Content is king in Google, so your company must have a reliable content management solution in place so you can get information-rich content on the Web every day. That way, updating your customers and prospects about your company’s products and services is easier than ever!
The best practices for content management described below will help you get the most out of your content management system.
Know Your Company’s Purpose
Whether you are a sole proprietor or the CEO of a large company, your business has a purpose. Are you the CEO of a clothing company? Then your objective is selling clothes. If you’re the manager at a chemicals company, your goal is selling chemicals.
The content on your site is there for a purpose. When you understand this purpose, you have a significant advantage over your competitors.
So you should make all of your content plans align with the strategy of your company. If its purpose is selling clothes, then you don’t write about anything other than clothing and topics related to clothing.
Understanding what you want to achieve and supporting your company’s goals is vital to superior content management. But your organization could have too many content ideas and too few resources to get the job done. One way around this common problem is to start small: focus on a particular product or product line and branch out from there.
Set Up a Publishing Plan
Proper content management isn’t done randomly. Publishing content to your site without a plan is like trying to bake a cake without a recipe.
For your content to be purposeful, you must organize it with a content publishing plan. Which type of content should go where and when does it need to be published? Do you have processes established, so you have blog posts ready to post every day? Do you know the types of content that drive viewers to your website?
Your publishing plan should have dates, titles, types of content, status, and authors. Remember that your publishing plan is more than blog posts – it also encompasses other content such as landing pages and product pages.
Maintain an Inventory
Related to establishing a publishing plan is keeping an inventory of all site content. It’s not smart to simply publish posts and pages and forget about them. Remember that people can access your content for years after you click the Publish button. Potential clients may stumble onto outdated content that doesn’t leave the best first impression.
Your inventory plan should detail when the posts and pages were published and a regular interval when each item will be updated. Different content types need varying intervals. Your financial reporting page probably needs a monthly refresh, while a recipe might require a review after a year.
Keeping a content inventory also ensures your content stays fresh and relevant, which is good for your clients and prospects. It also strengthens your site’s SEO.
Maintain a Quality-Minded Culture
Having a useful purpose, plan, and tools doesn’t count for a lot if you’re the only one in the office that sticks to best practices for content management. If you can spread a quality mindset to the rest of the company, your job simplifies.
Also, get every stakeholder and content editor to know that the Internet doesn’t need more content: It needs better and improved content!
Constructing and maintaining a quality-minded culture in your company might seem daunting at first. Make it easier by hiring the proper team members with the appropriate skills and introduce best practices for content management to your management team. They can spread those best practices to their employees so that everyone is on the same page to keep the content quality high.
If you implement the proven content management strategies above, your site content will shine!