For businesses aware of how content marketing is a game changer in their marketing campaign, it is essential to note that effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy is the heart of it. Ultimately, you must capture your audience’s attention and convert them to revenue-generating leads. But to ensure that happens, you must know how to reach your audience with the right optimized content. The conductor’s research report states that 131% of consumers are likely to buy products after learning about the brand’s content.
In this blog, we will discuss how to effectively create content that engages target audiences and learn how to drive organic traffic to your website strategically.
What is content optimization?
Simply put, the practice of optimizing your content has to achieve two target goals:
- Convert leads into customers
- Make it available for search engines
You must fit in the right keywords, meta tags, headers, alt text, and backlinks to rank higher on the search engine result page (SERP). To keep up in the digital marketplace, “high-quality content” has to be coupled with SEO.
Why is content optimization important?
It is crucial to have SEO-friendly content. Content writing is more than just showcasing your products or services. For a successful content marketing strategy, your posts must have:
- Keywords
- Structural flow
- Topic detailing
- Accurate title tag
According to Intergrowth research stats, 68% of online query starts with a search engine result. Optimized content will increase your brand value and help build relationships with your target customers.
How to optimize content?
Optimizing content might seem a little daunting, but it isn’t difficult. You can start afresh or optimize your existing content to ensure that search engines like google or yahoo can understand your content’s intent. You might take professional help to appear on the first result page, but a beginner can also rank higher by following these steps:
Make clean content
Creating content is part of the big marketing picture, but building original content that is relatable and informative should be the sole aim of your business. While developing it, you should be mindful of keyword research and the coherent breakdown of information.
Instead of stuffing all the keywords in your posts, try toning them down using short sentences. Use the relevant keywords that go with the flow and serve the purpose while improving your rankings.
There are various means to select the keywords; you can consider the following ways:
- Opt for long-tail keywords; although it has lower search volume and less competition, it is easier to rank for them. For example, “Shoes for badminton court” will help your content to rank higher than “Shoes for sports.”
- Hunt down keywords that have higher search volume and lower competition. Knowing keyword difficulty makes it apparent if you want to target it or not.
Optimize the content
Customers don’t prefer to go through lengthy texts even if the message is put down simplistically. You can optimize URLs, title tags, meta descriptions, and images for a wider reach.
- Putting images and infographics catches the audience’s attention more quickly than texts. Alt tags, also known as alternate texts for images, enhance customer experiences and provide greater accessibility to your business.
- From texts to images, people are moving towards short informative videos. Videos are a great way to increase the call to action for your products or services. Optimizing videos with the right keywords and using attention-grabbing colour schemes and descriptions hold the customer’s attention.
- User-friendly URLs attract more clicks and have meaning to help the target audience. Instead of using a descriptive URL, you can optimize it by using a simple, short, and precise URL that would be easy to remember and share.
Content Readability
Content dumping can be easily recognized by online users whose attention span is not greater than 10-15 secs. So, in the content optimization strategy, readability is the understated factor. Easy-to-read content enhances your site quality and reaches your target customers faster. For example, the Hemingway app is a free tool to help you measure the readability of your content.
- Focus on the tone of the content, avoid passive voice as much as possible and remove complex sentence structure.
- Avoid lesser-known words and always have an eye on the spelling.
As the saying goes, Less is more. Creating engaging, informative, and factually correct posts will pull more of your desired crowd.
Interlink
Your content optimization effort gets a boost when you use the power of links. It is the real “food for bots”, and they love to thrive on it. Search engines, like Google, use internal links to connect one web page with another on your website. It helps them to have a clear picture and have control of the structure as well. There are two types of links:
- Internal links:
These links help search engine bots crawl your website, find helpful content, and increase page authority. - External links:
These links help the target audience to gain your trust by directing them to other websites, and in return, it increases your credibility.
Summary
Content optimization is about creating valuable content that doesn’t get drowned in the internet whirlpool. Focusing on the basics of SEO practice will help you to extend your business, and you can answer your customers’ queries faster than your competitors. Most importantly, it is not all about the search engine bots but always about people first. And we at Neekan know how to balance the two.
Reach out to us in case you need help with content audit/optimization