What is Content Optimization? How to Use it On Your Website
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Content is king and knowing how to optimize content on your website will help increase your reach and ultimately help you rank higher in the search engines.
I truly believe that every great website starts with great content and if you’re just banging out low-quality word salads that aren’t optimized properly you stand no chance against the competition.
Times have changed and content optimization is more important than ever. In this guide, I’ll help you figure out how to optimize your content to ensure you rank higher in the SERPs for more keywords and generate more traffic to your website.
What is Content Optimization?
Content optimization is the process of fine-tuning your website’s content to make it more appealing to both search engines and your target audience.
It involves strategic adjustments to various elements, such as keywords, internal linking, and overall content structure. The primary objective is to improve the website’s organic visibility and attract more organic traffic.
Why is Content Optimization Important?
There are a handful of reasons why content optimization is important:
- Increased Visibility: The better content you have, the more keywords you rank for, the higher you rank in the SERPs. These things all go hand-in-hand so you need to make sure you’re optimizing your content but also making sure you’re providing valuable insights that educate and inform your audience.
- Improved UX: Well-optimized content is enjoyable to read; it’s as simple as that. Not only is it optimized for search engines with keywords, schema, and metadata, but it’s easy to read. This means short paragraphs, a lot of headers, and plenty of media.
- Increased Conversions: Conversion optimization is important as well and if your content is relevant to your target audience and written specifically for them, you’ll have a higher chance of converting them.
How to Optimize Content
Now that we understand why we need to know what content optimization is, let’s take a look at some of the actionable steps you can take right away to improve your content.
Keyword Research
It all starts here. Every article you write should have a rhyme and reason for all the keywords you decide to include in it. Use premium tools like Ahrefs to research keywords and find low competition options to include in your content.
The best strategy is to spy on your competitors using the site explorer tool in Ahrefs. This will show you all of the keywords that your top ranking competitors rank for so you can use them in your own articles.
Keyword Density
Once you’ve determined what keywords you need to use, you need to strategically incorporate them within the content. Be sure to do this naturally and don’t stuff keywords in where they don’t belong just to try and rank. This doesn’t work anymore.
Internal Linking
You need to take internal linking seriously if you want a well optimized website. Internal links connect relevant web pages to each other which helps pass value throughout the website and makes it easier for both search engines and users to navigate.
Using a tool like Link Whisper can help you do this quickly and easily by recommending great internal links and even providing anchor text so you can save a lot of time on your internal linking process.
Content Audit
If you already have a lot of content on your website but you haven’t followed many of these steps leading up to this point, don’t panic. You should perform a content audit by going through all the existing content to find outdated information, broken links, or pages that do not have any internal links.
Best Tools to Help With Content Optimization
Here are three tools you’ll want to have in your toolbelt as you dive deep into content optimization.
1. Ahrefs
There really is nothing better than Ahrefs right now because it’s so simple to use and it’s truly an all-in-one solution to your SEO needs. While it might be expensive, it’s well worth the cost to spy on your competitors, find all the keywords you need, and ensure you rank well.
2. Clearscope
Clearscope is another invaluable tool that helps you determine your articles word counts and what keywords you need to include in the article as well as in the headers. It provides suggestions for relevant terms and phrases to include in your content, helping you create more comprehensive and SEO-friendly articles.
3. Link Whisper
Link Whisper is a WordPress plugin that assists with internal linking by providing great suggestions for anchor text and relevant internal links based on the content across your entire site. This is essential for strengthening your internal linking structure which is necessary for content optimization.
Final Thoughts
Understanding content optimization is not optional in today’s SEO landscape. If you’re putting content on your website in any form, it needs to be optimized with great, low competition keywords and internal links that help connect the pages on your site.
Last but not least, you need great content in general. Your first priority should be to provide value to your audience and make sure that the content you create targets a specific audience and really speaks to them. Continuously seek to improve your process and Google will reward you!