Baby Steps to Content Optimization in 2022: A Complete Guide for Beginners

Intro

Picture this.

You’ve poured your heart and soul into creating a content piece, hoping it will entice clicks and sway customers onto the next step of their journey. But a couple of months after publishing, the analytics have a different story to tell. Your beloved content did not check off the desired business goal.

What went wrong?

Amidst such fierce competition, where almost everybody is dishing out great content, just creating content is inadequate. You also need to optimize your content.

In this article, you’ll find thirteen content optimizations to perform on your content and drive more organic traffic. While we previously covered content optimization for SEO, it’s worth treating the subject from a readability and conversion standpoint.

What Is Content Optimization?

Content optimization is refining various content elements to ensure that it is appealing to humans and search-friendly to search engines.

Optimized content stands a better chance of ranking higher in SERP and reaching the largest audience possible, driving your content marketing goals more effectively.

Why Do You Need Content Optimization?

Google’s only aim is to scour for highly relevant content that meets Google’s quality standards and fulfills the searcher’s intent. Thus, optimizing content with the help of various online tools enables you to:

• Achieve top rankings.
• Attract high-quality leads.
• Generate more revenue.
• Outperform competitors.
• Earn better backlinks.
• Build an identifiable brand.

How to Optimize Content? 13 Actionable Tips for the Starters

1. Discover the Right Keywords

Keywords are search terms people enter in a search engine to find information. Keywords have no alternative, whether it’s a small business SEO or a digital marketing SEO strategy.

Optimizing copy for the right keywords ensures that the search engine understands what your post is about and that your potential audience lands on your website after using a particular keyphrase. Also When writing a copy, you should pay attention to trends. You can't simply guess what users are typing in the search. Changes and trends can be easily tracked with tools such as Google Trends API, and help you explore Google search data.

Do Your Keyword Research

The best keyword to target for your content topic is the one you can rank for and has significant “quality” traffic potential.

Ranktracker’s keyword finder is your handy tool for this. All you have to do is enter the seed topic, and it gives real-time, location-specific insights on search volume, ranking difficulty, common questions, trend patterns, etc.

Also, Include Semantic Keywords

Semantic keywords are related to original keywords. Including them in content optimizes it to match the searchers’ true intent and rank for various keywords. Say, if you are trying to rank for “vegan diet,” then you might as well use related keywords, “plant-based diet” and “vegan food.”

The trick is framing the content in a way that answers users’ questions arising from various semantic keywords. As a result, it gives content more value and guides the Google spiders about the topic’s breadth and depth to rank the page more accurately.

Where to find semantic keywords?

• Google Trends.
• Social monitoring tools.
• Related search suggestions.
• Google’s “People Also Ask” feature.
• Keyword planner in the Google Ads tool.

2. Competitive Analysis and Search Intent

It’s time to look closely into top-ranking or competing results for selected keywords.

By reviewing competing sites’ content, you would be well off with all the search intent insights needed to improve content marketing strategy.

But why should your content align with search intent?

That’s because if the content does not answer searchers’ questions, it is deemed irrelevant by the search engine that obviously decides not to rank it higher in SERP.

Get your hands dirty with these tips to optimize content for search intent:

• Look at the format (Listicle, infographic, How-to guide, interviews) search engine prioritizes for the given query, think about which one readers prefer, and follow suit.
• The audience expects your content to address specific questions. Uncover them using “People also ask” and “Related searches.”
• Take cues from search intent to categorize content subtopics.

3. Content Structure and Subheadings

No amount of interesting information in the world will save content that is as good (actually, bad!) as a wall of text.

In contrast, organizing content allows you to structure ideas coherently. It makes the content crawlable, optimizes readability, and facilitates understanding. Structured content ranks high on search engines and drives more organic traffic to your website.

Don’t worry; it is easier DONE than said:

• Use header tags and advanced subheadings, H1 to H6, in descending order of importance.
• Break down the topic into multiple subtopics to make it easy to navigate, just like we’ve done here in this post.
• Make it scannable with short sentences, bullet points, lists, tables, and infographics.
• Avoid grammatical and spelling mistakes.
• Make Grammarly and Hemingway your greatest ally.

4. Keyword Frequency and Placement

We found the keywords perfectly to the T. But it is equally important to plant them in the right places within the content.

Following are the most valuable spots to place keywords:

• Title
• URL
• Meta descriptions
• Image alt tags
• Headings
• Main content

Further reading: How to use keywords in content?

While keyword stuffing is now a “folklore,” and rightfully so, too low a keyword frequency is also not desirable. Because then you’ll have trouble ranking organically unless the competition is low.

Generally accepted SEO practice suggests that you should naturally integrate keywords, main and semantic, throughout the copy such that a given keyword appears once per 200 words of the copy.

Take this Painter Salary Guide from Jobber as an example. At a quick glance, you can spot the keyword “painter salary” within the title, headings, and main copy, but not so much that it feels unnatural.

5. Eye-Grabbing Meta Description

A meta description is a snippet summarizing the webpage content that search engines displays in SERP.

Although it’s not one of the ranking factors, its optimization is always worth the effort because if your meta description is better than the one on a competing website, it can grab more click-through, improve indexing, climb higher on SERP and eventually reward your digital marketing efforts.

If you want to see how the optimized meta description looks in search results, Ranktracker’s SERP simulator has the solution.

Things you should remember while creating a compelling meta description:

• Keep it snappy, around 155 characters.
• Describe concisely the value you offer.
• Be specific; there is no room for fluff.
• Make it sound active and motivating.
• Use relevant call-to-action (CTA).
• Unique description for each content page.
• Do not forget to include keywords.

6. Internal Linking

Internal links take your readers from one page to another page of your website.

If you get your internal link structure right and manage it regularly, you make content work in two ways.

One, it allows search engine crawlers to discover relevant content elsewhere on your website and improve website rank.

Two, it guides readers through more content while keeping them hooked for a longer time and enhances the overall search experience.

7. Outbound Linking

A link from a webpage on website A to a webpage on website B is an outbound link. It’s like a vote of confidence shown by one website to another. Linking to authoritative sites is a great way to offer additional value to the audience and back up content with supporting resources.

Few outbound linking practices to remember:

• The page you are linking to must be relevant to your content.
• Outbound linking between unrelated topics can harm your SEO.
• Anchor text, the text to be hyperlinked, should be contextual.
• Stick to only high-quality, SSL enabled websites for linking.
• Ensure the page you are linking to opens a new window so it does not take the reader off your site.

8. Featured Snippets

You might have noticed that Google's top search results no longer begin with traditional blue links. Instead, users can see short texts, lists, tables, and videos that quickly answer the search queries right there. These are the featured snippets or position zero.

They are quickly evolving to be one of the most prominent features of SERP, and it totally makes sense to consider featured snippets during content optimization.

How to optimize content to earn featured snippets?

• Write as you talk.
• Optimize to answer “People also ask.”
• Use those questions in subheadings.
• Format content as per the ranking featured snippets.
• Give content a unique perspective.
• Arrange ideas using the inverted pyramid method.
• Google wants snippets to answer queries as quickly as possible, so keep each section's length between 40-50.

9. Strong Call-To-Action

Believe it or not, these snazzy-looking buttons like website feedback buttons, need strategies of their own. But nailing it will help you persuade the audience to take the desired action.

For a top-of-the-funnel user (TOFU), CTA should attract readers’ attention and build relationships. Conversely, CTA focusing on driving purchases, subscribing to newsletters, or downloading resources, works well for a bottom-of-the-funnel user (BOFU).

Some quick tips to craft click-worthy CTAs:

• Use bang-on call-to-action action phrases.
• Address customers’ pain points.
• Let the text be legible and above the fold.
• Invoke a sense of urgency. E.g., Sign up today only!
• Try and emphasize the value proposition. E.g., Subscribe for free.

10. Update Older Content

Fresh and up-to-date content has always been the fancy of readers and search engines alike. However, that doesn’t mean you should be a content mill and mass produce content. After all, quality over quantity is the key here. Reward your visitors with accurate and relevant content.

Another way to bring impactful content optimization results using old content is revamping.

How to update older content?

• Reevaluate keywords.
• Link to better resources.
• Add new facts, dates, statistics, or perspectives.
• Ensure that it follows recent algorithms of search engines.

11. Multimedia Content Optimization

With multimedia consumption raging in popularity, it’s the perfect time to ride the wave. Having SEO-optimized images, videos, and other media objects on a website makes a huge difference in its search engine visibility.

Check out these essential practices for optimizing media content:

Image Optimization

• Relevant and, if possible, the original image.
• Indexable format- JPNG, JPEG, or GIF.
• Keyword in the file name and Alt text.
• Resize image.
• Height and width attributes in the image tag.
• Image XML Sitemap.

Video Optimization

• Format- MPG, MPEG, MOV, M4V, and WMV.
• Host on YouTube and embed on your site.
• Visible brand name in the video.
• Keywords in the file name, keyword tags, and description.
• Transcript with keywords.
• Video XML sitemap.

Audio and Podcast Optimization

• Good quality audio files.
• Unique title and description.
• File names and audio-to-text transcriptions with relevant keywords

12. Social Shares

Sure, you want your content to stand out on social platforms. However, to make the content shareable on social media, you need to optimize it for sharing.

So, pay attention to:

• The content itself. It should be authoritative, engaging, and meaningful.
• Quick-share buttons so that social sharing is a one-click affair.

13. Content Optimization Tools

In the increasingly competitive content landscape, content optimization tools are a great way to build scalable content and SEO strategy and acquire higher rankings faster.

Companies or individual marketers, content optimization tools have something for everyone. Powered with machine learning, these tools help you find and bridge content gaps using the right keywords, topics, and subheadings from SERPs data.

Content Over-Optimization: How Much Is Too Much?

Optimization works, but over-optimization counterworks.

When you go overboard with technical SEO, there is a good chance that you lose sight of the bigger picture –creating content that speaks to readers.

Here’s what over-optimization looks like, and you should get away with it immediately:

• Keyword-heavy URLs.
• Links to low DA or spammy sites.
• Multiple main headings or H1.
• Excessive keywords in anchor texts while interlinking.
• A ton of internal and external links pointing to the homepage.

Wrap Up

By now, you must have realized (rather, shockingly) how many valuable content optimizations you were skipping to focus just on getting content published. But it’s never too late to create optimized content. So even if you can manage to apply a few of the above techniques, it’s a good start.