A Guide to Website Content Development - Planning

Are you working on planning your website content development? If so, watch this video for some advice to make your website content development run smoothly and your website planning more effective.

A practical website content plan starts with four things:

• Who each page is for.

• What questions it needs to answer.

• Where it belongs in the site structure.

• What useful content already exists.

During a website redesign, the plan should also account for analytics and search data, old-to-new URL mapping, review ownership, gated resources, and video. Working through those decisions before writing helps keep content from holding up design, development, and launch.

In this article, we’ll discuss how to plan, write, and edit effective website content that not only draws people to your website, but gives them a reason to come back.

Unless you have decided to outsource content development to a professional copywriter, you might be asking yourself such questions as: How do I start writing? What should I write about? How much do I write? Well, whether you consider yourself a good writer or not, we hope you’ll find that this three-part series will make writing content for your website a simpler process.

The first part of our content writing process is the planning stage.

Identify Your Audience

Let’s start by establishing your website’s audience. Your website’s audience will likely be comprised of your company’s target markets. Is your company trying to attract new buyers? Is your goal to retain or serve existing clients or customers? Or maybe you’re writing to inform the general public?

It is possible that your target audience will vary across web pages. Some pages may speak to potential buyers, while others may speak to existing clients or customers. No matter the audience of each page, when writing the page, you must keep in mind who the page is speaking to.

For some website projects, we also create ideal client profiles and map content to the buyer’s journey. We use an interview-style approach to learn what those prospects care about, the questions they ask, and the information they need before they are ready to contact your company.

Pinpoint Their Needs

Once you know the audience or audiences that your website will speak to, it’s time to identify the information that the audience needs about your company or organization.

Think about the questions that you and your team are asked when dealing with prospective or existing clients and customers. Sales conversations are especially useful because they show what people want to know before they move forward.

We also look at Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console to understand:

• Which pages are most popular.
• How people use those pages and where they go next.
• How visitors arrive at the website.
• Which search queries lead to the site and how well important pages are optimized for search.

Your website should work like a well-prepared member of your sales and marketing team. It should educate visitors, answer their questions, and help them decide what to do next. Use the data and conversations above to identify patterns and make the information people need clear and easy to find.

Create an Outline

Now that we’ve thought about who the website will speak to and what questions it needs to answer, it’s time to create a website outline. This outline provides a detailed, hierarchical sketch of the pages that will be on your site.

We’ll list all site pages, and then organize them by their parent and child pages. This becomes the sitemap for the new website. Page names should make sense to prospects, and every page should sit in a category where people can find it easily. I find a spreadsheet is an especially helpful tool when creating a website outline, but of course you can use any tool that you find helpful.

If you are redesigning an existing website, the sitemap should also map old content to new content. When pages are combined or disappear, plan the appropriate redirect to a newer version of the page or another closely relevant destination. Look for redirect chains and other technical SEO discrepancies while you still have time to solve them. Google Search Central’s site-migration guidance also recommends creating an old-to-new URL map before a move and monitoring the old and new URLs afterward.

For more context on how the sitemap fits into the larger project, see our four-step strategic website redesign process.

Inventory Existing Content

The final step before we begin writing our content is to take inventory of the content that already exists about your organization.

Gather the content from your existing site if you have one, from your marketing materials, and from any other collateral or documents that explain your company, your services, and your assets. The inventory should include every page on the website, how it is categorized, and where it belongs in the new sitemap.

Be sure to include content that can be easy to overlook:

• Guides, reports, or other assets currently gated behind a lead form.
• Videos that need to appear on the new website.
• Sales materials and subject-matter expertise that can help answer prospect questions.
• Pages that need to be mapped to a new URL or redirected.

When reviewing these materials, keep the content that speaks to your target audiences, answers their questions, and supports your website outline. Decide whether a gated asset should remain behind a form or whether making it public would make it more useful to prospects.

Decide Who Will Write, Review, and Approve the Content

In our experience, content projects often stall when clients try to write all of the website copy themselves. If you don’t do this every day, writing can feel daunting. You may not know where to start, what tone to take, or how the copy will eventually fit the page design.

The client-side project manager should own the review and approval process. That person should identify everyone who needs to review the content, bring their feedback together, and set clear deadlines. This keeps writers from receiving conflicting comments at different times and gives the website team a dependable approval path.

If your team needs help creating the copy, an interview-style process can make the work easier. A writer can ask the subject-matter experts focused questions, organize their answers, and shape the material into website content without expecting those experts to start with a blank page.

How AI Can Help With Website Content Planning

AI can be an incredible planning tool when it has the right context. Useful applications include:

• Researching topics and questions an ideal client profile may be asking.
• Consolidating sales call notes or transcripts to surface recurring questions and themes.
• Editing and improving content after giving the tool context about your brand, voice, tone, and messaging.
• Asking AI to interview you before it writes so your words and your company’s perspective shape the draft.

One mistake we see is asking AI to draft website content without the context files and preparation needed to get useful results. That often produces copy that could belong to almost any company. Your expertise, examples, claims, and point of view still need to come from people who know the business.

Google Search Central’s 2026 guidance for AI features says the same SEO fundamentals still apply and that no special AI-specific files or schema are required. Clear page topics, useful original information, accurate internal links, and content that answers real questions remain the foundation for search and AI-search visibility.

Now we’ve finished planning content creation for your website. For help with the next step, our website content guide covers how to organize and write individual pages.

If you have any questions about content creation, or would like to partner with us to create content for your website, contact us.

Last updated: August 2026