Swanson Russell

The key to any good website is ensuring that the content present is highly relevant to your key audiences. Whether you are going through a complete website redesign or just a much needed facelift, targeted, unique and timely content is key to accomplishing your brand’s goals. Already have great content? Look for ways to provide your audience with fresh resources, materials and tools to keep them coming back.

Below are 4 tips for creating strategic website content 

1) Identify your audience: Before you start creating new or updating existing content, make sure you know who you’re taking to. You can do this by answering a few questions:

• Who is going to be visiting your site? How do they want to be communicated to?
• What are the main reasons a user is visiting your site?
• How are they typically visiting your site? Desktop, mobile, both? If you have an existing site and you have google analytics (www.google.com/analytics) installed, you can determine how visitors are accessing your site most often.

2) Identify and prioritize your main objectives: In this step, you should identify the key objectives of your website content strategy. These objectives should be focused around what you hope to accomplish with your site (or section of your site). A site’s purpose could be anything from teaching visitors about the mission of your organization to instruction on how to use your new product to selling your product online. No matter what your goal is, your content should be relevant to and focused around achieving those objectives.

3) Audit your existing content: Before you jump in to creating new content, spend some time reviewing what you already have. In some cases (not all) using what you have as a starting point can save time and money.

In addition to updating content, a crucial part of this step is reviewing any content that is outdated or is no longer accomplishing your sites objectives. If your content is not pertinent to your objectives or doesn’t provide some kind of value to your user it should be removed. Your content should always be relevant and serve a strategic purpose for your target audience.

Ask yourself the following questions as you’re reviewing your content:

• What content could be reused as is?
• What’s unnecessary or is no longer relevant and should be removed from your site?
• Is there content that touches on a relevant topic but needs to be rewritten/reproduced?
• Are there pages that could be rewritten to be more SEO friendly or maybe include better keywords?
• Are there pages that would benefit from the addition of visuals (images, infographics, video)?

4) Planning New Content: After you have successfully identified your target audience, established your overall objectives and reviewed what content you already have, it’s finally time to start brainstorming new content. When you’re creating this content, think about what you still need to highlight or focus on to help your site do a better job of achieving its objectives. Here are some questions to help kick-start the brainstorming process:

• Are there questions that customers ask the sales or supports staff on a regular basis?
• Are there new products for your brand to highlight?
• Are there common industry issues that your brand has the solutions to solve?

Once you’ve determined the topics for your new content, you need to decide how to produce it. Adding images to web pages with text content can add visual interest to your website and enhance visitors understanding of your content. Video may be the perfect way to deliver your message. Or, you could ask your visitors to contribute content like product reviews and testimonials. The media type of the content you produce can be just as important as the subject.

Continued Content Creation & Optimization

Remember the key to creating good content is keep it focused and be mindful of its purpose. No matter what content you create, it should always be created for your target audience and serve the objectives of your site. And as your site evolves so should your content. If you want to keep users coming back, ongoing content creation is a must and keeping content fresh is key. A quick tool for this is keeping a weekly/monthly/quarterly content calendar. This could be on paper, in a google doc or spreadsheet. No matter the format keeping your sites content timely and relevant to your audiences is crucial to your sites success.