It’s no secret, content is the most important thing on your website. As well as providing the information visitors and search engines want and need to know about your business, content sits at the centre of creating a seamless, successful and ultimately profitable customer journey. Thanks to its keywords, internal links and calls to action your web page content can be used to invite and help users to complete an action, whether that action is to contact you to find out more about a service or purchase a product directly from your website.
With website copy however, many businesses take a “fit it and forget it” attitude. Reviewing your web page content on a regular basis is in fact the key to successfully reflecting your business, communicating your website’s purpose and capturing the attention of new and existing customers alike. As a web design agency, we understand there is so much more to a website than just looking good. We help with all aspects of the online experience to ensure success for our clients. Here we take a closer look at the steps you can take to review your web page content to better establish your business online.
Get to know your audience all over again
Market research isn’t a one-time thing. Your research efforts should be ongoing particularly as audiences and the markets they frequent evolve continuously in this fast paced, technologically driven world. Before you begin to review your web page content, get to know your target audience all over again. Find out what your target audience looks like, identifying specific buyer personas along the way, and why they actually read your website content.
Determining whether your audience is reading your content for work or leisure, sharing it on social media, and even where they are reading it will help you craft content that better informs them.
Analyse existing web content
As well as finding out what your audience wants and needs from your content right now, seeing how the current content on your web pages performs is of course important. Analyse the good, the bad and the ugly, and leave no stone unturned. Look at the performance of every component, from its tone of voice, subject matter and keyword usage, to its design and site-wide continuity. A scorecard system works well for most when evaluating and measuring the success and failures of current web page content. Categorise each component and grade from 1 to 5 to clearly determine what works and what doesn’t.
Recreate and reassess
Using the information on your scorecard to edit the content on your web pages is the next step, but it’s important to remember that the best web page content wasn’t created overnight. Reassessing content throughout the editing process is vital. It’s recommended that you reassess and rescore material once 50% of edits have been completed, then again at 85% and finally once all amends have been made. When reassessing ask yourself – are you catering to your target audience? Are all keywords correctly integrated? Is the right language, tone of voice and structure being used? If the answer to any of these questions is “no”, head back to the drawing board.
Reviewing your web page content is time consuming but it is worth it. After all who wouldn’t want to increase their chances of online domination? Editing and reassessing your content based on your audience’s wants and needs right now is the way to do just that.
