Website Redesign Content Optimization

“Time to get that content
into our shiny new website!”

… cracks knuckles …

… sits down at the computer …

… drinks coffee …

… stares blankly at the screen …

Content, oh content, where do I begin.

Content is the life breath of your website.

Content is what Google looks at when ranking your site for search results.

Content is how users will come to understand what you are all about.

Content will funnel a user to ultimately convert into a customer.

Content not only communicates information on your company but tells the story of your products / services / solutions.

Without content, things would be … pretty boring.

Now, let’s explore some strategies to enhance your content for a successful website redesign.

The Daunting Task of Content Creation and Entry

At WebMechanix our Design team creates beautiful compelling website redesigns that are capable of keeping a user engaged and continuing their journey down the rabbit hole wanting to see what else is on the site, but without content to enhance and fit within the design, it falls flat.

Myself, being the lead web developer on a project, I’m on the home stretch of the redesign process and too often content becomes the holdup at the end of the line. It is so easy to think the content will come together quickly, heck you have a website now with all the content, so moving it over will be a cinch! Well yes and no 😉

To a seasoned WordPress expert, content entry is fairly straightforward. Armed with the experience of entering countless web pages through WordPress’ block editor allows for succinct entry without having to hunt and peck for settings, and all the while keeping in mind the consistent style and feel the website should convey. After all, what good was getting that stellar design if each page is going to have mismatched layouts and spacing 😢.

Without experience in WordPress block editor, or content optimization, you quickly find yourself burning hours trying to get the formatting just right, struggling to size images properly, and introducing inconsistencies between pages.

WordPress makes a lot of things easier, but it also has a learning curve to become efficient and work optimally. 1000% you should know how the system works, the tools available, and how to create new content and edit existing pages. But as far as the initial load of getting started, it is often best to leave that to highly skilled individuals.

For instance, I’m a pretty capable DIYer, and can do a lot of things around my house that many people call a handyman for, but when there is a larger project, e.g. building an addition, I rely on contractors to get the job done in a timely fashion so all pieces of the puzzle fall into place when they should and the room can get completed this year 🙂. Sure I can run electrical, hang drywall, and paint a room, but at scale these are better handled by a team of professionals and I’ll apply my talents to supervising and making edits later.

Two Main Benefits of Redesign Content Optimization: Optimize Content and Save Time

When redesigning your website, optimizing content and saving time are critical components that drive the success of the project. By improving content quality and efficiency in content management, you set a solid foundation for your website’s performance and user engagement. Let’s explore how effective content creation and strategic entry can achieve these goals.

Content Creation / Organization

Who knows your company better than you and your team? No one!

But unless you were hired as a writer, you may not be the best person for the task of crafting content to be on your new website.

Instead of you spending hours brainstorming, writing, editing, and rewriting content, it is an astronomical better use of your time to be the subject matter expert (SME) and rely on a team of writing experts to convert your knowledge into well structured, search engine optimized content. Not only will it maintain your message, but it will also be part of the bigger content optimization strategy within the context of the larger goal of your website redesign. Whether that be getting more traffic to your site, funneling users to convert into contacts, or communicating better with your target audience.

Content Optimization and Entry

Entering well-formatted content into WordPress with properly sized and optimized media is a surprisingly time-consuming process. Between drafting content in other tools, copying text in, optimizing layout, resizing images for the best performance on the web, and making sure pages are consistently formatted, hours can fly by. An entire work week can be lost finessing content in the editor.

Handing things over to an experienced dedicated team of WordPress experts can streamline the process. With an expert on hand you are guaranteed to get your content in place and layed out to work best with your new design system.

In the redesign process you can save yourself a lot of time and energy by expanding your scope to include content entry and formatting.

It is still important to understand how to use and update content on your site. During a redesign process WebMechanix provides multiple training sessions for the ins and outs of using the WordPress Block Editor along with all the facets of the WordPress backend that you may need.

There is a lot under the hood of a new website that our WordPress developers build out so that you can have a better user experience editing content. But for the initial heavy lift of getting all your content into a new design it is often a better choice to use a dedicated team of experts. Once this content is in place you will have a great starting point to continue editing and building out new content.

Mastering the Fine Details of Content Optimization

There are more factors in the content optimization strategy that seasoned WordPress experts are able to tackle for you.

Image Optimization

The optimization of images and keeping your site performant. There are a lot of services and methods to optimize images. They range the gamut from converting images to the best next gen formats, cropping, and resizing images so that you aren’t dropping images onto the server that will hurt your site’s load speeds and help with Google’s Core Web Vitals scores.

SEO Backbone

laying out an SEO backbone

The first piece of a website redesign is making content look good and readable for the user, and then the rest is making sure the search engines are happy with how the content loads and reads to their algorithms. With the right content entry team they will not only be able to help you get that content into the website, but can also craft and tweak in order to make it the most appealing to the search bots. What good is your content if users can’t find it!

You may have noticed some phrases in this post, such as:

1. Content optimization
2. WordPress expert
3. Content entry
4. Optimized content

That is all in an effort to further improve the SEO value of the content. We have to practice what we preach after all! And this is where SEO experts can help in forming your SEO content strategy to match who you want to target.

Beyond modifying text, making sure metadata is in place for search engines to pick up on intent of pages and articles helps rank pages for search terms and display useful information in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

A content entry team, paired with great WordPress development is able to keep in mind often overlooked aspects of content. Accessibility is crucial to making sure all users can navigate and get to the content they need. Applying correct ALT text to images not only helps when a file decides not to load, but provides contextual information to screen readers. Utilizing the proper flow of HTML heading syntax makes sure that assistive technologies can provide context and navigation cues to users.

Saving Time with Expert Content Management

Time is money, and you have deadlines to meet.

The value in hiring an experienced team to craft, enter, and fine tune your content is measurable in the amount of time you won’t have to spend doing it. If it isn’t part of your daily job, then you will have to carve out and sacrifice time from the other responsibilities in your work day.

If you think about the extra work you will have to make up because you are devoting time to writing and editing content it quickly becomes clear that adding content entry into your sales scope makes a lot of sense.

Know Your Scope

When deciding to hire a content team, always make sure you understand the breadth of services you are receiving. You don’t know what you don’t know, and you will want to make sure you are getting your money’s worth.

“Content Entry” can mean a lot of things to different people. At WebMechanix we understand it is more than just a copy paste job and we have many tiers available to facilitate content population. Some key features to think about and ask for are:

• Existing content migration to a new site
  • This can be a very basic bulk migration where some formatting sacrifices are made, or a more hands on approach to make sure that existing content still looks good
• New content creation
  • Content writing is hard, a dedicated team will be able to create content to match a new design and optimize it for search engines and user conversions
• SEO
  • Getting into the content (existing or new) and making adjustments to text and metadata to make search bots happy
• Image curation
  • A site redesign will have a great new look, but don’t forget about all the imagery that will be needed to match your new content

Your Time is Valuable

Content creation and entry is the life blood of any website and especially on a website redesign project. You have a chance to start fresh, or get refreshed, and have things done right. Utilize a team that is familiar with the ins and outs of matching content to designs, SEO optimization, and has the efficiency to get it in place quickly. You will want to get your hands dirty in the editor and become an expert in your own right, but for bulk entry, and matching content to designs, hiring a support team will be more cost effective and stress reducing!