content production websites

Content production for websites

In Content production by Rob JohnsonLeave a Comment

All this talk about producing content for your website is confusing for some businesses. They already produced a pile of keyword-rich, SEO optimised content for their site covering all the products they sell, who they are, and where people can find them. Marketing people advise them to blog, but how many times can you write about the same products? Content production for websites is important, sure—but how can you make it relevant when you’re just saying the same thing?

You can answer those questions by going back to first principles. Content production for websites creates the building blocks for SEO. It makes it easier for both search engines and real people to find you online when they find new, authoritative content which helps people looking for information and products.

There are three broad types of content you need for your site. The cost of ignoring the production process for one or more of those content types is you disappear. The Internet is growing every day, as you can see at the Internet Live Statistics site. If your site doesn’t grow and change, you are just an ever-shrinking drop in an increasingly large pool.

The three types of content you need on your site

The content on the pages of your website falls into three broad categories: static content, gated content, and evolving content.

Static content is stuff that doesn’t get updated all the time. Things like your ‘contact us’ page, or company information, will generally stay the same for a long period of time. You may also have landing pages for products that only change or update once a year—those pages would be ‘static’ content.

Gated content is a type of static content that someone has to request from you. It may be sensitive information like a price list, or more general information like an instructional video, a whitepaper or a manual.

Evolving content is any content that is updated on a regular basis—daily, or weekly or monthly. A blog, or a news release feed, counts as evolving content.

Why do you need different types of content production for websites?

You need to manage producing different types of content because there are different types of searches. The reason you have a website is so people searching for information can find you. And most searches on the web—upwards of 80 per cent—are for some type of broad information, rather than people looking to buy something or find a place.

These different content types give people a variety of different ways of finding you when they search online. You want static pages to help people searching for your brand or one of your products. You may also want to appeal to people who don’t know you yet, and won’t be searching for your brand or products. Evolving and gated content may appeal to those searchers more.

It’s easier to work out what content you should produce if you have a content strategy to help you find and build an audience.

Your strategy will determine what kind of evolving and gated content you think you need. That evolving content points both searchers and search engines towards your static pages, helping to guide people towards your products and services.

What is the content production process for web content?

Content production for websites involves researching, writing and promoting content. If you only do one of those three stages, your content will not help people or search engines find you. Where many companies fall down is they only do one or two stages—they will research topics and promote their site, but fail to produce regular content. Or they will produce lots of content, but without the proper research behind it.

The Research phase of content production involves finding keywords or search queries. There are a number of tools you can use, but the easiest and cheapest is Google itself. When you do a Google search, you get a number of suggested search terms to choose from. You will also often get a number of related searches at the bottom of the page.

Use these search terms to inspire blog posts. You can either write them yourself or find a great content marketer to do it for you. These blog posts constitute your evolving content. If you don’t have a blog on your site, you can create a microsite and publish them there.

Finally, schedule the publication of the posts. If you also want to promote the fact that you’ve published the posts, add a plug in to a social media scheduling tool like Hootsuite or Coschedule.

In conclusion

Content production is a process, rather than a one-off thing. It is the process of creating the building blocks for SEO.

if you create the three types of content for your site–static content, gated content and evolving content–you are covering all the bases for both people and search engines to discover you online.

The content production process involves planning all those types of content using keywords, both long tail and head terms, to figure out what people want to know. Then getting it done and scheduled, and promoting it to attract readers.

Having a production process comes before your focus on the quality of the content itself. Quality of content is really important, but it can also be easily adjusted after you’ve published it. More important is just getting on with it. Done is better than perfect.

 

beginners guide content marketing

 

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