Map your website content to the customer journey

Key takeaways

Mapping content to the customer journey means listing every page on your site, tagging each with the journey stage and question it serves, and checking where stages are crowded or empty. Most small business sites have plenty of find-stage content and gaps at compare and return. The map tells you what to write next, what to merge and which pages need a better route forward.

• List every page and tag its stage: find, orient, compare, commit, return.
• Note the question each page answers and its next step.
• Most sites are crowded at find and thin at compare and return.
• Fill gaps before writing more of what you already have.

What does mapping content to the customer journey mean?

Mapping content to the customer journey is the process of assigning each page on a website to the journey stage and buyer question it serves, then comparing that map with what buyers need at each stage. It turns a list of pages into a picture of coverage: where buyers are well served, where they find nothing, and where several pages compete for the same job.

• How to design a website around your customer journey
• Customer journey stages: what your website needs at each

How do you map your existing content?

Map existing content in a spreadsheet. List every page from your sitemap or a crawl, then add columns for journey stage, buyer type, the question it answers, its next step, monthly entrances from GA4 and its key event rate. Fill the stage and question columns by reading each page as a buyer would. The exercise takes a few hours for a typical small business site.

• Page URL and title.
• Journey stage: find, orient, compare, commit or return.
• Buyer type it serves.
• The question it answers, in the buyer's words.
• Its next step or call to action.
• Entrances and key event rate from GA4.

• What to keep, cut and rewrite before a redesign
• Entry points: design for visitors who skip your homepage

How do you find content gaps?

Find gaps by comparing the map with your journey map's questions. Every important question should have a page or section that answers it. Typical gaps on small business sites are price guidance, process, proof by sector, comparisons and anything for existing customers. Questions your team answers every week by phone are the clearest gaps of all.

• Turn the questions customers ask into your website journey
• Consideration stage: help buyers compare without leaving

How do you handle overlaps?

Handle overlaps by merging pages that answer the same question for the same buyer. Two thin articles on the same topic, or a service page and a landing page saying the same thing, split attention and search signals. Keep the stronger page, move the useful parts of the other into it, and redirect the old URL.

• Website migration SEO checklist

How does the map decide what to write next?

The map decides what to write next by ranking gaps by how many buyers they affect and how close they sit to the decision. Compare and commit gaps on busy service pages come first, then return-stage pages that save staff time, then new find-stage articles. Writing more awareness articles while service pages lack prices rarely pays.

• A website content plan for small businesses

When is a content map overkill?

A content map is overkill for a site of under ten pages, where you can check coverage by reading it in one sitting. It earns its time on sites with dozens of pages, years of blog posts or several services, and before any redesign, where it doubles as the content audit.

What does this look like in practice?

A pattern we see in content maps: forty blog posts tagged 'find', six service pages tagged 'orient', and almost nothing tagged 'compare' or 'return'. The business has been writing articles for search while the pages that turn visitors into enquiries were left as they were at launch.

Pausing new articles to add pricing, process and proof to the service pages changes the balance. Across our client work we have seen a 2.4x enquiry rate from conversion changes of this kind. Global Bridge Labs (GBL) maps content before writing any more of it.

• See client work
• Website Design & Development for UK businesses

Content mapping checklist

• Export every page from your sitemap or a crawl.
• Tag each with stage, buyer type and question.
• Add entrances and key event rate from GA4.
• Compare with the journey map's questions.
• Merge overlapping pages and redirect.
• Rank gaps and write compare and commit content first.

• Information architecture for small business websites

Next step

A content map shows in an afternoon what months of publishing may have missed. We will map your pages to your customer journey and show what to write next.