16Jun 23 The Ultimate Guide to Content Optimization: Boosting Your Website’s Performance

The content optimization strategy is often synonymous with search engine optimization. Although optimizing your content just to please the bots will not take you far. In the digital world, users in general are at the centre of the universe. Therefore the ultimate optimization is to write your content for users in addition to search bots.

In fact, when content is written with the user’s best interest in mind, it is always rewarded by search engines.

In this article, we will look at multiple ways that could help you optimize your content to enhance your website’s performance.

Content Optimization

Content Optimization is a technique that is used to ensure that your content achieves two of the major objectives- getting higher organic reach and turning leads into successful conversions. 

Incorporating numerous time-tested techniques help you score well on the SEO graph, but essentially there are countless other ways such as adding marketing and editorial elements to achieve content optimization.

Why is Content Optimization Important?

Content optimization is a vital aspect of marketing. Even if you present great content on your website there are chances that it would go unnoticed.

Some common reasons why content fails are:

1. The keywords might have less or no search volume
2. Details are missing in topic
3. Lack of a coherent heading structure so Google’s crawlers are unable to decipher your content
4. The intent of the article is missing from the title

Failure to optimize your content will put you at risk of disappearing in the vastness of Google. If search engines are unable to crawl your article, even the best-written content will not be able to produce desired results. Ensure that your content reaches viewers who need it the most. For example, If X is interested to look up the latest fashion trends and instead gets content on painting or sketching then also it is still not achieving the marketing goals.

In order to eliminate these issues once and for all, we have curated a few helpful insights to optimize your content and help you create a wonderful marketing strategy for your brand.

Methodology

There are a handful of parameters on which content is evaluated by search engine crawlers.

The four main attributes of good content are –

• Search Engine Optimization
• Readability
• Consistency
• Voice
• Authenticity

There are various content optimization tools such as – Plugins –  to calculate all of these scores for you when you are posting it online. Any score between 8-10 is considered to generate the highest-scoring content. It is safe to say that good quality content will provide value to people in general and is usually rewarded by search engine bots.

Let us look at ways how to optimize content for a brand:

How to Optimize Content for SEO

The aim behind digital content optimization is to be able to be found by search engines.

Follow the given steps to optimize your content for SEO:

Choose the Relevant Topic and Appropriate Keywords

Identifying target keywords and selecting topics are crucial parts of any content marketing strategy. Decide the topics for your blogs and how they will impact your audience before you start writing. Also, determine how these topics resonate with your website or brand theme.

You should focus on bigger topics because Google pays more attention to how you are adding more branches to the subject by giving a wholesome explanation. Nowadays, it does not focus on single keywords.

It is important to note that while keywords are individual search queries that a user may have, Topics are a broad category that develops and defines a relationship between a range of similar keywords.

Topic Research tool will help you immensely with finding an idea that resonates perfectly with your target audience.

For example, in case you run an online yoga retreat, you may start with the topic, ‘Benefits of Yoga on Mind and Body”. The tool gives you an opportunity to select desired geographical locations.

4 Steps to Search on a Topic Research Tool:

1. Select a Topic
2. A wide list of sub-topics will appear, from which you can choose one for your article
3. Once you insert a topic, you will be able to see popular searches, queries, and content ideas related to that topic.
4. Post selecting an apt topic, your next step is to find target keywords for your blog post.

Besides selecting the right phrase that works with the article, you need to ensure that the selected words match the search intent of your dedicated audience.

Explore the keywords that resemble your mission and incorporate them into your content. Before selecting a keyword, you must check the information such as intent, related keywords, questions and variations.

A Great Tip: Evaluate keyword search results and volume directly from Google search. 

Google will produce the most generic searches for the query and help you examine the searches from the user’s end.

You can procure a list of crucial keywords and filter them into primary and secondary categories. 

To expand your research, you can examine the top-ranking page using an SEO-optimized content checker and check for what elements lead them to score high on SERPs.

Identify Linguistically and Logically Related Keywords

Semantically related keywords increase your chance of ranking high on SERPs. You should add keywords that are related to each other either logically, conceptually or linguistically. This will help search engines to better understand your topic. Focus and stick to the original theme of your topic for maximum impact.

For instance, to write your article on Yoga you can include words such as “Weight loss”, “Building Core Strength”, “Body Mass Index”, etc.

Develop a Basic Structure

You need to have an outline to design your content in an appealing way with a logical flow. Structure your blog around the search queries you collected from Google search. You can divide relevant queries under separate headings with H2, H3, or H4. As per studies, 47 per cent of the top-performing article has a variety of headers incorporated in them.

Establishing a basic structure is extremely important due to two basic reasons:

• Breaking your content down into several pieces enhances the readability of the article.
• Search engines can easily crawl through the length of your content to analyze how relevant your article is to a certain target audience.

Maintain Keyword Density

Managing proper keyword density is about finding a healthy balance between adding keywords throughout the entire content piece, URL, and title. Paying attention to keyword density and ensuring it is present in the right quantity is the recipe for well-optimized content.

You must identify the difference between keyword density and keyword stuffing. Keyword density is maintained to eliminate the chance of populating your content with more keywords than necessary. While earlier it was a common practice to stuff ample keywords, the recent update in Google penalizes websites for keyword stuffing in their content.

Avoid Cannibalization

Keyword cannibalization happens when a marketer optimizes two different pages or blog posts with the same keyword. Crawlers usually place both these articles as competitors and thus your site traffic and ranking suffer.

To avoid this issue, you can ensure that each content has a unique keyword so one of your content doesn’t compete with the other.

The most convenient way to find if a certain article you wrote has a keyword that ranks on Google is by putting the keyword in the search bar. The formula is to write “Your website name” – For Example – UsePerWish, and add the Keyword next, For example – Content Optimization. This will give you a result for existing ranked posts on your website.

Add Visuals

Visuals added to a piece of content on your website not only entice the audiences but also reduce your website’s bounce rate. Images add meaning to your content and visitors seem to be more attentive to all that you have to say.

Apart from images, article-embedded videos boost traffic compared to the ones that lack multimedia.

Check out our tips to make your content replete with visuals:

• Create and include relevant infographics
• Embed significant original videos or sample videos created by reliable industry experts
• Ensure that the videos provide value to your audience
• Collaborate with content creators and influencers working in the same industry

Interlinking

Internal linking is a significant SEO practice which enables search engine crawlers to find and rank particular pages readily.

Create a list of the content you have already produced so you can interlink related topics. For instance, If you have an article titled “Beginners’ Guide to Yoga”, it could be linked to an article titled “Simple Yoga Poses” So anyone who is interested in starting their yoga practice would learn a little about the poses as soon as they have acquainted themselves with the basics of yoga. This way you can direct your audience to move to more of your insightful resources so that your audience keeps hovering within your website.

Sometimes, it is natural for a visitor to get distracted when they are on your website. For Instance, when a visitor has to check for a term or meaning of a reference in your blog, they conduct another search and get deviated to another site, therefore it is pertinent to explain things vividly and also link pages to your own website.

Also when you add new blogs to your website, you can update your previously published articles with links to the new articles. As your older articles have been on Google for a longer time, the chances of them reaching the target audience get higher. Therefore, when you link a new article to your older articles, you will be able to get better audience engagement.

Approach and Finish the Content in Great Detail

Write your content comprehensively without leaving out any important information. Address each search query that a user might have regarding the topic. This should invariably be your blog content strategy.

You can easily achieve this by following the given guidelines:

• Conduct Google research on how your competitors are producing content for your select keyword
• You can use curated content optimization tools for this purpose, however, there is no match for a manual research
• Closely monitor what all your customers are asking for. This will help you go beyond just adding available resources and delving deeper into what a customer is looking for
• Don’t repeat the same points that popular websites put forth and try to create your own unique observations regarding the subject that may add more value to your audience’s lives

Improve Technical Aspect of SEO

Technical elements are an integral part of search engine optimization. A confusing structure and delayed loading times significantly impact the user experience.

A few technical aspects of SEO-optimized content are given below:

• User experience and loading speeds
• Organize your Meta title and description
• Eliminate broken links
• Correct placement of alt tags on images or videos

Update Your Content Regularly

Just like you survey and keep an eye on your competitors, they do the same with your website. This gives rise to the need of updating and reviewing your highly ranked content in order to hold on to your ranking.

Especially, if you run a news website or a business that is highly dynamic, your content needs to be frequently updated to keep your posts optimized.

You can add the year to signify how recent a post is. For example, the title of your article could look like “Best Mobile Phones in 2023”

Many marketers audit their content every 6 months to generate better results.  You can also try the same tactic to make the best out of your content strategy.

How to Optimize the Quality of Your Content

Good quality content is grammatically correct, comprises appropriate keywords and maintains a cascading language flow. Now how can you incorporate all these attributes in your write-up to make it SEO-friendly content?

Let us look into this further.

How to improve your writing?

Maintaining an interesting flow in the content is challenging for any content writer. People in general, lose focus very easily therefore it is difficult to keep your audience engaged.

Follow the given steps to improve your content quality:

• Write like a friend – Write your content only and only for your readers. Interact instead of writing boring textbook copies. Write your content like you send texts and SMSs while you are chatting with a friend.
• Introduce personalization – Understand your target audience before you write for them.
• Use simple language – Simplify your terminologies and language by adding explainers, and full stops wherever required, and also by using short sentences. Your job is to educate your readers about your product or services rather than to reflect your expertise in a particular language.
• Use power words – Use words such as “amazing”, “groundbreaking” and “flawless” to grab their attention.
• Shorten your paragraphs – Ideally, you should write not more than 90 words per paragraph.
• Maintain consistency throughout the text – Be mindful of the tone, voice, spelling, etc.
• Incorporate backlinks – Ensure that your content is linkable and shareable.
• Encourage social sharing – Include all your icons for social media platforms at an easily accessible spot so users can easily share the content as and when they want.
• Value your customer’s sentiments – Pay heed to customer feedback, and their comment to refine your content accordingly.
• Follow the wave of trend – Whenever there is a latest trend in any field you can leverage this and include it in your own marketing strategy. For example, if there is the latest popular dance reel, you can include the music or make a comment on the song, etc. Many marketers have utilized this tactic over the years, and statistically, they have been able to create a few highly successful marketing campaigns.

Bottom Line

Content curation and creation is the most significant aspect of search engine optimization. Boosting Website’s performance is a primary objective of each brand. And content is central to this goal. It is because the better the content, the more the chances of being successful at gaining website traffic and conversions.

As you can imagine how there are countless businesses operating in the same field, and the competition is usually neck to neck. Users prefer to open and read only a handful of resources available on the first page of SERP results. Therefore, it is necessary to adopt effective SEO techniques to create fabulous results.

UsePerWish helps you optimize your content for you to attain the highest ranking on the SERPs. To learn more about our services, contact us today at UsePerWish.