioritize your list of potential content ideas. What is critical to supporting the success of the site? Of the company?  These are pages that are directly responsible for improving the visitor experience and presenting your site as polished and – most importantly – updated.

After that, it is really up to you, the organizer to prioritize “wish list” content that will improve your SEO by attracting links, things like blog posts, whitepapers, webinars. Some ideas might take a very large amount of time and a lot of resources to develop. The format will also have some impact on how soon each can get produced.

Step Three:  Schedule Content Production

From your list of willing writers and producers, assign a “person in charge” for each piece of content and a desired due date for each piece of content – unfortunately, this may oftentimes be you, so consider looking for freelance writers. This should give you the basis for a reasonable timeline for what will be produced and when. Share this with others to keep yourself accountable to meeting deadlines.

Step Four: Optimize, Measure, Optimize

Once your content is in hand, figure out how to get traffic to it on your website. Make sure to use SEO best practices so it gets found by search engines. If it makes sense, send PPC traffic to it. Also, place links to it strategically around your site. Adding a link from the homepage is a sure way to get traffic fast. Adding links from pages with common themes helps your site’s SEO and the user experience. After the page has been up for a week or so, look in your analytics program to see what kind of traffic it is getting and where the traffic is coming from. You may want to adjust the content based on the data  you find.

Having this plan laid out on paper and having input from other people are the two main things that will make the task of website content planning less daunting. The execution is easier as well because you will know what needs to be produced, by whom, and when. With this plan and the insights you gain from analytics, you should be on your way to having a site with relevant, engaging, and – ultimately – sales generating traffic.