What is a website content plan?
A website content plan is an overview of the content on your website. It contains a list of all the content you have or want on your website, and it displays the content hierarchy.
Your content plan helps you to organise your content in the most logical, easy to understand way possible.
It’s usually laid out as headings (examples: page names, the names of your products or services, blog categories, and blog post names). This makes it much easier to decide what to put where. It also helps you to decide which is the most important content on your website and therefore what you should write first.
If you plan your website in advance, it’ll be much easier to chop and change your structure and content until it all makes sense for your business, and for users and search engines to understand.
What’s in a good website content plan?
A good website content plan shows:
- The content you already have.
- The content you need to add.
- The hierarchy or layout of all your content.
Why is website hierarchy so important?
The hierarchy of your website tells search engines and users:
- What your site is about
- What the most important content on your site is (hint: it’s at the top of the hierarchy)
- Where to find related content
Imagine that your website structure is like a pyramid. The most important information is at the top, and those top pages branch down into sub-categories relating to them.
Make your content plan easy to create!
- Start with a basic structure and add as you go.
- Use headings or categories to group your content.
- The most important information comes first, and the rest follows in categories, in descending order.
- Keep in mind who you’re building your website for, and why.
- Remember to include the standard content that should always be on your website.
How do I create a content plan for an existing website?
You must audit your existing website content to incorporate it into your updated plan. Follow these same steps but fill in your existing content first. As you work through the steps, evaluate your existing content to check what’s working and what’s not.
If your current page is working, keep it and make sure it’s in its correct place in the hierarchy.
If it’s not working, consider how you can rewrite it, or if it should be repurposed somewhere else, or deleted altogether.
Create your Website Content Plan
The website content plan is one of the first steps you should take when building a new website or auditing an existing site.
Step 1: Clarify your Website’s Goals
You can’t write an effective plan unless you know exactly what the goals of your website are. Once you know what you’re trying to achieve with your site, you can write content that will facilitate your goals.
Start by asking: What is the aim of the website?
Are you trying to sell goods or services, get new leads, educate customers, or maybe streamline your internal office processes?
Once you have answered this thoroughly, you will know what your call to action is.
Your call to action is what you want visitors to DO on your website.
- Do you want them to buy something? Call to Action: ‘Add to Cart’ or ‘Buy Now’
- Or subscribe to your newsletter? Call to Action: ‘Subscribe’
- Maybe you want them to use your knowledgebase instead of calling your office? Call to Action: ‘Read FAQ’
When you know what you want users to DO, you will have a much clearer idea of what content you need that will point your users towards doing that thing on your website.
Example: If you want visitors to buy your ‘SEO audit service’, you could write content like:
- Why is an SEO audit important?
- What is included in an SEO audit?
- What should I do with the results of my SEO audit?
You might also offer this service as a digital product in your online shop so customers can book and pay for an audit online.
PRO TIP: As you think of new and interesting topics to write about, add them to your website plan. Make sure to add the topics or headings (or even target keywords) in a category that makes sense. You want to ensure users can find relevant content quickly and easily.
Step 2: Define your website’s audience
You must understand who you are building your website for, so you can ensure your content is interesting and relevant to these people.
Define every aspect of your target market by asking questions like:
- Where do they live?
- How old are they?
- Where do they spend their time online?
- What do they do for work or fun?
- What can they afford?
Once you have a clear picture of who you are planning your website for, you can consider what content would interest your group of potential customers.
If you want to know what to write for your customers, ask yourself:
- What challenges do they face?
- What would make their lives easier?
- What topics interest them?
- What inspires them?
- What do they search for online?
But the most important question of all is:
What do you want them to DO once they have read your content?
Make sure that whatever you write, eventually steers site visitors to doing whatever you’ve set as your website’s goal. If you want them to buy something, content should eventually point them to the purchase process.
Step 3: Do Basic Keyword Research
Keyword research is the process of discovering what your customers are searching for online. The search terms they use are called ‘keywords’, or ‘target keywords’. They are usually phrases, rather than single words.
You must look for popular search terms that have a reasonable search volume (this is the number of searches per month). These search terms must also make sense for what you are offering on your website.
Example: Let’s say you are selling dog beds.
Within your organization, you might call them by their product name (The Canine Deluxe 3000), but that’s not what customers search for when looking for a new dog bed. Unless you are a massive, extremely well-known brand, your customers are probably using search terms like ‘buy dog bed’.
This means you should optimize your page for the search term your customer will use to search, while also including any relevant product information of your page.
In other words, don’t remove your product name from the page because people aren’t searching for it exactly. Rather add the search term you want to optimize for so search engines can match your page to their user’s search.
This keyword research is extremely important because you want to create content that people are looking for online. The end goal is to optimize your content so it can be found by people using search engines. This is why we start with keyword research when building an effective website content plan.
Keyword research will also help you to come up with ideas for page or blog content.
One of your key goals should be to answer your potential customers’ search queries, so your website is served in search results. This way, searchers can click on your site and find your products or services.
Let’s go back to the dog beds example:
You could add pages to your content plan based on what users are searching for. This is especially useful when deciding what blog posts to write.
Your topics could include ideas like:
- What’s the most durable dog bed? (keyword: ‘most durable dog bed’)
- How do I measure my dog to find the right size dog bed? (keyword: ‘right size dog bed’)
- Can I leave my dog bed outside? (keyword: ‘dog bed outside’)
- Are indoor or outdoor bog beds better? (keyword: ‘indoor outdoor dog bed’)
- What if my dog refuses to sleep in their dog bed? (keyword: ‘dog refuses dog bed’)
These are all good topics to write about if you are selling dog beds. They could be posted on your blog as informative articles for customers and leads.
Once you’ve decided on a list of target keywords for your website, add them to your content plan in the most logical place they would belong.
If you’d like to go a step further, you could write the article heading per keyword too (like we have done above). You are already planning your website, so why not do as much as you can while you’re in the right mindset!
Here are some great keyword research tools:
- Google Trends
- Google Keyword Planner
- Answer the Public
- Ubersuggest
- Keyword Tool
- Keywordit
- Wordstream
Step 4: Use our Website Content Template
We have created a document to show you how websites should be structured. (Some of the pages might not apply to you, in which case, you can ignore them.)
Please download this Website Content Plan Template here.
This will make it easy to structure your website.
It demonstrates how the most important information is in the main menu (in blue). Any additional content should be arranged into their respective categories, so they are easy to find, and they make sense.
As you move down the structure, the importance of the content lessens. This means the most important content goes at the top, and the least important goes at the bottom.
We have kept this document as an open Word document so you can edit it easily. This way, you can replace our headings with the headings and topics that will be on your website.
On page two of the template, you will find a basic page structure template. This is useful to make sure you aren’t missing any important information on each of your website pages. As always, delete anything that doesn’t apply to you, or add to it as needed.
If you have any suggestions as to how we can improve this content plan template, please let us know!
Step 5: Add all the Required Content Headings
Now it’s time to create your content plan by adding all the topics or headings you can.
Move them around as necessary, which is the reason we create this plan in the first place. It makes it very easy to chop and change, before committing to writing content.
If you find that you have some topics or headings that don’t fit, decide whether you really need them on your website. Do they add value? Do they warrant adding an additional category of content? Should the topic be added inside another page instead?
There are a few elements that should be included on almost every website. However, they do depend on what your organisation does, and what functionality your website will have. You’ll need to decide what you should keep and what you can ignore, from the lists below:
- Good, clear branding
- Contact information
- Introduction to your organisation
- Details of the products and/or services you offer
- Links to your social media accounts
- Information about your organisation (like an ‘about us’ page)
- A clear call to action
- Legal requirements according to your governing laws (eg: privacy policy, cookies policy, terms and conditions, disclaimers, etc.)
If you have an ecommerce website (an online shop), you probably also need:
- Payment gateway/s
- Shipping policy (for physical products)
- Warrantee, guarantee, and returns policy
- Trust indicators (eg: affiliations, testimonials etc.)
- Product reviews
A good website content plan will save you time and effort
It’s usually obvious when websites have been built with very little planning. They are inefficient and appear jumbled. Content is difficult to find, or important information is missing. The internal linking structure is often a disaster or non-existent. Some pages can have quality, informative content, while others look like they were created in 2 minutes using (bad) AI.
Websites should cover their topic/s thoroughly, so they become a vital resource for interested visitors. If people engage with the content because it’s useful, those websites will rank highly on search engines. If they rank well, more people can find them and visit them. The new visitors will hopefully convert into customers and the organization wins!
Plans can be added to and refined as often as is needed. Our expert team recommends installing efficient analytics so you can examine your website traffic. If content isn’t working – change, update, or remove it. Continue to monitor user activity and make changes to your content or structure as needed, so you’re always improving your website.
Websites can quickly grow large and unwieldy. Your website content plan will help you to keep track of your entire site and will give you a clear picture of what sits where.
If you need help putting a content plan together, or if you need a team to audit your existing website, please contact us.
