Planning website content is the website development stage that can make or break your whole project.
A poorly planned website performs poorly no matter how much money you spend promoting it later.
Links don’t work as well as they should, conversion rate is mediocre, and user experience is so bad that it makes people look for alternatives.
Here’s how to plan website content to make sure your website is scalable, powerful, and profitable.
Planning website content goes hand in hand with business development and strategic thinking.
Know the goal of every page on your website
Every page needs to follow one main goal. Product pages need to sell products, service pages need to make users sign up for your benefits, contact pages need to get the reader in touch with you, help or knowledge base pages need to answer user questions fast, and so on.
Knowing the goal of every page will help you understand better what kind of design elements and content to put on it. Whether it’s video, imagery,
Always check back with the main goal of every page when you plan it out. An obvious example – if the goal of the page is to convert the visitor to call you, you’re not going to be placing links to your Instagram and other social media, right? RIGHT?
Plan for your audience and reader persona
This goes hand in hand with your page goals. Some pages target prospective customers, some focus on existing ones, and you need to keep that in mind while planning website content.
You can’t really skip a customer persona while planning your website and its’ content. Without a clear, data-based image of WHO you are targeting, most of the expenses will be a waste. Here’s our guide on customer persona creation for small businesses.
Map keywords to website pages
Keyword cannibalization is the #1 enemy of most websites we get to work with. Cannibalization means there are 2 or more pages that target the same keywords and compete, or “cannibalize” each other.
Cannibalization can be both a result of negligence and good intentions.
Negligence is obvious – most website owners have no idea what keywords each page of their site is optimized for.
Good intentions can also work against you – we see it too often with service websites especially, when blog posts outrank the proper “money” pages.
For example, a landscaping business has a “tree removal service” page designed to convert, and then produces 5 nearly identical blog posts around “how to hire a tree removal service” keywords. They want to increase their relevance that way, but they just get Google confused as to what page is the main one on the topic. As a result none of them get the rankings they deserve.
The fix is easy – list all your pages while planning website content and pick and assign several related keywords to each.
Here’s how we did it at WebCopyLand while planning out this website:
One page can not be optimized for more than 3-6 closely related keywords.
Leave space for growth on your blog
Your business blog serves many purposes and your blog posts can have absolutely different goals.
But most importantly, the blog is where you test stuff with your audience, get stats and data, and expand both your content and your business. That’s why you need to start a blog fast, start with broad and informative topics, and audit your blog content often.
If you want to get the best results and minimize guesswork, use our content planning service to get an initial content plan.
Website content planning tool
If you use just a spreadsheet and Google you will already be a step ahead of most website owners. Those are the main tools you need for planning website content initially.
Here’s a basic website content planning worksheet you can use:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wLKnSyqLcn4HHmu7IisLxzQzhYTpHY24twupcJM8YIQ/edit#gid=0
You’d need more advanced tools in order to pick up the best keywords but all of them are costly and have a learning curve – so you can just get in touch with us and let us handle it for you.