Are you working on planning your website content development? If so, watch this video for some advice to make your website content development run smoothly and your website planning more effective.
The transcript for this video is below.
Hi, my name is Lina Calin, and I’m the Account Manager at Whittington Consulting. Welcome to the first installment in our content writing series.
We’ll discuss how to plan, write, and edit effective website content that not only draw people to your website, but ensure they come back again and again.
Unless you have decided to outsource content development to a professional copywriter, you might be asking yourself such questions as: How do I start writing? What should I write about? How much do I write? Well, whether you consider yourself a good writer or not, we hope you’ll find that this three-part series will make writing content for your website a simple process.
The first part of our content writing process is the planning stage.
Identify Your Audience
Let’s start by establishing your website’s audience. Your website’s audience will likely be comprised of your company’s target markets. Is your company trying to attract new buyers? Is your goal to retain or serve existing clients or customers? Or maybe you’re writing to inform the general public?
It is possible that your target audience will vary across web pages. Some pages may speak to potential buyers, while others may speak to existing clients or customers. No matter the audience of each page, when writing the page you must keep in mind who the page is speaking to.
Pinpoint Their Needs
Once you know the audience or audiences that your website will speak to, it’s time to identify the information that the audience needs about your company or organization.
In order to determine what information your website should provide, we’ve got to identify your audience’s needs. As we well know, in today’s world, almost everyone does online research before engaging with a company in any capacity.
You need to make sure that your website serves as a key member of your attraction team- educating, engaging, and closing the deal with members of your target markets.
Just as you would want a member of your sales team to provide all of the information a potential client or customer would want, and the guide that potential client to engaging with your company, your website needs to be doing the same thing.
Think about the questions that you and your team are asked when dealing with prospective or existing clients and customers. If you have them, take a look at your website’s analytics. See which webpages are viewed most frequently. Identify patterns, and notice what information about your company seems to be most important to website visitors. We need to make sure that this information is made clear on your website.
Create an Outline
Now that we’ve thought about who the website will speak to and what questions it needs to answer, it’s time to create a website outline. This outline will provide us with a detailed, hierarchical sketch of the pages that will be on your site.
We’ll list all site pages, and then organize them by their parent and child pages. To show you what I mean, here’s a sample of a website outline. I find Excel is an especially helpful tool when creating a website outline, but of course you can use any tool that you find is helpful.
Inventory Existing Content
The final step before we begin writing our content is to take inventory of the content that already exists about your organization.
Gather the content from your existing site if you have one, from your marketing materials, and any other collateral or documents that explain your company, your services, and your assets. When reviewing these, be sure to only keep the content that speaks to your target audiences, their questions, and your website outline.
Now we’ve finished planning content creation for your website! If you have any questions about content creation, or would like to partner with us to create content for your website, contact us.
Thanks for joining us today, and stay tuned for the next installment- Writing your website content.
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