Why You Need a Content Strategy + How to Get Started

Have you ever tried to blindly bake bread from scratch? Baking is more than buying the ingredients. It takes planning, time and all the right equipment to formulate a loaf you can be proud of.

Creating a content strategy for your company’s website can seem as confusing as mixing, proving, and scoring a sourdough loaf. Yet, with the right method, ingredients, and guidance, you can produce engaging and attractive content for your users.

Bread is a far-fetched analogy, so we will leave it there for now. Keep in mind that you wouldn’t heat up your oven and waste energy on baking before knowing if you had some flour stowed away in the cupboard.

Why do you need a website content strategy?

Blogs, product descriptions, explainers, landing pages and more make up your website and its overall content. They define the effectiveness of your site, too.

With misguided or failing content, your website can become a jumble of conflicting ideas.

A straight-forward and concise website content plan is key. To understand that you need to get to grips with your content and its importance.

Some extra reading if you need it:

• There is More to Website Content Writing Than Words
• 4 Steps to Establish Your Content Strategy – includes visual guide
• Content is the Core Focus to all Successful Marketing Strategies

Ready to start your content journey?

Despite the ubiquitous nature of the phrase ‘content is king’ many companies are not doing enough. To fully visualise the future of your website’s content, a plan of action must be simple, attainable and easy to understand.

What considerations make up a website content plan?

The depth of resources around content make it difficult to know where to start.

To make it easier, we have outlined five big aspects that you will need to get to grips with:

1. Search engine optimisation (SEO)

Content is not just for on-page customers and browsers. It is the linchpin for the success of your whole website.

Effective and catchy SEO content can drive traffic, improve conversions and increase leads for your business.

The difficulty lies in SEO’s mystery. The constantly evolving SEO sphere makes it tricky to master, but a few changes can help you produce content that appeals to Google, Bing, Yahoo and every search engine in between.

For an in-depth look into SEO copywriting and its importance, take a look at this blog:

SEO Copywriting – It Will Help Increase Your Client Numbers!

For the moment, we will glance at two huge parts of SEO in relation to your website strategy: keywords and copywriting.

SEO keyword research is the basis for any website content strategy. It’s important that you create a master list of competitive keywords and those more niche and localised.

What are the people you’re targeting searching?
You need to know the answer before putting a strategy together. Keyword research will aid this, along with customer persona work.

Search volumes and your current rankings on Google can be a good basis for measuring your content’s impact too once it’s underway.

A combination of 20 of these keywords will be a good basis to include in your content.

Here’s how to incorporate them into your copy:

• Use the keywords in catchy headlines and subheadings
• Pose questions that are commonly asked by customers – reflecting their typical thoughts when searching for your services or products
• Make sure that keywords are integrated into landing pages naturally – and not overloaded, ignore keyword density
• Add locations if you’re speaking to consumers in a specific geography

2. Metadata – it may not be a ranking factor, but it’s what’ll get you noticed

In one way, metadata is intrinsic to SEO, but it deserves its own section regarding your website content plan. Metadata is the back-end title and description for your page. It’s what consumers will see when your website ranks for their search. And in a sea of results, you want to stand out – your meta will help you to do that.

Metadata will be a big factor in whether your page is seen online.  If you have catchy and appropriate metadata, people are more likely to find your website.

It’s an element that must be considered in a content strategy – and something you can change retrospectively. The metadata on old blogs and landing pages can be changed and altered to make them neat and attractive in both an SEO and customer experience sense.

it’s an easy and effective way to implement your keywords immediately.

Just remember to always speak directly to your consumer. Grab their attention with a relevant keyword and solve their problem.

3. Think mobile first, ALWAYS

Chances are you are reading this on a mobile or tablet. Am I right? It is how the majority of your users will search for services and products. Google ranks websites on a mobile first basis now. Did you know that? It was a recent algorithm update. Mobile speed and user experience is EVERYTHING.

This has changed the way websites are built but also how content is uploaded, laid out and even written.

With dwindling attention spans, your content strategy will need to address how you will keep your mobile customers interested.

Content goes beyond just blog writing. Vlogs, explainer videos, product unboxing and everything in between could help to evolve your content for your users.

Written content, however, should still be front and centre. It is integral to your website content strategy and will keep your customers interested in what you have to say.

When it comes to producing mobile-first content, it’s vital to look at your own experience when browsing:

• Do you find yourself skim reading large chunks of text?
• Are you guided by the words or imagery more?
• Are you likely to click away from a site if intrusive adverts pop up?
• Will you go back to the search engine if the formatting gets in the way of the content?

Your website content plan must consider how you are going to reduce the chance of users clicking away. Focusing your user experience around mobile first content is a key way to focus every post and landing page you produce.

4. Website development

The foundations of the best content lay in the back-end of your site. Your website needs to be flexible, intuitive, and easy to understand – both for your company and its customers.

Developing a website that looks great, reads easily and functions smoothly is essential. Without this, your content will not even matter, as they will already be sailing through a competitor’s website.

When producing a plan for your website content, speak with your developers to see how they can help. They will be able to maximise the potential of your site, optimise it for mobiles and improve loading speeds – all essential to your SEO!

A solid foundation such as a slick, smooth and attractive website will improve the effectiveness of your content.

5. Guest speakers, social media and blogging

Every sector has an ongoing conversation. Forums, blogs, opinion pieces, social media debates. There is relatable content across the web ready for you to use to maintain this conversation.

A content strategy suggests a timely and organised plan, so why not ensure you are thinking about regularly posting. Get in contact with guest speakers who can give insight into a topic once a month, link your social media channels and start posing more questions to your customers.

The conversation will be different for every company, but you may find that you attract customers from different angles by considering it in your website content strategy.

Regular and consistent content

You cannot start a bakery on the success of one loaf. The bread analogy is back!

You are ready to produce loaves with all the right equipment – but how will you continue to satisfy your customers?

A bakery is a part of a weekly or daily routine for some. Visiting your website may be a daily or weekly routine for your users. That’s why it’s vital you create a consistent base of content that can be relied upon.

This will enhance the user experience on your website both in the short and long term. In the short term, they may see one blog from a social media post but in the long run, customers may find the answer they need from a post you uploaded two years ago.

The difference this time will be that your posts will be optimised, easy to read and link to the most applicable areas of your business.

It’s a lot of work – hire a website content manager

Your content is a huge undertaking. The biggest brands in the world have dedicated content professionals to oversee their content marketing across all channels.

If you truly want to kickstart and revitalise the content you have produced and will produce, a website manager could be perfect. They can take the time to analyse your content, get to know your target audience and improve your SEO credentials.

What can a website content manager help with?

We have discussed the reasons why your content strategy is vital, but how can you action it?

If you do not have the time to dedicate to a comprehensive plan, a website content manager is your ideal choice.

Sitting between your company’s best interests and your website’s effectiveness, a clear strategy will be created.

A website content manager will have the skills to help you:

• Formulate a plan for your content
• Organise and upload content across your channels
• Improve the look of your website
• Ensure that the performance of your site is up to standard
• Provide an impartial opinion on your content and its effectiveness

The results?

A website content manager can help you in a number of ways, including:

• Focus your SEO keywords to ensure the best SEO practice is followed
• Alter and change your website to suit mobile-first content
• Edit and correct content across your website – keeping you relevant to consumers
• Help to boost posts over social media
• Use paid advertising effectively to gain more traffic
• Increase the time users spend on your website

There’s so much to do… how can I get started on my content TODAY?

Anyone can write. It’s effective website content writing that confuses things.

Start small, establish some basic content then move into blogging. It will help you to understand what your users want to read and learn about. Track how your blogs do on Google Analytics and when you share on social – do your posts gain engagement?

As a suggestion, think about a big question in your industry. It can be one with an easy answer or one with a complex explanation. By taking a minuscule aspect of this question and breaking it down, you can try to answer it in a piece – there are endless opportunities to provide worthwhile content.

You’re not going to get the answers you need until you experiment. A strategy doesn’t end at planning and executing – it’s a cycle: plan, research, execute, measure, optimise, measure, plan…

To give you a hand in producing sleek, concise and easy-to-read content for your website, here are four Ss to remember:

1. SEO keywords:

Hone on one subject and choose a few keywords to focus on. These will represent the margins of your piece, helping you to create effective SEO copy without much hassle.

Now, content writing needs to incorporate these keywords, but you should not throw them in at every opportunity. Google and other search engines have smart and ever-changing algorithms that will pick up on you ramming in a chunk of text with your keywords in it.

2. Subheadings:

Vital for mobile and integral for neat, easy-to-read copy, subheadings are an often-overlooked aspect of content writing. Your content should include plenty of subheadings to break up passages and direct the eyes of your users to different sections.

They also stand as important tags for your content – effectively categorising your content for search engines and users alike. Snappy subheadings that pose questions or incorporate those keywords will be ideal.

Mobile users will use the subheadings to guide what they want to read. As they skim and scroll down your page, they will notice subheadings more easily than normal text. If you can entice them with attractive and intriguing subheadings, you will keep their interest up.

3. Short sentences:

In the same vein as keeping users engaged, supplement those subheadings with plenty of short sentences. Make a point. Explain the point.

If you think as a potential reader, you will instantly begin to condense those sentences to make them easier to consume. This is, again, vitally important on mobile where attention spans wane!

4. Send them to different pages:

You’ve got them interested. They have clicked on your post and they read your content. Back to Google they go and never to be seen again.

Many content writers and managers will attest to the need to direct users to other parts of your site. You will see above that we have linked to different blogs. This is because it helps you get more information and encourages you to stay on the site.

A call to action at the end of your piece, hyperlinks to your products and links to previous blog posts are important. Not only will you keep your users interested, but you will help Google and other search engines to explore different areas of your website. A win win!

Start your website content strategy right away – plan, execute, measure, react

You are now equipped with all the knowledge to produce a plan that works for your business.

Whether you choose to hire a content manager or evolve an in-house content strategy with your team, you will start to communicate with your customers better and improve their experience on your website.

To discover more about content writing and to explore the opportunities open to you at TJ Creative, get in contact.