Why I love website roadmaps
When I speak to marketing teams about content one of the things they’re most confused about is where to start.
There’s often way too many priorities all competing for attention. So what do they do? They usually start writing. Because that’s the easy bit right? To create content.
Unfortunately, easy doesn’t always mean best. If you’re just creating content but the foundations of your website are wonky, you’ll struggle to make any meaningful impact with your SEO strategy.
Which is why I love website roadmaps.
What is a website roadmap?
A website roadmap is a backlog of tasks to get your website in the best possible shape. Where it can be read easily by Google, it ranks in search for your key terms, and it appeals to your ideal customer profile.
Website roadmaps gives all the tasks needed to make this happen a priority order. This means that your content team (and website developer - here’s hoping you have one), know exactly where to start and what success looks like.
When I work with clients on their content strategy, it almost always begins with an audit. This might be a technical audit (looking for broken links, site speed and other signs that Google is having trouble reading your site) and a content audit (looking at how well existing blogs and pages are performing).
The output of which is a list of fixes, optimisations and improvements. These make up your website roadmap.
How to create your own website roadmap
If you’re trying to create a website roadmap for your own team or company, here’s a brief overview of the steps to take:
1. Choose your goals
Without knowing what you’re trying to achieve it’ll be difficult to prioritise the required tasks. For example, if you’re in a competitive market and you need to beat your competition, you may want to focus on site speed and other technical factors, without which, it will be difficult to compete. If you want to begin ranking for your own brand name, your first task may be to improve your homepage, page title and meta description as these are the low-hanging fruit that would help you to make that easy jump.
2. Audit your site
There’s a lot involved in an audit and that’s why you may wish to find a team to help for this initial step. An audit looks at everything that’s great, okay, needs improvement and that’s broken on your website.
A technical audit will involve things like site speed, a crawl of content to see how Google is reading your site, a look at hierarchy and the other technical SEO elements which make up a strong site.
Once you have a list of fixes and improvements around your structure, you’ll then want to look at the “on-page” SEO elements, also known as a content audit. This is where you analyse what content you have, which terms it’s already ranking for, and any gaps where you aren’t ranking but should be.
3. Organise your tasks by priority
The final step of a website roadmap is to prioritise your tasks. This, again, will depend on your objectives and also how much of an impact each task may have on your site.
A site which takes 30 seconds to load, will always struggle to rank regardless of amazing content. There are also often a bunch of “quick wins” that will take minutes for a developer or website owner, which could have a big impact. These are what we call “high impact, low commitment” tasks.
Website roadmap matrix
For help prioritising, you can use this matrix to plot out your tasks. Once your tasks are on there, you can then create your roadmap by organising them in a list from 1, 2, 3 then 4.
Tools you can use to create a website roadmap
There are many tools available that lend themselves well to a website roadmap. Like all tools, it’s best to first ask what your team will actually look at.
There’s no point using something fancy like Asana, if half your team doesn’t even have a login. Whilst Devs tend to love tools like Linear which are built for roadmaps, they don’t lend themselves as well to a huge content plan.
If in doubt, a Google or Excel spreadsheet will work well and it’s what I tend to shoot for most of the time. Easily viewable, ordered by priority and you can see what’s been completed using a simple colour or tick-box key.
Here’s an example of a website roadmap I used recently. Here, you can see just how simple it is to make a plan for your website and prioritise tasks, for ultimate impact.
Which is why my friends, I love website roadmaps.
Want help creating yours? Get in touch.