The ultimate content optimisation guide.
As content marketing continues to grow in popularity, brands are beginning to heavily invest in content creation to improve their SEO presence and rank in search results. Welcome to our complete guide.
Getting your voice out there is a fantastic first step in increasing your brand’s exposure, but making sure it is heard is more important. After all, what good is a great website and great content if it can’t be found on search engine results pages?
If your audience can’t find your site or content in their search results, it’s so much harder to reap success, and your investment and time may go to waste. That’s why content optimisation is such a crucial step in the SEO content marketing process. Read on to find the complete guide to Content optimisation.
Content optimisation refers to updating and adjusting a piece of content to make it more appealing to search engines and your audience. By focussing on search engine optimisation, you can get more traffic to your website and make more of that traffic convert.
Not only does optimised content improve your SEO and increase your chances of appearing in Google search engine results pages, but it’s also great for boosting user experience.
There are a few steps you can take to optimise your content and enhance your organic search rankings on Google. Investing in keyword research, adding image tags, creating new or refreshed web content across landing pages, editing blog posts and pages are a place to start. Even simple things like adding an alt tag, meta tags and descriptions and a title tag to each piece of content you post to your site are all ways you can up your content optimisation game.
Annoyingly, however, a piece of content that performed well in search engine rankings one day could be considered stale and outdated content the next. This means it’s so important to implement regular content optimisation into your content marketing and SEO strategy.
In short, yes!
Content is one of the main pillars any marketing should be built on. Search queries and trends change like the weather – so it’s important you actually think about every piece of website content you create so everything adds value across your web pages.
Content that hasn’t been properly optimised for SEO doesn’t perform well. While comprehensive, relevant and user-friendly content is rewarded with higher rankings in search engine results. Higher rankings mean your business has a better chance of being found online. So if you optimise your content correctly, you’re also adding value to your business’ bottom line and helping your customers understand your business.
You can check how people are currently finding your site using google search console information. You should track this regularly to make sure you are creating website content and content types around keywords which will benefit your site and your customers.
Search engine optimisation ensures your content can be crawled by search engines and formatted for human consumption too. It’s important that every page on your website are built for the searcher. If not, you’ll probably find our that your search engine ranking will be much lower than your competitors.
There are several different ways you can optimise your content. Here are some of our top tips to help drive traffic to your content marketing and appear in those search engine results and guide you through some simple steps to drive traffic to landing pages, integrate more of your target keywords and improve your overall inbound marketing strategy.
The headline of your page or blog post is the first thing your reader sees. It’s important that it inspires users to click on your content rather than ignore it. It needs to be eye-catching, easily-read, and informative for your customers.
If your content hasn’t been performing well on search engines in the past, consider what you can content optimise to improve your content. You can track this in SEMrush or AHrefs. You might even want to test these tags across your site to work out what Google likes best.
For example, does it address any questions the reader has? Is it useful? Does it spur an emotional response? Would you click on it if you saw it in your search results? Do your readers learn something? Or is it clickbait? Is it misleading? Is it boring? All the content you put on your website needs to engage at every entrance point to your site.
Your headline and title tag should seek to answer the question your audience has without being misleading. It should also utilise powerful and emotional words designed to compel readers to click through and read the rest of your content. Your title tag should be short, sweet and be reflective of your content. This should then be backed up with an informative meta description to make sure your audience understands your content inside out – and come back for more.
Content Optimisation Tip 1: How-to style headlines effectively get a user to click on your headline.
Content Optimisation Tip 2: A content marketing tool like Coschedule’s headline analyser can help you improve your headlines while optimising content.
Another great way of optimising content and boosting your presence on search engines is through adding links to your content. Digital marketing has become more and more collaborative and integrated over the past few years – and Digital PR and SEO are now more closely aligned than ever. Google’s John Mueller has recently told how important Links are for Google to rank your search pages, but it’s the quality of those links – not the quantity.
Filtering stats and research from reputable sources throughout your content helps back up your claims and provides evidence for the points you make. If you optimise content in this way, you make your content more reliable and trustworthy, making it more valuable for your reader. They’re also more likely to reread your content, as they’ll consider you a reputable source.
Citing authoritative sources in your content helps you become a thought leader in your industry and helps you build SEO authority on search engines, encouraging others to engage with your brand and content after finding you on Google and other search engines.
It’s also useful to link internally, too, adding links to useful and relevant blog posts and pages you’ve written in the past. It builds authority and encourages readers to stay on your blog, decreasing your bounce rate and boosting your ranking on search engines. It also gives you a greater chance to convert readers into customers by answering more of their queries and positioning your brand as a trusted source.
If you want to optimise your content for search engines, begin by conducting keyword research to find a target keyword that aligns closely with your content and the goal you have in mind. Keyword research will help you identify the keywords you need to use to create great content.
Content Optimisation Tip: Use Google to explore other types of optimised content, finding out where each piece sits in the search engine rankings – a quick Google search helps discover which sites perform well for that specific target keyword. You can take inspiration from these content pieces and work out how you can make your content better.
Content Optimisation Tip 2: Use Google search console to understand what pages current rank well, and what need improving.
As well as adding keywords into your content, also remember to optimise your page titles, title tags, and meta descriptions by popping your keywords into those too. This will increase the ranking of your page in search engines including google, yandex, bing and yahoo. Remember, your page title and meta description will appear in search results, so you need to describe what your optimised content is about so users are enticed into clicking on it. This will increase website traffic and improve your on-page SEO.
It’s also important to remember that when you’re working to optimise content, avoid over-optimising it and stuffing keywords everywhere. Write for humans and allow your target keyword and its semantics to fall into place naturally.
While every piece of content on your website must follow your brand tone of voice, an easy way of creating optimised content is through switching up the tone in which the content is written.
In previous drafts, you may have experienced limited success by using a passive voice. This may mean that your blog or page fails to appear in search engine results because it has low SEO value and doesn’t engage your audience.
Consider optimising your content by changing the tone.
Content Optimisation Tip: An active voice makes your writing stronger, more direct, and, you guessed it, more active.
Turning a blog or web page into a long-form piece of content can do wonders for your SEO.
Sometimes slipping in a few extra words can do the trick; other times, you may need to evaluate the content length in more depth. Adding more research or extra advice can really help. Incorporating different viewpoints is another great way of lengthening your content whilst still adding value for the reader.
You mustn’t use words and extra content flippantly, though – always consider whether what you’re writing is interesting, engaging, and valuable.
Content Optimisation Tip: Adding bullet points, lists, or switching up the format of your content are all great ways of lengthening your content in a refreshing way.
Adding media and visual content to your blog posts, pages, and website is a great way to boost your content strategy and ensure your content is optimised.
People often think that content is all about writing. But that isn’t always the case. Content optimisation is all about providing quality content to your readers, and that content can be in a variety of different forms.
Videos, images, audio, GIFs, and presentations are all examples of content you can add to your pages or blogs that will engage readers and pique interest. Visual aid also helps to illustrate the point you’re making in your content and improve user experience. Visual content is also a useful way of portraying information and helping it stick – we retain information better when read with an image.
Ultimately, the goal for all types of content is to convert readers into customers. Therefore you need to optimise content with plenty of calls to action (CTA).
CTA’s make your content actionable and let readers know the next steps to take. They should be filtered within your content and be clear and concise.
As you begin optimising your content, you may find that your call to action is different from what it was previously. This is fine; just ensure readers know where to go next.
Content Optimisation Tip: Including keywords in your CTA’s can also improve user experience and boost your SEO.
Have you considered whether or not your written content would translate effectively into another media form?
Repurposing your content is a cheap and relatively easy way of optimising your content and getting the most value out of your ideas.
You could turn a blog into a printable PDF or guide. Transform important information from a web page into an animation. And visualise key stats in an infographic.
And don’t forget about social media – tonnes of platforms have ‘blogging’ options now. Have you made the best use of this feature?
Honestly, if I can impart any advice to you, it’d be this.
PROOFREAD, THEN PROOFREAD AGAIN.
Never publish any content without taking the time to proofread and edit it first.
Any mistakes can harm your reputation and be super embarrassing.
A tool like Grammarly can help you check for spelling and grammar mistakes, or you can hire a professional to give you a hand. We use Grammarly in-house, and it helps us massively.
Typos can be difficult to spot, and we all make them, so going over once or twice with attention to detail or asking a colleague to read through can make all the difference.
Content Optimisation Tip: My top tip is to read your content out loud to help you identify weak areas and reduce fluff. Then you can make sure your article reads well and polished to the best it can be.
You’ve worked super hard to write your high-quality content. You’ve followed all the content optimisation rules, included all the long-tail keywords, you’ve added a meta description and title tags, you’ve made the best use of imagery, and now your blog post is the bee’s knees.
So, please don’t make the mistake of leaving this piece of art to stagnate, hoping it just ‘gets found’ by prospects.
You need to market your content by distributing and promoting it to all available platforms to give it the best chance of being viewed, enjoyed, and shared by your target audience. Otherwise, you may have wasted hours of content optimisation.
Here are just a few ways you can promote your content:
Or do you need a little more help?
Content optimisation is key if you want to get the best results from your content, appear in Google search, and improve your click-through rate.
But we understand how confusing and time-consuming it can all be. Title tags, a meta description, SEO, keywords – there are so many marketing buzzwords to get your head around that getting started with content optimisation can be daunting.
Purpose Media is a content marketing agency that cuts through the noise. We work with you to produce creative content in line with your sales, SEO, and marketing objectives. And we don’t over-complicate it.
Mixing creativity with contextual understanding, we craft high-quality, compelling content optimised for SEO, driving traffic and results.
The perfect content marketing agency will listen to your goals and objectives, creating content that can generate leads.
Everything we do is built on delivering results across all digital marketing, so we make sure our clients get great content that drives results to impact your business objectives. By working with us, you can increase your organic visibility on your website and reduce the effort and costs – so you can focus on your day job.
We create user friendly, optimised content every day; allow us to help you do it too.
If all this sounds like something you need and you’d like to find out more, give us a buzz. Or fill out your email address and info on our contact form, and we’ll get back to you.