Your website is your brand’s hub. You have complete control over how it looks and its content, something you can’t say about many other channels. Delivering engaging, relevant content on your website is critical to hooking and converting customers. If you’re in a highly competitive field, it’s a place to highlight your differentiators and your story. To make this happen, you need a website content strategy that speaks to your audience and delivers your unique message.
Developing an effective website content strategy means following the right guidelines, adopting the right messaging, and monitoring the right KPIs (key performance indicators) to achieve your goals. In this post, we’ll dissect website content strategy and supply you with tips on how to stand out in the crowd.
What Is a Website Content Strategy?
We’ll start with defining content strategy. In general terms, this is a set of principles that guide the creation, delivery, and governance of content, as well as making sure that you deliver the right content to the right people in the right place. It’s a mindset, but also a living document.
When looking specifically at website content strategy, the fundamentals are still the same. The “place” is your website, which dictates certain factors, guidelines and best practices for how you develop content. The content must align with the user experience (UX), voice and tone, publishing strategy, SEO, and measuring performance with content analytics.
Tips for an Impactful Website Content Strategy
Now that we’ve outlined the framework and all the important characteristics of a content strategy, it’s time to talk tips. Keep in mind that this is not a ‘one size fits all’ or ‘off the shelf’ approach. Your specific strategy will vary depending on your brand’s position and the needs of your audience. By integrating these tips into your strategy, you’ll be able to maintain consistency and entice visitors.
Involve the Right Teams
Developing a website content strategy doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It requires collaboration across many different roles. It’s an inclusive process that incorporates perspectives and skills of a content team, including UX and design professionals, writers, developers, brand leaders, and SEO specialists.
Outside of the content team, business stakeholders should also be part of the discussion. Personnel from sales, product teams, and customer-facing roles should also be part of the process, as they have unique insights to help you outmaneuver your competitors.
Create Content Workflows and Governance
Creating content is a complex endeavor. To be able to consistently publish fresh content, a tenet of content marketing, you need to devise content workflows. These workflows identify all the tasks that need to happen in order to complete the content project, as well as the order these tasks should be carried out in.
You also need to implement a strong system of content governance. As part of your strategy, you should define parameters for content, such as topics, word counts, linking, readability goals, and SEO.
Deploying a content marketing platform to act as your hub makes establishing and implementing content workflows and governance much easier.
Align Your Strategy with Audience Needs
A content strategy means nothing without an audience. Everything you create for your website is for your customers. Thus, understanding your audience is essential. Their needs and challenges should be the main influence on your strategy. To achieve this, build and maintain buyer personas that address the motivations, objectives, and concerns of your customers.
If you stay true to developing content for your audience, you’re likely to stand out from your competitors. That’s especially true for industries that have been slow to adopt content marketing. If you’re competitors still publish advertorials and commercial content, you’ll be a breath of fresh air!
Establish the Role of SEO in Your Website Content
The main reason you create a website is to be found online. Look at what your competitors are doing. Study what is working for them in terms of SEO, and try to identify what you can do better.
SEO is crucial, but always remember to write for your audience first, algorithms second. This will actually help you achieve a better organic ranking, as Google want to provide high quality results for their users. You’ll be more likely to accomplish with quality content that’s consistent. Beyond the content, there are also technical elements like meta data, UX, and readability scores. All these elements deserve a spot in your website content strategy.
Check out some more good tips in the video below.
Think Mobile First
Designing for mobile first is an emerging trend in web design. More and more people will have their first experience with your website using a mobile device, so your content strategy should address this.
Mobile experiences and huge chunks of copy aren’t a good match. Content creators and UX professionals need to work together to deliver the best experience. Even small things can make a difference.
For instance, if you have six blocks of copy on a web page in the same section, you should ensure they all have similar character counts. If they are wildly different, the text boxes will appear distorted, detracting from the message.
Measuring Performance
The last part of your strategy should identify the KPIs that will determine if you’re meeting your goals. The metrics you choose to follow will depend on your goals, but the following metrics are universal:
- Pageviews
- Time on page
- Bounce rates
- New traffic
- Pages that refer to conversions
- Organic rankings (check at least every 30 days)
On a ‘big picture’ scale, you should also measure how your website performs for lead generation. Measuring performance let’s you know what parts of your website are prompting the most conversions.
Refresh Your Website with a Strategic Approach
Your website is your most important digital asset. It should be a nucleus for buyers to learn and explore solutions. Using these tips, you can refresh your content with the aid of a robust website content strategy.
If you’re working on your new website, check out this great DivvyHQ resource—a website content outline template. Download it today!