What Is Content Optimization, and How Can I Use It to Improve My Content?

If you’re one of the 40% of B2B or 37% of B2C content marketing teams with a documented strategy, well done. Having a documented strategy is the first step in implementing a successful content marketing process.

However, having a strategy does not guarantee your content will reach your audience, even if you choose topics, formats, and channels that align with your target audience’s needs and preferences. You also need to ensure your content is visible to the almighty search engine crawlers and adheres to Google’s helpful content standards.

How do you meet these tall orders? Apply content optimization techniques. Let’s dig into the nitty-gritty of what optimization means in the context of content and optimization methods.

Understand Content Optimization

If your content strategy provides topics, formats, and channels your audience is interested in and uses, you have already taken steps to ensure you craft engaging content. Fortunately, you won’t have to start from scratch to turn a good asset into a high-performing one.

In fact, optimizing your content is just a bit of housecleaning to ensure it can reach more people in your target customer base. Optimization maximizes content distribution, allowing you to cast a wider net and capture more of your audience’s attention.

If you’ve been doing content marketing for a while, you’ve undoubtedly incorporated a few techniques already, but you might need to implement more to give your content a real performance boost. Content optimization techniques include:

• Researching and including keywords: Including the long-tail and short-tail keywords that people will likely use to search for your products and services gives search engines the information they need to make your content rank higher for those terms. When people search for information about your topic, they’ll be more likely to click on your content if you appear on the first search engine results page.
• Adding metadata: Adding specific bits of info like title tags and meta descriptions helps guide search engine bots as they crawl your content, allowing them to classify and rank your content correctly.
• Including links to authoritative sources: Inserting authoritative links for content optimization can broaden your audience’s grasp of your topic and give your content more clout with search engines and your audience.
• Writing better headlines: Creating catchy headlines that include your main keyword and increase your audience’s interest will help attract the right people — and search engines — to your content.
• Improving readability: Using keyword-rich subtitles, headings, and subheadings helps search engines properly index and rank your content. They also make content more scannable, allowing your audience to digest information more quickly, a major plus in today’s time-stressed world.
• Embedding more visuals: Using visuals, infographics, and videos to break up the text helps to retain your readers’ attention. Labeling visual aids properly with metadata allows search engines to “see” this content, raising your visibility in search results.

Content optimization sets up your web pages, blog posts, and other publications to attract search engines and, even more importantly, the people likely to buy your products and services.

Breaking it down into chunks of easily achievable tasks simplifies the process, making it easy for you to optimize every piece of content that you publish. Let’s dig deeper into each of these points to see how you can simplify your optimization process.

Apply Keyword Optimization for Increased Visibility

The key to keyword mastery is to learn what your target customers want to find and how they search for it, as the SEO experts at moz.com point out. Targeted keyword research can help you discover just that.

Create Customer Personas

Content optimization with keywords starts with an understanding of who your customers are. Many companies find that creating customer personas, such as “Debbie Doctor” and “Dan the Developer,” helps them put a face on their target audience.

Demographics, such as age, gender, location, income, and occupation, are vital to your customer personas. Even more importantly, you need to include your customers’ preferences, the questions they ask, and what keeps them up at night — their pain points.

Facebook Analytics and Google Analytics can help you narrow down all these factors. Your content analytics program will also be an essential ingredient in nailing down who is converting through your existing content, helping you get an accurate picture of your typical customers.

Find Out How People Search for Your Products with a Keyword Research Tool

Identifying relevant keywords your audiences use is essential to content optimization, while keyword mapping will help you keep track of your keywords. Keyword research requires you to:

• List your products, services, and related topics.
• Enter them into a keyword research tool.
• Assess top-ranking entries to understand search intent.

Google’s Keyword Planner is easy to use, even if you’re not running Google Ads.

When you enter your keywords, the tool will suggest similar keywords, along with the monthly search volume for each. Choosing longer-tail terms with fewer monthly searches often improves content optimization since there is less competition, particularly if they’re more relevant to your niche.

Often, suggested keywords will include questions. With the rise of voice search that uses personal assistants like Alexa and Siri, questions that have your keywords will help you rank higher. Voice search consists of 48% of all web searches, creating the proliferation of natural language questions as keywords.

Source: DigitalGYD

Use these keywords naturally in your content, especially in its title, subtitle, and first paragraph. Never stuff keywords into an article or use awkward wordings. With today’s search engines’ sophistication, they can recognize synonyms and disregard common words like “the,” “a,” “in,” “an,” and “you” in your content.

Leverage Metadata to Get on Your Target Audience’s Radar

When you search for something, the results list includes a title and a short description. These items are metadata, which help determine which content appears where in the results.

Even more importantly, they help searchers determine, at a glance, what the content is about. Including metadata as part of your content optimization process makes it more likely your audience will see your content in the SERP and click on the link. Title tags and meta descriptions are two important metadata components.

Title Tags

Since social media and search engines use these as headlines to describe your content, optimize them to attract more people who search for your products and services or with related questions or issues. The ideal format is to include your primary keyword first, your secondary keyword second, and then your brand name — all in only 50 to 60 characters, if possible.

To format your title tag, separate the two keywords with a hyphen and the keywords from your brand name with a vertical bar (|). Count all the spaces and characters in your character count.

Blog posts often include only the post title or an alternative and your brand name. However, your title should consist of a keyword for content optimization.

Here are two examples, the first for a product, the second, for a blog post about how to choose products of that type.

• Product page: Bridal Bouquets — Floral Arrangements | Ideal Florist
• Blog Post: How To Choose Your Bridal Bouquet | Ideal Florist

Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions are short, accurate, yet attention-grabbing descriptions of what each piece of content offers its readers. Ideally, they should be between 150–160 characters, including punctuation and spaces.

Here are two examples for the fictional florist above:

• Product page: Find the ideal bridal bouquets for your big day with advice from the expert team at Ideal Florist. Find floral arrangements and bridal party flowers here.
• Blog post: Discover how to choose the perfect bridal bouquet for your big day from the wedding floral arrangement professionals at Ideal Florist. Learn more in this post.

Including a call-to-action to encourage your audience to click on the link can increase the likelihood that they will.

Use Links to Authoritative Sources To Give Your Content Clout

As the vintage E.F. Hutton commercial points out, people are more likely to heed advice if a major industry expert supports your point of view. Linking to authoritative sources helps with content optimization by letting your audience know that you understand the value of research and providing trustworthy information.

Conversely, when you produce the kind of high-quality content that others cite in their work, you’ll get valuable backlinks to your content, raising your likelihood of appearing higher in search engine results. You can receive backlinks organically or by joining forces with other brands and subject matter experts to promote one another’s content.

Not only will world-class content and backlinks help you get more of your target customers to your brand’s online channels, but they’ll also leverage the power of recommendations. When a blog post helps one of your target customers solve a problem, she’ll probably recommend that post to her friends and colleagues, increasing your audience with more of your target customers.

Create Catchy Headlines To Grab Your Audience’s Attention

The saying that there is nothing new under the sun applies to content topics. No matter what topic you choose, searchers looking for information about it will see countless results.

However, content optimization in your headings makes it more likely that your post will be the one your target audience picks to read. Create a catchy headline and include your target keywords to let your audience know at a glance that your post is relevant to their needs.

Unless your content capitalizes explicitly on a current event, create evergreen headlines to accompany evergreen content. Using titles like “How to” or “X Easy Ways to Do Y” lets your audience know they’ll receive actionable information that helps them solve a problem.

Include Subtitles and Bullet Points To Guide the Audience’s Eye

Breaking up your content improves readability and scannability. Using subtitles, headings, and subheadings helps your audience fast-forward if they need only some of the information you offer.

These guideposts also provide a break for the reader’s eye, especially when you’re posting longer-form content. Keeping your paragraphs short also helps readers move through the page and reduces the feeling of overwhelm by seeing large walls of text.

Including bulleted and numbered lists for content optimization underscores essential information and guides a reader’s eye. They work a lot like the highlighting you did in school when you crammed for finals, helping readers remember the most critical information in your article.

Incorporate Visual Content To Bring Your Words to Life

Effective content management includes maximizing every aspect of your content, including the visuals. The more senses you can incorporate into your content, the more memorable your posts will be.

If you only hear something, you’ll probably remember only 10% of it later that week. When you slip an image into the mix, the percentage of what your audience will retain rises to 65 percent.

If you pair written text with images, infographics, and videos, you involve three senses, giving your audience an even better chance of remembering it later. Posts that include images increase engagement by 180%, while ones with videos make people more likely to buy what you’re selling.

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Source: Hubspot

Don’t forget your friendly search engines, though. Since they can’t actually *see* images or watch videos, use the right metadata, such as alt text and titles, to help search engines zero in on your content so it can appear higher in search results.

Use Content Optimization for All Content To Boost Your Strategy’s Effectiveness

The great thing about digital content is your ability to update it in minutes. Don’t limit optimization to new content. Expand your revamped content strategy to include past content as well.

With Divvy’s comprehensive content marketing platform, you can easily retrieve older content, optimize it with all the tips we’ve provided here, and get it working overtime to attract more target customers to your business. For a quick demonstration of how we can help your content optimization efforts, request a demo today!