WordPress Strategy – Part 3: Content

Welcome to part three of our four-part blog series covering how to form a WordPress Strategy. In this article, we’ll look at why you should take a considered approach to your site content.

What we mean by content.

Content is everything you include on your website, text, photos, videos. It’s a bit of everything, closely tied to the user experience.

In web design, the saying “content is king” holds. What interests visitors to your website is what you have on offer. Whether you’re writing a blog, selling books or offering services, you need to have quality content that will keep your visitors coming back—more than that; you want to encourage user interaction with your website.

Quality content and user interaction will often lead to repeat visitors (customers) and potentially share your website with other potential visitors.

Considering your content.

Every time you create a new page on your website, you need to consider beforehand if you have enough content to include on the page. For example, do you have something to document, illustrate, and how do you differentiate your content from something that already exists?

You should also consider the order of your content and prioritise it accordingly. Finally, you must think about how your content will link to other pages throughout your site and if that navigation is clear to visitors.

If the goal is to keep visitors on your website, they need easy access to the content they’re seeking. So, for example, a blog should be organised into categories and sub-categories, allowing users to filter down to what they’re looking for quickly.

Take the time to consider the purpose of your website, your expertise, and what your visitors are seeking.

Then, importantly, stick to your topic and post regularly.

What not to do.

Sometimes I encounter clients that want to reach for the stars, do everything and sell everything. Whilst being ambitious is fine, it’s essential to consider your audience. Visitors to your website are probably looking for something particular, and they’re not going to be interested in excessive content.

A good analogy is that you don’t go to the General Practitioner for specialist care. You go to the specialist. Visitors will typically prefer content written by people and businesses experts in their field. From a search engine optimisation standpoint, keeping on the topic will improve your keyword density and assist you in ranking higher in the long term.

Other website content considerations.

Highlight your content and make it visible to your visitors. Offer a clean user experience (UX) that allows your website visitors to focus on your content. No one likes to be bombarded with links, advertisements or swaths of bright colours.

There are a few simple rules to keep in mind when writing and structuring your website content. Following these rules will help ensure that your content ranks higher in search results.

• What questions are your visitors or clients asking? Use this to inform your content choices.
• Organise your content correctly using appropiate titling i.e. h1, h2, h3 and so forth.
• Name your photos and vidoes correctly, and include Alternate texts (alt text) to ensure it’s as accessible as possible.
• Keep your website strucutre as simple as possible.
  • Whilst this is more of a technical consideration, it also relates to the user experience and is essential. The way you structure your website and it’s content influences search engine optimisation (SEO).

What about e-commerce websites?

The strategy difference between a standard WordPress website and a WooCommerce website is considerably different. Whilst I’ll look to follow up on this topic in a separate blog series, you should keep the purpose of your website front of mind. Ensure that your content makes it crystal clear just what services or knowledge you’re offering. Visitors should be able to determine the purpose of your website within a minute of visiting it, not uncertainty around what it is you offer.

This is why the content you produce should be relative to what your website is offering. For example, it’s a great idea to maintain a blog on an e-commerce website, but it needs to be relative to your products, and you should include links to the products you’re selling.

If you’re operating an e-commerce website, your goal is to make a sale. Writing a blog that attracts readers but doesn’t promote conversions (sales) is like buying self-licking ice cream; pointless.