With Google stating that it handles more than 2 trillion searches every year, and the numbers growing each year, the content for a business can be perceived as a needle in a haystack. To drive leads and revenue, targeting the high volume keywords and visibility positions on search should be the goal for every business, and this is more likely if the business is set up for omnichannel content discovery.
As the word omnichannel clearly states, your website needs to be set up for multiple devices, such as a desktop, mobile, and tablet, which means it needs to be responsive, and the content has to be distributed across multiple channels and platforms consistently – listing platforms, maps, voice devices, etc.
To elucidate on the need for an omnichannel presence, according to a study, 90% of digital content does not have an audience which means that their content doesn’t sit in the high visibility pages on search and despite 69% of all online traffic comprising of local and organic, most digital platforms aren’t even built or set up to optimize content for local or organic search.
The underlying problem?
With every website striving to be visible on search, businesses have to ensure that the CMS that they opt for is founded on 3 pillars or stages to boost omnichannel content discovery.
Websites are built on CMS platforms that focus on the website’s look and feel but not the discovery of content or consumer experience. Yes, having a website that is attractive and has clear-cut navigation to take website visitors through discovery and the buying process is important, but visibility, customer acquisition, and conversion is the sole purpose of a business – which sometimes or most often eludes businesses when choosing a CMS.
3 stages of a CMS to solve the business problem of content discovery or visibility
We’ve listed out 3 must-haves that every CMS should have to solve the content discovery problem that businesses face:
Stage 1: Content Discovery through an SEO-First CMS
Rather that have a CMS that’s focused on the look and feel of a website and then have a technical SEO team take care of your visibility and reach, your websites have to be built for visibility and this can be done with an SEO-First CMS. As an SEO-First CMS, the focus should be on:
How to pick the right CMS for your business
- Schema – Your ticket to rich results and voice search
You’d want to cover all aspects to improve your visibility or position on search, and schemas are your route. With Google mapping content across the globe entities, schemas help the search engine bot recognize entities on a page and their relation with each other and this helps the search engine display the web page content for relevant queries as rich results. Without them, it’s a game of guesswork for the search engine.
Do Schemas Really Help SEO? By How Much?
- Core Web Vitals and the Page Experience Signal
With the Page Experience Algorithm, the latest ranking factor, web pages will now be ranked based on the experience they offer customers or website visitors. This means the focus shifts to the ability of a CMS to ensure that all their SEO requirements of a website are addressed at the root of page design and creation and not after the page is built.
With the Core Web Vitals added to the Page Experience Signal, a web page will be judged based on the speed of the page load (First Input delay), the load speed of the largest elements of the page (Largest Contentful Paint), and the stability of the elements of the page (Cumulative Layout Shift) along with the other Page Experience signals, such as mobile-friendliness, HTTPS, and having no intrusive interstitials.
How to Fully Optimized for Core Web Vitals
- Fast websites that are optimized across all devices
Poor page speed not only affects the ranking of a website but hampers the revenue of the business. Having fast loading websites are a necessity and your CMS should be able to seamlessly deploy Accelerated Mobile Pages and Progressive Web Apps to give your website an edge over the competition. Despite mixed market reaction about AMP, Google recently stated that they are completely focused on AMP development as it improves user experience by drastically reducing the page load time among other benefits. In fact, AMP is now a ticket for websites to meet the Page Experience Algorithm requirements.
PWA on the other hand not only offers a better user experience but improves engagement in the form of mobile or push notifications. Using PWA, your business can engage with its customers whether they are on your website or not and build customer loyalty.
Stage 2: Workflow to create and publish omnichannel content
Managing content across locations and websites could prove to be an arduous task for any business, especially enterprise businesses, and here’s where a CMS that is built for an omnichannel content creation and consistent distribution comes into play. For this, your CMS should have:
- Content centralization and efficient asset management
For enterprise or multi-location businesses especially, having the content centralized so that it can be edited once and published across locations at scale makes the whole process of content management simpler and efficient.
Businesses can manage their FAQs, images, events, blogs, etc., in a central repository to simplify the auditing process and distribution to all locations across the country or globe is just a few clicks away.
- Customizable templates and content blocks that suit multiple channels and devices
You’re obviously not publishing content to a single channel or device and this means your content templates have to be dynamic to suit the look and feel of channels and devices. With a role-based workflow, the content authors can choose a suitable content template and each template should contain customizable content blocks that suit the web page’s user experience. Having these content blocks or Miblocks in case of Milestone CMS, gives businesses the ability to make content changes to each block independently and not worry about changing or even messing up the content across the website in one go. This also gives the website opportunities to constantly have fresh content – which is an important SEO factor.
Of course, publishing of the content using API-based content delivery within the CMS (internally) and externally on the website is crucial to ensure that the content is dynamic, up-to-date and is consistent across all channels and platforms where the content has to be displayed.
Once published, you’d want everybody to access your website and consume its content to make a buying decision, and while ensuring that your website is ADA-conforming, having an API integration to ensure that your website is multi-lingual is also a requirement to reach and address all local and organic searches.
Stage 3: Having a rich partner ecosystem
To ensure efficient website management and that the customer journey is seamless, having the rich partner ecosystem with the right API integrations and third-party platforms, such as a booking engine with a revenue recovery model, rate parity widget for bookings costs, digital asset management platform, CRM, reviews management platform, inventory management platform, and so on, are a requirement.
Of course, an ideal CMS does not stop at ensuring that your content has an omnichannel presence, in fact, your CMS should have impact reporting to measure your website, paid, local and organic performance to make strategic business-driven decisions by understanding the behavior of customers on search and while they are on the website. Here too, centralized data of your performance analytics across all channels is vital to assess your business’s standing and room for improvement across all locations.
To know about Milestone CMS and our suite of products that help businesses achieve a digital and omnichannel presence, contact us via email at [email protected] or call us on 408-200-2211.
Data References:
https://searchengineland.com/google-now-handles-2-999-trillion-searches-per-year-25024
https://ahrefs.com/blog/search-traffic-study/
https://www.brightedge.com/blog/why-seo-2020
