Your website content is critical to achieving your inbound marketing goals. Everything else you do is done for the purpose of driving traffic back to your website, where you can then educate visitors, help visitors learn about your business, convert leads, and close deals.
That being said, creating web content without a plan to guide your actions is a bad idea. A good website content strategy can help ensure that your web copy will help you drive business results.
Here are some of the factors that go into creating a good website content strategy.
Objectives
All of your content should have a purpose. Why are you creating it and sharing it? What content marketing goals do you hope to achieve? You don’t create website content for the sake of creating website content. You do so for a variety of reasons, like driving web traffic, educating prospects, or closing sales.
Without objectives, you won’t possibly be able to understand whether or not your website content is effective.
Simplicity
You might have a lot to say and a lot to share with your future web visitors, but if your website is cluttered with content that isn’t easy to digest, you won’t have the chance to engage your visitors.
Keep in mind that you only have 10 seconds to impress, so you don’t want to waste it on anything that’s over complicated. Keep it simple. Create easy-to-use navigation cues. Use informal language. Be clear and concise. And highlight the important points. You want your visitors to be able to find what they’re looking for and read what they want to read quickly and easily in that 10-second window, which is why simplicity is key.
Credibility
Your web content must be credible. People are coming to your website because you’re an expert at what you do or what you sell. Your web visitors will be judging you while they browse to ensure that you’re the right company to buy from.
And a lot of things can damage your credibility. Missing citations for research; unprofessional, overly personal, or derogatory content; spelling and grammar errors; distasteful content; inflated qualifications; and false facts can drive web visitors away.
Make sure credibility is a top factor when you’re building your content strategy.
Knowledge of Your Audience
Your web content should speak to your ideal buyers—your target audience. It should answer their common questions, help them find the information they’re seeking during the buyer’s journey, and help them find solutions to their problems.
The only way you can achieve this is to know your audience on a deeper level. Before you start writing anything, know who its intended audience is and ensure that it speaks to their needs, pain points, and desires. Otherwise, your words will fall flat with your ideal buyers and you’ll generate leads that aren’t qualified.
SEO
Don’t forget to include SEO in your content strategy. All of your content, links, images, videos, titles, and URLs should be optimized for SEO in order to ensure that you can generate as much organic traffic as possible. Ensure that the content you create follow webmaster guidelines, and avoid black-hat SEOtactics at all cost.
Schedules
Your content strategy should include a schedule for when your content will be published, by whom, and why. This will help you stay organized, help your team stay on target, and help you avoid publishing gaps.
Teamwork
You might be the content strategist, but know that any good content strategy depends on teamwork. Yes, content is king, but content on its own will not generate the results that you seek.
To create a content strategy that delivers ROI, you need to involve your designer, your writers, your editors, your SEO team, your user experience expert, and even your stakeholders into your planning stages.
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