Intro to Content Planning

What is a Website Content Strategy?

Content strategy refers to planning, creating, publishing, updating, and overall managing all content on any given website.

What is a Content Strategist?

A content strategist plays a diverse role, combining skills in:

• user experience, 
• SEO, 
• content marketing, 
• public relations, 
• traditional marketing, 
• user interface design,
• branding, 
• web development,
• understanding of semantic relations, 
• CMS management, 
• writing, and editorial processes

This field is still evolving, and often, content strategy is either overlooked or handled as a secondary task by someone with a different primary job. 

Additionally, knowledge of business operations and understanding how businesses profit or lose money greatly enhances a content strategist's effectiveness.

Isn’t a Content Strategist, just a Website Project Manager?

At its core, content strategy has two goals:

• Meet website visitor expectations
• Meet business objectives

By this definition, yes, Content Strategists can sometimes just be “responsible for all things website”.

This can make them a website PM who is calling the shots whenever the question at hand relates to the company’s website.

How to Create a Content Strategy for Your Webflow Website?

Before we jump into steps you can take to create your own content strategy, let’s consider one very important thing.

Every Business is different 

Your strategy should be tailored to the amount of resources you have, your niche, competitive landscape, etc.

There’s a huge difference between a solo blogger, a five-person team launching a SaaS, and an established company making seven figures in profits each year.

With that out of the way, let’s look at a few key concepts that stay the same, despite the size and resources any given Webflow website has.

Content Strategy is a Team Effort

The most common issue, of why many websites are not as successful as they could be, is teamwork.

There are two core problems that are common when analyzing sites that are not successful:

• Everybody has an equal strategic saying in “website project” matters
• People are doing things and making decisions outside of their expertise

In other words, there are either too many chefs in the kitchen, or there is no one.

Content strategy and website success depend heavily on:

• The right people taking the right responsibilities
• Decisions are being made by experienced people
• Working as a team to help each other with their blind spots

Remember, content is king. And only teamwork can make this king strong!

Content Strategy is Not (Only) Your Blog

Another misconception seen a lot sounds something like this…

Content strategy is all about managing your blog and publishing articles on it.

Not true, especially if you run a Webflow website. That’s because in Webflow each CMS Collection is its own content type.

In Webflow we don’t even need to create a blog to have loads of website traffic. 

Instead, we can create different CMS Collections for product reviews, product comparisons, top lists, features, services, and any other content type.

Furthermore, at the end of the day, any content strategy is bad if it doesn’t help support your business. 

That’s why offer (service, feature, etc) pages are even more important than any other page type you have.

So it seems that Content Planning has less to do with content and more to do with Website Page Creation.

Keep this in mind next time you hear the term Content Strategy.

Content Planning

Great content planning makes it easier to establish successful content strategies. 

Here are a few actionable content-planning steps:

• Do keyword research and understand search intents
• Plan content in clusters
• Determine content structures and content types
• Create sitewide taxonomies that support your content plan long-term

As for actual content planning tips, here are a few:

• Cover topics, not keywords
• Start with metadata
• Create briefs before you create content
• Avoid cannibalization (that’s why you start with metadata)
• Before writing content, make sure you have clear heading outlines for SEO

Doing all this will make it easier to create the best web pages out there. Which is fundamentally, what the goal of content strategy is!

Work to Be the Best Site Out There!

Another common misconception about content strategy is creating too little content about a subject. 

A lot of people believe that creating a few pages about a topic will help them reach their business goals. But it takes more than that.:

A “low effort” content strategy doesn’t work.

When you search for anything online… Do you want to see the best resources, with the highest authority and trust in that industry or low-effort content written by beginners?

That’s why it’s important to have the mindset and goal of wanting to be the best informational source and service provider out there!

Most of us are very detail-oriented content consumers, but it all changes when we become content creators for the first time. 

Quality content creation is hard, but it is essential. And if you can create a lot of high-quality content, you’re much more likely to succeed.

Establish Content Operations

Any successful website will have multiple people from different disciplines working together. Developers, designers, writers, project managers, SEOs, and even virtual assistants.

To avoid too many cooks or wrong people calling the shots - issues I mentioned earlier… 

Having a clear understanding of how your website procedures (content ops) work and who’s responsible for what is crucial.

Content Updating Cycles

Creating new pages is hard, but keeping them up to date can be even harder.

Search engines and visitors expect your website to be error-free and have the latest information. 

It doesn’t matter if it’s a side-topic article on your blog or business information on the contact page.

Constantly auditing, updating, improving, or even deleting content from your website is a mandatory practice to keep up the pace with your competition.

Thinking About Content Strategy

Let’s end this with a few fun tips aimed at content management and strategy beginners.

Content Strategy Questions to Ask

Web content strategy has a few content-related questions that always stay relevant, no matter the website project:

• What business objectives do we have for the project? This single page?
• Who is the audience?
• What is our message?
• Where will this content be used? Device? Location? Context?
• How should we structure this page? Content?
• When do we need this content done?

Content Analysis Questions to Ask

Whether you are analyzing content from your competitors or auditing your own content, here are a few main questions you should ask yourself:

• What page types are needed? Offers, articles, landing pages, etc?
• What is this page format? List? How to? Guide? Tool? Solution?
• What is this page angle? What user knows or doesn’t know if they are here?