These are 10 practical ways to make your site better using content strategy.
- Plan! Creating great, consistent content without a plan is really difficult. Start with a clear idea of who your users are, why they come to your site and how this helps your business. Then think realistically about how much resource you can spend on content. Prioritise. Set some targets.
- Prune. The less content, the better. It makes your site easier to navigate and maintain. Leave in what your users want to know, not what you want to tell them. For example, do your users really want to know about your mission and values? These matter to you but probably not to them.
- Consider all remaining content from a user-centric point of view. What do they want to know and do? What information do they need and when? What formats work best for them? Keep things simple and straightforward and don’t use glossy, expensive formats (like video) if it doesn’t genuinely benefit them.
- Copy write properly for the web: concise, jargon-free, consistent tone of voice. Get some short brand and style guidelines.
- Look at the crunch points where people decide to buy, contact, sign up etc. What can your content do to persuade and make it easy? Don’t neglect little bits of content, like forms/ text on buttons/ automated email. Make sure they’re just as helpful and hardworking.
- Sort out your metadata, social media and marketing. It’s cheating to put this all in one go but these are Top 10’s all by themselves. There’s no point having great content if people can’t find it or you’re not reaching out to the audience.
- Be consistent: don’t say one thing on Linkedin, another on your site and something else in your brochure. The same with social media. Tone can vary a bit from platform to platform, but make sure you’re broadly consistent.
- Update your blog or ditch it! Blogging is hard work. If you don’t have the time to write, link and respond, admit it and get rid of your blog. An empty blog is a horrible thing and makes a terrible impression.
- Maintain: your content needs care and your site needs to feel alive. Be realistic about the time you can spend creating and maintaining content. Be practical. Prioritise. Draw up an editorial calendar of new content/ old maintenance and if there’s more than one of you, sort out the workflow.
- Measure and Amend! Start using metrics to see how your content performs. Set yourself some targets. At first these may be more guesses than goals but you’ll get better at it. Then you can amend your plan. Measure again. Amend some more….
Downloadable PDF: How to use content strategy to improve your site – Top 10
