You’ve got a blank canvas for your new website but how do you decide on the pages, structure and content? It can be difficult to know where to start when it comes to organising a new website and you can quickly feel overwhelmed.
Maybe you have a current website that you want to bring content over from, and lots of new content you want to feature too. If you’re struggling to organise, decide what content stays and doesn’t stay, we’ll hopefully give you a few helpful pointers of how to identify, organise and write your website content.
1. Content audit
First of all, look at all the content, old and new you have and assess whether each piece is achieving its goal. For example, if it’s information about services, is it giving all the vital details clients want in order to decide whether to buy from you and is there a clear call to action? If not, you’ll need to improve it.
Use a spreadsheet, with a tab for each content area/page, with flags and comments for where you need more information or further editing work.
A content audit is time consuming, but the more organisation and assessment of your content you do in these early stages, the better your website will be in the end.
2. Site map
Constructing a site map is best carried out at the same time as your content audit. As you assess each piece of content and the goals it needs to achieve, organise the content into the website pages. You’ll need a visual diagram for drawing out a site map and there are plenty of tools online for doing this.
Don’t just carry over every page from your old website. Think about how browsers want to navigate a website and how each piece of content relates to each other.
As you put your site map together it’s likely you’ll realise where the gaps are in your content, and where some pages are surplus to requirements.
3. Identify the critical pages
If your website is a big one, it may be that you can’t have all your new pages ready for launch. A website is an ongoing project, and with new content ideally being created all the time, it’s best to think of a website as never entirely finished. But you can’t launch without your service pages, so these would be critical.
Pages such as a fully populated blog, and some of the pages that may feature in your About section are less critical and can be added later as you go on to further develop your site.
4. Identifying keywords and phrases
Identifying the organic keywords and phrases your audience use when searching for your products and services enables you to structure the outline of your content. This might also throw up further gaps in your content you might want to address.
Included in this SEO exercise is thinking about internal and external links to build traction with search engines that your content is genuine and trustworthy. Internally this is ensuring that your website content contains logical, self-referential links. For example, where services talk about other services, create the links to the relevant pages, and where blogs refer to services, make sure there are the links to those service pages.
External links are where other respected websites refer to your website. You can achieve this by building links with those companies and guest-blogging or, on a more long-term basis, becoming an authority in your area so that those businesses’ blog writers will refer to your content.
5. Outline each critical page
You have your content audit, site map, critical pages and keywords and phrases, so now you need to outline each of those critical pages to help you either edit the old content you have, or write new content.
An outline would include your basic checklist for each page: goal, content, call to action, image. For example, for your team page the goal might be to educate visitors about your team and how qualified they are to do the job; the content could be bios for each team member and their job title; the call to action could be to subscribe to your newsletter or blog and the image could be a group portrait or internal workspace image.
6. Write and polish the content
After all that organising, identifying of critical pages, outlining content, keywords and goals, your actual content should be a little easier to write. Remember to stick to what is relevant for the page. Do not be tempted to feed back in the irrelevant content you identified way back in the audit, or try to make it fit.
If you need a professional copywriter, now is the time to get one. Your outlines, sitemap and keywords will be of great help to any website copywriter and will not be wasted.
7. Get it off to design, and keep going!
Once you’ve got to this stage you can get your content off to the designer. But don’t stop there. Remember those non-critical pages, and ongoing blog content you didn’t strictly speaking need for the launch? Keep these in your sites and be prepared to spend regular time working on and updating your website.
Continuous improvement is the key to a fresh, relevant website browsers and others in your industry will want to refer to. Market trends, customer insight and demand, and your own business and product development are all worthy content topics for you to be engaged in and the publisher of on your website, which search engines, and your customers, will reward you for.
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