Did content optimization ring any bell in your head? If you’re in the digital marketing field, you’d immediately think that it must be related to content improvements and better copywriting techniques. If that’s somewhat you thought, then you’re pretty close.
Content Optimization 101
In case, you don’t understand digital marketing at all and have no idea what content optimization might be, then this article will help you understand this topic.
What is Content Optimisation?
Content optimization is a content overhauling to improve, enhance, and adjust a blog or website’s content to maximize its effectiveness to gain organic search traffic and attract new social media followers.
Now I bet you have some idea of what content optimization is.
But don’t worry because I’ll be explaining this topic in detail so that you could implement content optimization strategies with full confidence.
The basic idea of why content optimization is necessary is that it enables your website and blog to grow faster. You might have heard about SEO optimization.
Have you ever wondered why bloggers and marketers hire SEOs to optimize their sites?
The answer is that they want to make sure that their site pages are accessible, fast, and well-organized from the search engines point-of-view so that it could get more traffic and they could make money in the end. There are a number of aspects that play a role in the site’s SEO, but it all comes down to improving the website content, elements, and pages for better results.
Also read : How to Become a Copywriter
Similarly, website content also requires optimization for organic traffic and search engine optimization.
Content Optimization 101
Here are 4 steps you should take to optimize your website content:
Improve the Readability of the Content
The fundamental concept of improving the content’s readability is to ensure that the content is well-written, error-free, and understandable by both the audience and search engines. However, it’s not as simple as it may seem because it’s challenging to come up with good content. Here are some suggestions to come up with better content that improve the content’s readability:
Hire a Content Writer
Publishing content at scale is one of the requirements for any blog to grow whether it’s a niche blog or a company’s official blog. Most of the times, it becomes difficult to write and publish content on a regular basis. Therefore, hiring a content writer becomes necessary; you don’t have to hire a full-time content writer. Instead, get in contact with a freelance content writer and get the job done. If you like his/her work, continue working.
Use a Grammar Checker
If a content writer doesn’t work out for you or you can’t afford to have a content writer on a consistent basis, then consider getting a grammar checker tool’s subscription. The benefit of a grammar checking tool is that you can write content and fix the grammar and sentence-structuring issues using the grammar checking tool. Try Grammarly.
Prefer Simple Words
Using complex words don’t guarantee that you’re doing a good job at writing content. Often times, it makes difficult for a segment of the audience to understand your point of view. So don’t use such complicated words that may be difficult for the general audience to understand. One of the best practices of content optimization is using simple words. You’d often find the simple words in the popular keywords.
Write Short Sentences
One of the hacks of improving the content’s readability is writing short sentences. Top bloggers also recommend writing short sentences. The reason is that it helps you write better and convey the message easily.
If you use Yoast SEO WordPress plugin, you’d also see the content’s readability rating. It analyzes a number of things such as grammar, wording, sentence-building, length of sentences, and more.
Furthermore, you can also go through your content a few times to see if there are words or sentences that can be replaced or removed.
As far as the website copy is concerned, it doesn’t have much space to go into details like blog posts. So you have to cut short the message and deliver the point-of-view in a couple of lines. You’d often see prominent lines written on the pages of the websites. Companies make sure that their website copy sends out the message in a short span as well as communicate effectively.
Selecting the Keyword and Density
Keywords are the search terms that bloggers, SEOs, and marketers induct into their website copies and blog posts to attract search engines traffic. However, any random keyword doesn’t work out. In fact, the selection of the right keyword is not an easy task to do. Keywords are always fascinating for bloggers and SEOs. And, it’s not a surprise why bloggers and marketers chase the best keywords to rank their sites in search engines.
The problem with keywords is that they are not easy to find. Once you figure that out through tools like SEMrush and Google Keyword Planner, the next part is the density of the keywords to use in your content.
A lot of SEOs believe that 1-3 percent of keywords density works fine for them. However, you can always alter that due to the length of the content. Make sure that you are not just stuffing keywords in your content for the sake of ranking. Keep it normal and genuine because keywords stuffing leads to the bad readability experience for the users. Keep in mind that search engines are smart now and they observe the audience’s behavior to determine the quality of the content and websites. So pay attention to the selection and the density of the keywords.
Adding Resources to the Content
One of the important aspects of content optimization is the resources you add to the content. Such resources make content helpful and valuable for the audience. If you don’t back up your points with different resources, it starts to look a little less worthy. In fact, the top bloggers and marketers support their arguments with various types of resources. Once you go through the types of resources that you can add, you’d understand the essence of this point.
Here are different types of resources that authenticate your point of view:
Examples
When you add examples to your content, it becomes more understandable and clear. That’s what the examples do, and that’s why we use examples to send across the true meaning or point of view. Bloggers and digital marketers give examples of their past experiences and others’ work to educate the audience or to convince the audience to take a certain action.
Screenshots
Screenshots play a vital role in delivering the message to the readers. A lot of bloggers and content writers use screenshots to support their narrative in the articles. Plus, screenshots work like a resource in the written content to guide the readers and navigate them further.
Online Tools
Online tools are essential in making the content useful for readers. You might have noticed that many top bloggers mention useful online tools to help guide their readers and subscribers. The number one reason is that they want to make their content helpful for the audience, and adding such online tools to make their content resourceful and helpful. Have you noticed that I also mention useful tools in my articles?
Influencers
Besides mentioning online tools and examples, influencers could also be mentioned in the content, which helps bloggers in developing relationships with influencers and top bloggers. You don’t have to mention influencers without any reason, meaning, if you’re adding an influencer into your content where it doesn’t make any sense, then it won’t help much because the influencer would understand what’s going on. Similarly, readers won’t find it interesting to check out. So add influencers to your content where the mention really helps the audience.
Therefore, you can take away that adding resources to the content is a content optimization technique that improves your blog’s content.
Auditing the Content
The last step of this content optimization plan is auditing the content. What this means is that you have to schedule at least two content audits in a year — you can do it quarterly as well.
The purpose of the content audit is to sit back and analyze the performance of the following things:
Keywords selection:
You can analyze whether or not your keywords selection is working out or not. Either it’s helping your website or blog in gaining organic traffic or not. If it’s not working out, then change the keywords entirely or start experimenting with new ones along with a few old ones.
Also read : How to do the Keyword Research
Traffic sources:
You must figure out the main traffic sources of your website or blog. If your major traffic source is social media, then don’t worry about it. Instead, tweak your content strategy using better keywords and article topics to gain more search traffic.
Also read : 5 Traffic Sources for Bloggers
Conversion rate:
The conversion rate determines the ROI of the content. However, things don’t happen overnight. It takes time to get things going; a lot of people experiment with content and give up because they don’t see early success. There is a difference in getting traction on your content through specific keywords and converting the visitors into paying customers. The study of conversion rate helps us understand what keywords and content categories to pick for better results.
Also read : How to Bring Back Visitors to your Site.
Engagement:
Engagement is a process of bringing in the visitor into the loop and offering something valuable to attract them for staying longer on the website. Everyone develops their own engagement strategies, for example, some make a Facebook group and bring people in, while others prefer email list building.
The content audit allows you to understand what’s working for your website and what’s not. The benefit is that you don’t blindly move forward if you regularly do content auditing to find out what working and what’s not. Once you’ve done your first content audit, you could alter your keywords strategy or content strategy to try out some stuff for the next phase.
Conclusion
The point of this article is that your content is essential to growing your website traffic, conversion, social media fans, and paid customers.
Content optimization allows you to understand and implement content changes if they’re required. You could go through the transition of changing the keywords or rebuilding any major content plans.
It all begins with a proper content optimization strategy.
What else would you like to add to content optimization?