Are you struggling with your content rankings on search engines? Owing to cutthroat competition and information saturation, it is quite difficult to bring your content to the top of search results. However, content optimization can help you boost your rankings on search engines while also improving your visitor’s engagement. Moreover, it makes your content more relevant so you can outrank the competition. In this article, we discuss all you need to know about optimizing your content.
What Is Content Optimization?
Content optimization is a set of practices that you can adopt to optimize your content for search engines. This technique helps you generate more online traffic and boosts your conversion rate. It involves a number of steps and practices, such as:
- Adding primary keywords and long tail keywords
- Adding meta tags and meta descriptions
- Including keyword relevant information
- Including relevant internal and external links
- Optimizing the readability score of your content
- Adding appropriate visuals
- Fixing the formatting of your content
What are some common Goals of Content Optimization?
Planning your content optimization strategy shall begin with determining the goals you want to achieve. Preparing a list of goals and consequent plans of action can save you time and enable you to track your performance efficiently. Here are some common goals you can use for determining the success of your content optimization practices:
Top SERP Rankings:
The ultimate goal of optimizing your content is to rank on top of search engines. Thus, including top SERP Rankings as your primary goal can help you stay on track.
Better Branding:
More optimization means more exposure and organic traffic. When people tend to visit your brand often, your brand receives positive feedback. Thus, you can improve your brand perception in view of your customer’s minds simply by using content optimization.
Boost Traffic:
Content optimization enables your page to show as a highlighted result on top of SERP. Thus, your page receives more traffic than your competitors. Whether you want to achieve more conversions or get better brand exposure, content optimization can help you reach more audiences.
Optimize ROI:
Undoubtedly, the ultimate goal of any content marketing is to boost ROI and get more conversions. When your website receives more organic traffic, your visitors are more likely to convert. Thus, you can optimize your ROI and reduce marketing costs.
Suggested Read: 6 Content Marketing Goals You Need to Follow for Better Brand Success
Best Practices for Effective Content Optimization
Perhaps the two most important things to consider when optimizing your content are producing helpful and relevant content for your audience. The latest Helpful Content Update from Google clearly differentiates between the importance of relevant content and helpful content. Today, your content should not only be relevant to your audience’s needs and expectations but also helpful for them. To optimize your content for a better SERP position, you can follow some useful practices such as:
Conduct In-Depth Competitor Research
Many content experts overlook the importance of looking over your competitors beyond the first page of SERPs. However, content optimization requires you to outrank all the competition instead of first-page competitors only. Thus, your need to implement a detailed competitive research plan. It is recommended to extend your competitor research beyond the online realm and into the physical store realm. Thus, you can better identify your target audience’s existing and emerging trends before anyone else.
Here is how you can do preliminary competitor research for content optimization:
- Enter the primary keyword or seed keyword into the search engine bar
- View the first and second-page results to identify your competitors
- Analyze and compare online competitors’ trends with on-ground audience trends
Here are a few things you need to keep in mind when choosing your top 5 competitors:
- The website’s Domain Authority (DA), Trust Flow (TF), and Page Authority (PA)
- Average length or word count of the posts
- Content freshness and level of comprehension
- The flow of content and keywords in title, meta description, main content, and headings
- Number of social shares, internal links, and external links
E.A.T Factor:
E.A.T Score or E.A.T factor refers extent of the following elements in your content:
- Expertise: Does your page contain quality, expert-written content? Are you offering the correct subject matter and knowledge from experienced experts?
- Authority: How good is your website’s authority on the subject matter you want to cover?
- Trustworthiness: How many authoritative backlinks do your site content from trusted, relevant sources?
Highlight Your Presence In Featured Snippets
Google has recently launched a new way of previewing SERP results to visitors in the form of Featured Snippets. Basically, the featured snippet box displays a content description before the URL of the website.
According to a study, Featured Snippets receive 8% more clicks as compared to other URL displays. Thus, it is a good idea to get your content highlighted through a featured snippet for getting more traffic. [1]
Another term used for featured snippets is “Position Zero” or “Zero Search”. It refers to the top position of the organic search results.
However, there is no particular Schema markup you can use to get content into featured snippets. Google selects featured snippets automatically based on relevancy.
Here are some tips that can help you get your content in featured snippets:
- Adopt a Q&A Writing style and answer specific audience questions in-depth
- Include question keywords in your content optimization plan to get more visibility
- Prepare unique, helpful, and user-focused answers to specific questions
- Create content that specifically answers the intent of the user in-depth.
Boost Internal & External Linking
Internal linking is a major factor Google counts while ranking your content. External and internal links are an important part of your content marketing strategy. Although you can control external links limitedly, you can add as many internal links as you like to the content.
Here are some tips on how to incorporate external and internal links into your content:
- Make sure that all resources on your website are only 3 clicks away from your visitor
- Create a Related Content Section and include links from every content theme on your website
- Create Read More sections and add contextual links to relevant content pages on your website
- Review and fix any broken internal links from your website
- Create a Cornerstone content section on the top navigation and feature the most important content pieces on your website
Make sure that your Cornerstone content has relevant internal links. This practice helps Google figure out the most important content to rank from your website.
Work on the SEO Score of Your Content
SEO is the foundation of any content optimization strategy. Search engine optimization aligns your content marketing and writing efforts. Here are some tips you can follow to improve your SEO score:
- Write relevant content titles, SEO meta titles, SEO meta descriptions, and headings in your content. It will help search engines to better identify the theme of your content.
- Adopt a smart internal linking strategy to enhance the visibility of your content and improve your audience retention rate
- Update your content with fresh, new information and regularly audit your website for content improvements
- Use SEO copywriting to optimize your business website’s landing pages. SEO website content writing helps your business website get a better position on SERPs.
- Include appropriate image “alt” tags to help search engines understand your visual elements and their intent.
- Another useful tip is content repurposing to ensure information consistency in your blogs, social media content, and emails. It offers you extra content optimization mileage.
Which Tools Do You Need for Faster Content Optimization?
YOAST SEO
If you are looking for a reliable tool to improve your SEO Score, YOAST SEO is perhaps the best option. The WordPress plugin enables you to track the existing SEO level of your content as well as make recommendations on how to improve your content’s SEO.
WriteMe.Ai
Content optimization requires rapid content creation and content scaling. You can easily achieve these things using WriteMe.Ai Content Writing Assistant. The AI-powered Content Writing Assistant helps you create original content for blog posts, social media, emails, Q&As, and more in minutes.
ProWritingAid
The grammar assistant tool helps you improve sentence structure and remove any grammar errors from your content. Moreover, it helps you improve content readability and overall quality.
WordCounter
The online website application lets you view the total number of words, characters and readability level of your content. It also helps you check the keyword density for 1X, 2X, 3X in your content.
Suggested Read: 11+ Content Marketing Tools You Need For Better Growth and Engagement in 2022
Conclusion
Content optimization is an essential part of any content marketing strategy. Optimizing your content to improve SEO Friendliness not only helps you rank better on SERPs but also gets more ROI.
References:
[1] Study on Featured Snippets – SearchEngineLand
