You’re ready to write your website content. You’ve created a site map so you have a general idea of the information you want to have on your website.
Now what? It’s time to create a content plan.
Define Your Site’s Message
This is where you identify the overall story your site needs to convey to visitors about your business. It’s more or less your unique selling points that help you establish credibility and authority in your area of expertise.
While your message should come across loud and clear on your homepage, every page on your website should relate and support this overall theme.
The easier you make it for your visitors (and the search engine crawlers) to understand the capabilities of your business, the easier it is for them to make a decision to contact you for help. Many websites use something like “Welcome to My Website” or “Welcome to Our Practice” as their homepage headline. This is as waste of precious real estate.
Your homepage headline is where you can loudly and clearly broadcast your site’s overall message and your business capabilities. Here are few examples of headlines that deliver the message:
- Business Insurance for the IT Industry
- Group Fitness Programs for Women of All Ages and Abilities
- Local Internet Marketing for Lawyers
The rest of the pages on your site that describe your specific services and your team should relate to the overall site message.
Focus Your Site’s Message
Just having a clear message for your site is not enough. You need to make sure it’s focused like a laser. It’s the same concept that applies to defining your brand. In the examples above, the site messages all have a certain level of specificity that help to keep a boundary around your content creation.
Each additional page of content that describes a product or service that you provide should describe how it addresses a specific issue relating to your target customer covered by the overall site message.
Identify Keywords
Keywords are the fuel that feeds the Internet marketing fire. With thousands of SEO specialists targeting millions of different keywords for their clients, you need to make sure your site message is specific enough to cause your site to appear in search results when target customers search for your services.
On top of that, you must be sure to align your content with how your potential customers describe the services you provide. You may call it one thing, but they may actually call it something else.
The businesses that speak the language of their target customers the best wins. Defining and focusing your site message with a content plan helps you clearly define a website that will effectively reach your target customers.
Next, I’ll describe best practices for presenting your content on your website.
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