How To Create A Content Plan For Your Website

What’s an amazing website with substandard content? Ineffective.

Your elegant, responsive, easy-to-use website has to work together with your content to convert users. You can’t have one without the other and expect to see a high conversion rate.

You need a strategic content plan! In this post, we are going to share with you how we create great content plans for our clients.

Learn About Your Customers

The first thing you need to do is create a ‘buyer persona’. A buyer persona is a representation of your typical customer using information you know about your current customer and your ideal customer.

Ask yourself what you understand about your current customers; demographics, behaviour patterns, motivations, needs and goals. You can use Google Analytics to discover demographics and behaviours of your customers very easily, however, you should also use what you already know about them!

Once you have a buyer persona, you can write content on your website that will answer all of the questions your users have when they enter your site.

When writing your content you should have one buyer persona in mind – the more personas you try to appeal to, the less likely you are to convert users.

Buying Process

In order to deliver your content to customers in a logical order, you must understand your buying process and apply it to your website.

Firstly, find out how people are hearing about your products or services and what information they tend to already know when they reach your website.

You can use Google Analytics to tell you how people have got to your site whether that is with an organic search, paid search, another website or social media. Then, look at the path they take on your website before they convert. Learn more on how to analyse behaviour using Google Analytics.

Once you have done the research, you can figure out what your customers are looking for at each stage of the buying process so you can deliver the right content to them at the right time.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is important for two reasons; it helps you understand what your audience is looking for online and helps you to tailor your content to aid its visibility in search engines.

There are many tools you can use to help you find the words and phrases people are searching online. For beginners, we would suggest using Google AdWords’ Keyword Planner. Keyword Planner will give you keyword suggestions on your topic and how many times each keyword is searched per month.

Learn more about how to do keyword research and how to implement it on this helpful blog from HubSpot.

Assign Your Content

Equipped with your keyword research and buyer persona, you should have a good idea of the content you need to have on your website and the questions you need to answer in that content.

Assign your keywords and content to the relevant pages on your website. At this stage, if you have discovered topics relevant to your business which you haven’t covered at all on your website, you may want to consider making new pages.

Then, you need to decide how you are going to deliver your content. How you do this will depend on your resources and what you know about how your audience likes to be delivered content. That could be video, imagery, white papers, reviews, case studies etc.

Statistically, video is a great medium for this. Learn the reasons video on websites is so effective. 90% of consumers trust peer reviews compared to only 14% that trust advertisements.

We also know that more and more people are browsing the internet on smart devices and people love to view videos on their mobiles! It makes digesting content very easy.

Prioritise important pages

Of course, no page on your website should be neglected. However, we understand that it’s probably not realistic for you to produce amazing content for every single webpage in a short space of time. Therefore, it’s important to prioritise your most important pages.

Your homepage will make the cut for that list as well as your other most visited pages and the pages that are designed to convert.

Ensure you have a great story to tell on your about page. Believe it or not, your about page could play a big part in converting your customer. You should use it to tell your prospective customers why you are great and state your company values. You should also give a brief overview of what you actually do and link out to the relevant pages that will give the user more detail.

Implement and adjust

You’ve got yourself a content plan! Only just like any marketing, you always need to be analysing and adjusting accordingly.

Once you have published your content, keep an eye on how it performs and make changes where necessary. If you do all that, you’re onto a winner!