Planning out your site’s content is one of the most important and necessary steps to make a site function and become successful. Content reflects your brand and the keywords used to find and rank your site.
Before brainstorming your keywords and ideas for content, think about what you want your site to be known for. What product, service or ideas are you trying to sell and convey to an audience? How should your keywords and content reflect this? By how you market yourself through your site’s name, logos, advertising, and other product attributes determine your brand. These parts of content planning are important because how you market your brand and site will distinguish you from your competition in the search engine rankings.
Demographics and audience
After knowing your brand, think about the audience for your brand and who will search your keywords: what are their ages, incomes, interests, etc? Your site topics also determine how your content fits with certain audiences of social media sites. Depending on the content, using some social media sites would be better than others. Facebook and Twitter are popular sites, but there are other alternatives. For example, if your content and keywords revolve around many visuals, use Pinterest, Flickr, or Instagram, which are image-centric social media sites.
Brainstorm and choose keywords for SEO
Next, choose your keywords to describe your site, which should relate to or match the keywords users search for. Knowing what keywords define your site and its content will give you the right keywords for search engine optimisation. The usual guidelines for choosing keywords for SEO apply in that you should not target one word or common keywords and be specific in choosing your keywords. After brainstorming the keywords, ensure they are included in your meta tags, titles, and descriptions. For more help with SEO, check out these freelance SEO services.
Page and link hierarchy
After thinking about your keywords, think about how your content connects with each other, through a hierarchical ranking. With hierarchy, ranking first is the most important part of a structure, the most important part of a website is the Homepage. In the view of search engines, the more internal links that point to a page, the more important that page is. Your page and link hierarchy for site navigation should be ordered based on order of importance and branch off:
- Homepage
- Category pages
- Subcategory pages
- Other pages (for products, information, etc.)
Begin building your Sitemap
After constructing your page and link hierarchy for your site, begin building your Sitemap using relevant keywords. The Sitemap is a list of URLS on your site viewed by search engines and users, you submit to search engines should be based off keywords. A Sitemap submitted to search engines determine how spiders, the term for bots that crawl (or “fetch”) webpages, will find your site pages. These pages, processed through the search engine’s algorithms, will then be ranked according to popularity and relevancy. After brainstorming and grouping together related keywords that will help determine hierarchy, build your Sitemap, and categorise your links so that they relate to each other.
Set a schedule
Determine how much you will update your content. Plan out what content will be displayed during certain time periods. Depending on the degree to which your content is unique, helpful, and compelling to read, and the amount of content generated regularly, you could update your site daily.
Edit and post content
Before posting the final copy of your content, you should review and edit your text. Even if you have written copy yourself, you should let another pair of eyes see what you’ve written to correct spelling and grammar mistakes. It is also a good idea to run the copy through a plagiarism scanner like Copyscape to make sure your content is unique.
Analyse data and keywords
Use tools to analyse how your content is viewed to gain more insight into who is using your site. Continue monitoring data and rankings to determine what keywords are profitable and which are not. Part of Google Ads, use tools like Google Analytics to track the success of your keywords and further optimise your website. Analytics will track what happens after a customer click on an ad, providing you with the tools to measure important metrics like bounce rate and keyword conversions.
