If you’ve recently commissioned the development of your new website, then you might be a similar situation, and be asking yourself the following question.
When do I find the time to sort out my content?
Content is a vital part of any website, and plays a massive role in how your project progresses even before Google has crawled your website for keywords.
When building websites, it’s really difficult to get a website into it’s final testing
stages when a website is still waiting for content, purely because it’s not a final version of what will be launching from the safety net of our test server onto the world wide web.
We are lucky, that there are placeholder generators that will allow our developers to fill the website with dummy text called Lorem Ipsum, which shows the holes that are waiting to be filled with your lovely content!
When do I need to write content by?
Writing content as soon as possible into the website process is really important, the sooner you can get the content written, the better it is, for you and for your agency.
Once you’ve decided the website’s sitemap, and you’ve either seen your wireframes or website design, this should give you an idea of the level of content that you need to write for your website, as the developers will develop the website to match the designs as close as possible.
We recommend that you aim to have your content written by the time the website goes into development. Sometimes it is easier said than done we know, but it is easier to potentially pad out your content at a later date, rather than your website being sat on our test server for months after it’s been developed (at any one point in time, we have about 4 websites sat on our test server waiting for content, which is always a shame, because these are great websites that the world deserves to see!).
How do I approach writing a website worth of content?
Writing a website’s worth of content is a mammoth task, we don’t deny it, but it will pay off in the long run!
There are a number of ways that you can approach writing content for your website.
We often advise those who are writing their own content, to start a document which has each page title, and each heading title on the page, write bullet points of the points you want to cover, then fill it out later on once everything is out of your head, doing it this way means that you feel like you’ve passed a huge hurdle rather than sitting down to do a daunting task of writing all of your content in one solid go. If you are really nice to your project manager, they might even create a word document which will help you on your way, by saying the type of things that you should be writing about on the pages across your website.
Other ways is to create a tone of voice document, and pass out sections of content across the company to the relevant people, and ask them to write for you, this helps ease the workload, but you will need to read over the content in order to make sure that it all follows the same tone of voice and reaches the same conclusion and shows you off in the best way possible.
You have to feel comfortable with how you are approaching content writing, and it needs to work for you and your business, fitting in around your daily workload.
How much do I need to write?
Google’s algorithm’s have changed considerably to favour content in a huge way, this is why it’s really important to be organised when sorting out your content for your new website.
The Google Panda update in March has had a massive effect on a number of websites, which uses under 600 words of content on each page. Our recommendations are to aim for at least 1,200 words of rich and useful content on each page of your website to really help boost your chances of a Google rank, but you shouldn’t be stuffing your page with useless information and keywords just to bring up your word count, it needs to be useful and informative every time.
Now you might think that over 1,200 words is a lot to fit on one web page, but understanding a users journey through the site, and delivering 1,200 words in an easy to understand and non-overwhelming way is tricky. That is where a good web design agency will come into play, and help you display your content in the best way possible without overwhelming a user to the point of leaving your page in favour for another website. Use their expertise in user experience and journey to help you, and ask for advice where possible.
If you are struggling to write your content, there are many copywriters out there you can hire to help you. In fact, we can offer a content writing service that will do just that! (Why not speak to one of our team today, about our copywriting services?)
I don’t have the time to write my content, and I don’t know what to write about…
If you are time poor, there is very little point in trying to fit writing content in, when you have better things to do, for very little money, you can have someone take that problem away from you, and write fresh, rich, Google friendly content to implement into your website!
They will need your help initially, by understanding your business, and your unique selling points and how you want to come across to your users, but once you’ve covered the key points for each page, then it is a fairly simple process.
How often do I need to update my content, after my website has launched?
We recommend that after your website launches, you should be updating the content on your site at least once a week, whether this is adding a new testimonial, new case study or blog post, updating your website with fresh content is vital in terms of inviting Google to keep coming back and reading your website for fresh rankings and to improve your general optimisation.
As an example, there are 20 members of staff in the Fifteen office, and each person is required to write 1 blog post a month, at least, to be posted throughout the month, this not only helps our website stay fresh and updated, it also helps our enquiry rate!!
Creating a content calendar is often the best way to approach writing blog posts, where you can plan week by week what posts are going to go live on your website, and who in the business is going to be writing them. This helps you keep organised and on top of your content.
Be content with content
Being happy with your content is part of the battle, but you can always change it at a later date, tweaking and updating your content is important to make sure that it is current, so don’t worry if you are not too happy with it in the first instance!
There are many options of how you can tackle the content curse, and if you would like Fifteen to help you on your quest, then please get in touch with us, and see how we can help!