How to Optimize Your Content: 7 Helpful Tips

How to Optimize Your Content: 7 Helpful Tips

Whether you’re writing your own website content or paying someone else to do it, you must ensure it’s up to par. The goal of any website is to appear in Google’s top 10 results on page one. If you’re on page two, you may as well be on page 50. In order to achieve high rankings, you have to know SEO best practices inside and out, as well as the many variables that impact rankings.

You’re probably already investing in some kind of content marketing. Eighty-seven percent of B2B and 86 percent of B2C companies market with content, says Search Engine Journal. That being said, though, what good is all that content if no one can see it? This is where organic search comes in, allowing you to not only consistently get your content in front of the right audience but at the precise time in the buyer’s journey.

When you’re able to get control over your content optimization strategy for search, you’ll notice a big boost in content performance over the short and long haul. A robust SEO strategy isn’t easy but it’s absolutely necessary.

But there are certain best practices you can use in order to optimize your content for search. Just for starters, you’ll need to focus on specific locations and devices, the text’s readability for target customers, plagiarism issues and article length optimization. There are tools online available to help you with this, such as SEMrush’s SEO Writing Assistant Tool and many more. However, there are some things you can do on your end to ensure your content is optimized for SEO.

1.    Do Keyword Research

Content optimization starts with keyword research – well before you even put pen to paper. Keyword research will show you what your target customers want and indicate if your topic is valuable and meaningful to them.

Ask yourself this:

  • How many people are searching for this keyword?
  • How competitive is the keyword?
  • What stage of the buyer’s journey does this keyword address?

When you do your homework on keywords, you will make sure the content is relevant for your audience and impactful for your business. in the end, this will help you better drive traffic and conversions.

2.    Improve Design

Everyone loves a visually appealing website. This means your web design should be attractive and grip the reader from that very first second. That’s because users associate the quality of design with trustworthiness and with the value of the webpage, according to Moz. Those signals will affect every single one of your marketing efforts, from the links you can earn to search engine rankings to shareability of content.

3.    Use Visuals

Use visuals whenever you can. Whether you have some videos of your yoga studio or high-quality photos of your pizza shop, use them as frequently as you can without getting too overwhelming. People love visuals because they break up dense text and draw the eye. Your users are far more likely to look at a picture, diagram or video than they are to read 1000 words of text.

4.    Choose Your Result Type

Because Google displays its results in a multitude of user-friendly visual forms to help users find information faster, it only makes sense to get on board with this. Depending on the search, Google offers different result types, from local packs to featured snippets.

Securing one of these result types is critical, as it streamlines your content to appear at the top of the results page, thereby improving your click-through rate. You can do this by:

  • Research which keywords spark a universal result type
  • Structure your content appropriately
  • Use accurate and correct information

5.    Craft Keyword Themes

You may be tempted to stop your keyword research after choosing your primary keyword. However, keep going if you want to boost your visibility. Instead of optimizing for just one keyword, optimize for a group of keywords that relates to an idea. This is called a theme.

When creating one, you should select two to three keywords, using ones that aren’t too broad or have a lot of competition. They should be highly relevant in order to drive qualified traffic.

6.    Add Transcripts to Videos

If you’re using video content in some capacity, that’s a great start. When creating your next video landing page, add a transcript of the video so search engines can crawl the text for indexing. This transcript will make it easier for search engines to understand your video content and ensure it ranks it for the right search terms. This practice will also improve the user experience, as visitors can quickly ascertain if the video holds relevance for them.

7.    Increase Page Speed

According to Google, if your content takes longer than three seconds to load, you are losing 53 percent of your mobile site visitors. People have no patience for slow loading sites. Can you blame them? If you can’t meet their needs quickly, they will move on. It’s as simple as that. You can use online tools like Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool to see how your website is doing on speed.

Contact Detroit Internet Marketing

With world-class SEO resources, white hat Internet marketing strategies and website design, Detroit Internet Marketing can help you achieve the content optimization you’ve been looking for. To learn more about how we can help, contact us at (248) 234-4830.