Content planning and creation are among the most important aspects of running a successful website. Whether you have an online store, a business presentation, or you use your website as a publishing outlet, it needs content, and you need to plan it.
A hectic editorial calendar, or a complete lack of one, is a sure way to make a mess out of content creation. One of the worst consequences of a messy content creation and planning process is the weeks where you forget to post content to your website.
Posting content regularly to your website is very important.
It might not be as important as ensuring the content is of very high quality, but it’s still one of the key things you need to think about when publishing content. Let’s see why your website needs new content on a regular basis.
SEO Is a Process
One of the major reasons why people post content on their websites is for search engine optimization. If you play your cards right, your content will help your website be noticed by people searching for the things you offer online. And SEO doesn’t stop with one piece of content.
SEO is a process, which means that it takes time. You should always be updating your website’s content in a continuing effort to have it rank better in search engine results. Doing it regularly only strengthens the process, helping you achieve better results.
It Makes People Come Back
If you want to have visitors coming back to your website just because of your content, you need to do two things. First, you need to make sure you have really good content they won’t see anywhere else online. Next, you have to get them accustomed to getting to your website regularly for new content.
People are creatures of habit. That’s a thing, you can use to your advantage when building an audience for your website. But you can only do it if you’re posting content regularly. It’s the same reason why people send out newsletters regularly – they’re counting on forming a habit in the reader.
Consistency Is Key for Branding
The consistency people talk about when they speak of branding usually applies to visual elements such as color schemes and logos. Branding doesn’t work if you keep changing the logo and the color palette. But there’s another reason why being consistent matters, and it also applies to posting content on a website.
Consistency shows that you care. It shows that you’re taking your content production seriously. Posting content irregularly will reflect badly on your brand because people will think you’re not able to commit to something as simple as posting content to a website regularly.
It Keeps You in Touch With Your Audience
When you have to post content regularly, you also have to create it regularly. That means that you’ll have to spend time searching for topics, researching what your visitors want to read, or looking for different keywords to build content around.
This will keep you – or the person you hire to take care of the content for your website – on your toes. You’ll have to know what topics are hot in the industry, and what are the things your audience is interested in. And that can help you in more ways than just giving you things to write about.
It Helps Deliver Quality Content
There’s nothing worse than remembering you haven’t posted anything in a while and then scrambling to post some content just to remind the search engines that your website isn’t dead. The only problem is that, in that case, you can easily end up posting something that doesn’t provide value to the visitors, and it doesn’t really do anything for the website.
Developing an editorial calendar can help you create quality content in a couple of ways. It gives you time to think about what you want to post. More importantly, it gives you ample time to research and create a piece of content to the best of your ability. You might be able to rush a piece of content now and again, but if you do it often, the audience will notice. And you don’t want to appear as if you’re constantly forgetting to post new content.
