We’ve talked recently about how site plans and content maps help organize a website. The next question is how the work they identify becomes a content plan. Moving from a site plan to a content plan involves decisions about what to create, what to update, and what to prioritize. Here’s how Rocks Digital Marketing makes those decisions, drawing on Managing Partner Lissa Duty’s 15+ years of digital marketing industry experience.
What a Site Plan Reveals About Your Website
A site plan gives our content team a full picture of what a business website needs. That includes identifying missing pages, topical gaps, and published pages that lack depth. The site plan also points to structural problems (such as pages in the wrong hierarchy), along with updates to existing pages and new content opportunities.
How We Prioritize Content From the Site Plan
After completing a site audit and developing a site plan for our clients, we typically uncover a range of website needs. Some are urgent, some are useful but not pressing, and others have minimal impact. At this point the task is to weigh each one against business priorities, ties to a core service, existing content, and potential search opportunities.
Foundational pages will usually take priority here, because later articles or location pages will point back to them. For example, the personal injury service page for a legal client of ours would need to be updated before we touch any subpages or supporting blogs.
Defining Content Projects From the Site Plan
Once evaluation and prioritization are complete, the next step is deciding the form the content should take. Depending on the site plan, this could mean a new service page, an extra section on an existing page, a refresh of an old resource, or something else. At this stage, we’re taking a recognized need and turning it into a project our content team can follow. And as we’ve discussed before, a content strategy isn’t always about more content. Sometimes, improving what already exists produces better results.
Turning Priorities Into a Content Plan
With priorities and formats identified, this is the point where they come together into a content plan. The site plan and the content plan are not doing the same job here. The site plan lays out everything the website needs. The content plan then narrows that down to what we’re actually moving forward with, and in what order.
This is the proven process we use for every client we create content for, whether that’s local businesses, service area businesses, multi-location businesses or national brands. The site plan tells us what a website needs, and we use the content plan to act on it.
Moving From Content Plan to Content Calendar
Once projects are prioritized and approved they move onto the calendar, where production and publishing actually get scheduled. The strategic decisions, including what to create, update or prioritize, have already been made by this point. The content calendar exists to organize that work across the Rocks Digital team, including our writers, editors, graphic designers and web developers. Our content planning and editorial calendar process keeps every piece moving from approval to publication, while staying connected to the strategy behind it.
Bringing the Process Back to Content Strategy
At Rocks Digital, we’ve talked to plenty of clients whose content had been driven by an open calendar slot without any strategy behind it, and that’s exactly what our process is built to avoid.
Here’s what we do instead. Content strategy sets the direction. After that, the site plan lays out what the website needs, and content mapping ties those pages together. This feeds the content plan, which decides what actually moves forward. Once something is approved, it’s added to the calendar, ready for development.
Turning a site plan into a content plan turns a long list of missing pages, updates and gaps into finished work with a planned purpose. We’ve used this approach for local and national businesses, and it’s how we plan and execute content for every client at Rocks Digital.
Talk to Us About Our Website Content Planning Services
Rocks Digital works with businesses to create site and content plans that identify what to create and which projects should come first. We develop strategies that drive traffic and turn your business website into an authority platform. Call (214) 989-7549 or request a website evaluation.
