Eager to ensure your target audience finds your well-written, relevant and informative content? Before you begin to brainstorm ideas for new and unique content that’ll draw in potential customers, it’s essential that you optimise your existing content first. To do this, we recommend giving your high-quality content a helping hand with a touch of effective content SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).
However, this is by no means a small job. From product pages and service pages to blog posts and even those essential terms and conditions pages, the majority of websites are populated with important content that requires optimising.
To discover how to make these pages and their sought-after content show up in all the right places, simply carry on reading!
What is content optimisation?
If you’re new to content optimisation, then you might want to find out more about what it involves and why.
Put simply, content optimisation refers to ensuring that content is written in such a way that it reaches the largest possible target audience.
The content optimisation process has various components and is often supported by different SEO tools and expertise.
What does content optimisation do for SEO?
Optimised content is simply another component of SEO. The overall aim of SEO is to encourage search engines like Google to rank your website higher than those of your competitors. Optimised content supports this because search engine robots are able to identify this content, assess its value and ensure it’s more visible in SERPs than content that hasn’t been optimised.
Why is content optimisation important?
Due to the fact that content optimisation helps search engines to find and rank your content with ease, it can make your content more accessible and visible to your target audience. If a greater proportion of your target audience is able to find your content, then you’re likely to see significant improvement in many different areas across your business.
You might see, for example, an increase in conversions, higher numbers of website visitors or a greater number of enquiries and phone calls. Put simply, optimised content is search engine-friendly content – something that every business, regardless of whether they operate online or have a brick-and-mortar store, will benefit from.
What are the key components of content optimisation?
The components of content optimisation include the creation of meta titles, the incorporation of valuable keywords and the inclusion of links from authoritative domains.
We explore each one of these key components in greater detail below.
Keywords
Conducting keyword research is vital to ensuring search engines list your content in the appropriate places for the right people, promoting a higher CTR (click-through rate). Once you’ve identified relevant keywords with enough monthly search volume for the piece of content you’re trying to optimise, it’s important to include them throughout your work. You should also identify and include semantically related, synonymous and secondary keywords to increase the likelihood of your target audience finding your content.
However, it’s crucial that you avoid ‘keyword stuffing’ – the process of adding lots of very broadly related keywords into your content simply because they rank highly and not because they are useful or relevant to your content. Google and other search engines will not rank highly those websites that engage in this practice because it is considered to be misleading and unhelpful for the target audience.