A Guide to Website Content Strategy

Efficiently populating a website with engaging content is so much more than just writing website content. Planning, developing and management must all be integral parts of your content strategy in order for your site to be usable and ultimately succeed.

The required level of usability comes from properly implementing information architecture, and don’t let the name intimidate you. Information architecture (IA for short) is simply how we structure, organize and label the contents of a website, a software program and any other thing that features content in order to maximize usability; in short, IA for websites is everything we do to make the site easy to read by people and search engines alike.

People who work on improving the IA of a website are known as content strategists. From the above it becomes obvious that on top of writing skills, a successful content strategist also needs to have management and editorial skills, as well as some form of content SEO and content management system to be in place.

Content can vary wildly depending on which site hosts it and what works for one type of site doesn’t for another. For example, an e-commerce site will mostly focus on product descriptions and articles that will interest potential buyers, while a service-based website will mostly focus their content strategy on explaining the features and benefits of their services.

How to Develop a Website Content Strategy

Website content development may seem simple but simple doesn’t always imply easy. For a successful content strategy, there are certain elements that must be decided and put in place before the first word is written and then published on the site. The elements are;

Key themes and main message being conveyed: Understanding in depth the topic of a website and how to remain relevant to the main theme the website/business is covering, is extremely important in developing great content for it. It is very easy to get off-topic when developing content (especially for blogs and community websites).

So successfully pinning down all key themes and messages we want to convey is of utmost importance to keep our content relevant.

Primary topics: Each website covers a finite number of topics within its niche. For a solid web content strategy, these primary topics should be identified and approached in order of importance.

A good website content strategist can make a whole world of difference in spotting these topics and writing engaging content (or hiring writers to write that content) about them.

The purpose of the content: As we’ve seen above, different websites need different type of content and business website content will be very different from blog or social community content. As with themes, it is important to always think about what the purpose of the content is?
Is it to showcase a product or service?
Is it to engage the reader?
Is it to increase traffic, or convert more leads to sales?

Gap analysis: Cutting through sea of jargon, gap analysis is simply asking two questions:
“Where are we?” and
“Where do we want to be?”

throughout the process of developing content for a website.

Gap analysis is paramount for website content management, as during the creation of the content new needs might arise and the content strategy must shift accordingly.

Tags and metadata: Tagging the content and inserting all appropriate metadata (captions, descriptions, alternative text, slugs, categories etc) is vital to help both people and search engines understand what the content is about and help the content be found through related content. In short, tags and metadata make content accessible and easily searchable.

Content SEO: Search engine optimisation for content is essential to make the content appear relevant and “appealing” to search engines and thus have it rank higher in the result pages. Search engines continuously crawl and evaluate content for relevance, quality and other properties that they use to rank that content in the SERPs.

The Content Strategist

It may be easy to understand how to develop website content but this is an art that’s hard to master. In the heart of every successful content strategy lies a series of questions that all content strategists must ask their clients before creating an appropriate content strategy for each website.

These questions can vary but some are pretty much standard (and self-evident). Here is what I normally ask my clients:

How does your business work?
What is the main message that they want to put across?
What is your next two or three-year business plan? (Remember gap analysis “Where do we want to be?”)
What are the main products or services? (flagship products, most profitable or products the client wants promoted)
What are the best features and benefits of these products or services?
What are the unique selling points (USPs) of these products or services?

After the above have been answered the content strategist will proceed to devise an approach to the specific website’s content development. Written content is one obvious component of any content strategy but there are numerous other ways to go about this and expand the strategy. Therefore, the strategist may also propose:

A step-by-step guide, in case the product/service is extensive needs some explanation for the customers to “get” it.
The use of images/photos to convey the messages and key themes, as well as to tell an engaging story.
A series of video workshops on “How to…” etc.
Downloadable podcasts, based on interviews of experts and/or testimonials.

Combined with good written content, all the above have the power to increase traffic, generate more leads and convert more sales by successfully marketing a product or service through an efficient website content strategy.
For those of you who wish to expand further on content strategy and all the subtleties that make or break website content development I recommend Content Strategy for the Web (Voices That Matter) , by Kristina Halvorson and Melissa Rach. This 190-something page book covers all you need to know about content strategy and then some!