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As marketers, we’ve all done it.
We want to drive more organic traffic around a specific topic, so we create a piece of content with relevant keywords that will reach our target audience. We press publish. We promote and distribute the new content on our channels, and then…we forget it exists or move on to the next task at hand. Oops.
Some of that content will naturally perform well and even meet or exceed benchmarks, especially if the topic’s evergreen or the keyword difficulty is in our favor. However, most of the time, our content needs to be reviewed on a consistent basis with tender loving care. Enter content optimization.
What Is Content Optimization?
By definition, content optimization means to improve a piece of content so it can be found more easily on search engines and, therefore, your target audience. Usually, its goal is to increase organic traffic, leads, conversions, or all of the above.
We’d like to take that definition one step further. Rather than asking, “How can we get our blogs to rank?” let’s ask “Is our content helping our audience?”. Although content optimization will always require SEO tactics in order to appease the algorithms, Google has begun rewarding “reliable, people-first content” above all else.
Adopting the “people first, search engines second” mindset may feel strange initially because it goes against what we’ve thought for years. But the results are worth it.
The Importance of Content Optimization
You put a lot of effort, research, and originality into your content (plus blood, sweat, and tears — we can only assume). If you’re pushing new content into the ether without regularly tracking its relevance, performance, and accuracy, though, then you’re setting up your content for failure and wasting time in the process.
In a case study of existing content conducted by Moz, 41.46% of re-optimized articles received more URL clicks for their target keyword. A recent McKinsey report found that increasing the relevance and engagement of content increases B2B revenue by 5%–10%.
We’re no strangers to optimizing content. In Q3 of last year, we placed an emphasis on optimizing older blogs, and our rankings and traffic for historically underperforming content improved. In fact, the top three articles that drove our highest organic traffic over the past six months were all optimized pieces.
Our Head of Marketing, Nicole MacLean, believes it’s important for content marketers to prioritize optimization within their strategy because:
“A key ingredient of helpful content is relevance. Marketers are always learning, and if you want your content to be truly helpful, it's important to review old content to ensure it’s referencing the most up-to-date stats and findings.” — Nicole MacLean
Think of its importance from your audience’s perspective as well. Our CEO, Mike Leonhard, says it best:
“No one wants to read outdated information, nor does Google want to present it to its users. Out-of-date content will reflect poorly on your authority and expertise as a company. How can current and prospective customers trust your brand if you can’t speak to the latest trends?” — Mike Leonhard
The Benefits of Content Optimization
Content optimization solutions are cost-effective and drain fewer resources because you are strengthening pre-existing content that’s already built a rapport with Google. After three months, it’s hopefully started to rank for keywords and drive traffic to your site.
Think of content optimization like bringing in your car for a tune-up before a long road trip.
Let’s say you’ve had it for five years, so you’ve already covered a decent amount of ground together. You trust it to do its job. But the reality is, in order to keep it running smoothly, you have to get an oil change every 5,000 miles.
Fine-tuning your content on a consistent basis will:
- Drive more organic traffic: Tailoring your content to help your target audience strengthens its chances of reaching the right people in need of your answers and insights.
- Improve search engine rankings: Matching the search intent of your focus keyword (such as having a content type and format that’s aligned with the top-ranking competitor pages) increases your content’s visibility and likelihood of appearing on the first page of SERPs.
- Increase conversion rates: Refining your content using a consistent tone and voice, thorough research, and unique points of view makes it more persuasive and trustworthy — helping to boost conversions.
What Does It Take for Content To Rank?
In this day and age, sometimes it takes a miracle — plus, a few other ranking factors that regularly optimizing your content helps address. Although none of us know the exact science of what the search engine algorithms favor, Google has made certain aspects of top-performing content clear:
High-quality: Improving E-E-A-T throughout your content is a surefire way to strengthen its quality and rank. This can be achieved through various tactics such as ensuring your content accurately answers and aligns with your audience’s search intent and leveraging insights from subject matter experts in your industry. Consider hiring professional writers to ensure your content is engaging, authoritative, and optimized for search engines.
User Experience: Optimizing your content for different devices (mobile vs. desktop), keeping your image and video file sizes from being too large, and formatting your content for readability will create a smooth UX and keep your audience on your page longer. Exceptional content won’t mean much to Google if your page takes forever to load.
<div class="tip">Pages should load within 2.5 seconds and interactions on your site should process even faster (within 100 milliseconds).</div>
Off-Page SEO:
- Building credible backlinks by optimizing your content with unique insights and guest posting on reputable and relevant sites lets Google know that your site is trustworthy, increasing its visibility and reach.
- Garnering more testimonials from review sites and engaging with your reviews, both positive and negative, strengthens your off-page SEO tactics, fosters customer relationships, and increases your rankings.
- Although it’s a low-weight ranking factor, increasing your brand awareness via your social channels and posts can help with your backlinking efforts as well. Be sure to empower your audience to share your content — especially your blog posts — on their own social channels by including one-click social share buttons throughout your articles.
On-Page SEO: Optimized metadata, headings, anchor text, and keyword implementation will always be fundamental to your ranking potential. However, the way in which we communicate our knowledge about the topic will weigh heavier in terms of where we rank. It’s also beneficial to understand the different types of SEO keywords in order to use them in your content compellingly.
5 Tips To Optimize Your Content for SEO
In order to optimize for SEO in 2024, you have to swallow a tough pill: Generative AI and advanced search experiences have changed the way your customers search for content — whether you want to believe it or not.
John Miller, founder of Scribewise, helped address common misconceptions about SEO content optimization in Scribewise’s recent report, The State of B2B Buyer Preferences in 2024. His team’s research found that 54% of marketers believe SEO is less important than it used to be, but 63% of buyers still include an internet search in their buying process.
Also notable, 59% of buyers say they want content that empathizes with and provides solutions to their specific pain points.
How can you optimize for organic SEO when both it — and our feelings toward it — are constantly evolving, while also acknowledging your audience’s search journey? Let’s discuss some search engine optimization tips to achieve exactly that.
1. Plan Your Writing With Detailed SEO Content Briefs
An effective way to save time during both the content creation and optimization process is to make sure you’re teeing up your writers for success from the very start. Briefs improve the overall consistency and quality of your content. They are detailed outlines that guide your writers to create content that outranks your competitors.
Briefs ensure that your content will have:
- Strategic titles and headers containing primary and secondary keywords
- Thorough keyword research and authoritative insights about your topic
- Relevant internal links with keyword-optimized anchor text
- A consistent brand tone, voice, and writing style
If you find yourself in need of more SEO strategic insights but don’t have the time to conduct the research yourself, Compose.ly offers a content brief creation service that provides you with quality content and hours in time savings.
2. Conduct Keyword Competition Research
Leverage a content gap analysis tool (we use Ahrefs) to gain a clearer understanding of the organic keywords for which your content isn't ranking, but are utilized by the top SERP performers. Keyword competition helps identify any sections that discuss semantically related or secondary keywords you may have overlooked in your writing. Expand upon them in your optimization.
Domain authority is not a direct ranking factor, but it does provide you with a good estimate of how likely your page will rank compared to your competitors. It also represents whether or not other brands consider your content to be high-quality by linking to it within their own pieces. If the content in the top-ranking positions comes from sites with a DA of 60 or higher, it could make it more challenging for your content to get on the first page of SERPs.
If you’re targeting a high-competition keyword, there’s a good chance it may never reach your ideal audience. Your best bet at establishing yourself as an authority in your space is to optimize your content with low-difficulty, high-search-volume keywords that have decent traffic potential.
This approach allows you to rank for more niche topics, increasing your chances of a higher topical authority, which is different from your DA and represents how much of an expert you are in a particular subject. Establishing your topical authority via hub and spoke content marketing, as well as good internal linking strategies, can help you rank for topics with a higher keyword difficulty.
Before you get lost in the SEO data sauce, heed this word of caution from Bin Cochran, SEO Expert and VP of Marketing at Marketwake:
“Above all else, you must ask yourself: Is this updated content something I would enjoy? Does it help someone answer a question? Does it educate, or does it entertain? Am I proud of the content my company or I put out?”
3. Include Internal Links
Internal links are like a Rolodex of relevant knowledge and content. Not only do they help Google crawl and index your site, but they also provide a more seamless user experience for your audience.
They direct readers to articles or resources that cover your subtopics in greater depth, thus optimizing your brand credibility. Internal links showcase your content’s comprehensiveness, which Google favors when presenting results to users.
As effective as internal links are, it’s important to note these best practices before going link-crazy:
- Don’t force internal linking. When referencing a supplemental piece of content, it should truly help your audience gain a deeper understanding of the subtopic you’re linking.
- Ensure the anchor text itself is keyword-rich.
- If it’s been a while since you last read through the blog post you’d like to internally link, review the piece to verify that it doesn’t include any outdated best practices or insights.
- If you come across duplicate content or articles that need rewrites, add them to a list of “Future Optimizations Needed” and prioritize that list based on ranking potential.
- Aim to link content on your site that is more evergreen, recently published, and/or high-performing.
Of course, it’s impossible to keep all of your content up-to-date all of the time — that would require some sort of “everything, everywhere, all at once” multiverse. But, we are recommending that you approach your internal linking with care.
4. Structure Your Content for Readability
Don’t fall victim to writing long walls of text! Break. It. Up. While you optimize, consider the format and flow of your content. Both search engines and audiences need to scan your content with ease if you want it to resonate.
<div class="tip">Keeping your content’s quality top of mind can help ensure that it’s outlined for maximum readability. Download our content quality optimization cheat sheet for more tips.</div>
Headers are a heavy-weight ranking factor so make sure they’re skimmable and presented in a contextually appropriate way. As a quick reminder:
- H2s = Identify main points
- H3s = Break out subpoints under H2s
- H4s = Further break out subpoints under H3s
Additional readability best practices to implement while optimizing include:
- Capping your paragraphs at four to six sentences for easy digestion
- Breaking up your sections with images, videos, quotes, infographics, bulleted lists, and bolded words to keep your readers engaged
- Shortening sentences that are too long and expanding sentences that are too choppy — striking a balance between the two will help your audience focus better
5. Optimize Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
Meta titles and descriptions are your audience’s first impression of your content. Strengthening your metadata should be a priority step when it comes to optimizing your on-page SEO.
Although your meta title should include your target keyword, it should also be enticing enough to garner clicks.
A quick exercise: Which is more persuasive to you?
- “The 2024 Content Strategy Guide”
- “The Ultimate Time-Saving Content Strategy Guide.”
Meta descriptions should accurately tease what your content covers and offers and convince your audience to read your content. Google recommends accomplishing this with anywhere between 70 to 160 characters. Descriptions longer than that will get truncated.
Include your focus keyword here as well. (Bonus points if you can naturally squeeze in a secondary keyword.)
For example, one of our highest top-performing blogs with our most downloaded asset, “How To Write a Top-Notch Company Boilerplate,” has the following meta title and description:
Meta Title: “How to Write a Top-Notch Company Boilerplate: 3 Examples | Compose.ly.”
Meta Description: “If your content strategy involves press releases, you better have a compelling company boilerplate. Find out how to write one for your business.”
Content Optimization Strategies That Improve Your Content Quality
Increasing your content's SERP ranking, organic keywords, or backlinks is meaningless if the content can't keep your audience engaged and on the page. In order to say something unique that differentiates you from competitors, you need to first improve your content quality.
Review and Compare Top-Ranking Competitor Pages
Identify which blogs or landing pages are ranking in the top three positions for your target keyword. SEO tools like Ahrefs and Semrush can quickly point you in the right direction.
Once you’ve found the content, read it. Yep. Set aside time to cosplay as an audience member and review their content with a critical eye. Ask yourself if these pieces truly align with your search intent and answer your questions.
After you’ve analyzed your competition, read your own piece of content from start to finish.
<div class="tip">Leverage an AI tool to compare sections of copy from both your content and your competitors to identify what’s missing from yours and generate topics to help you fill in those gaps.</div>
Although this might not be the quickest content optimization strategy, it’s one of the most effective approaches. You’re left with a clear direction on how to improve what matters most: search intent and an emotional connection with your audience.
De-Optimize Your Content
Be honest. When’s the last time you hit “Command + F” on a blog to see how many mentions of your target keyword it has?
Sometimes, the content piece that just won’t rank is actually over-optimized. The length of your content should be your guiding light in terms of how many times you can reasonably mention your focus keyword. For instance, a meaty pillar blog of 3,000 to 5,000 words allows you to be more thorough and leverage your target keyword more times than a 1,000-word article does.
When we say to de-optimize your content, we mean to shift the sole focus away from keyword implementation and toward content relevancy, comprehensiveness, and education.
If you mention the term “keyword research” in a blog post more than a dozen times, Google is going to expect you to be a keyword research expert.
Are you educating your audience about the topic you’re trying to rank for, or are you attempting to get more form submissions?
If you improve your content by writing the best overview of your target keyword rather than optimizing the keyword for SERPs, you set yourself up to create an original piece of content.
You’ll gain your audience’s trust because your landing pages alone provide value rather than trying to squeeze someone into your funnel. It’s also easier to weave in your keywords more naturally.
Another de-optimization tactic includes reviewing your content’s links:
- Are you including your most relevant, up-to-date internal links?
- Do you need to remove any outdated or broken third-party links?
- Is there a section within your content that reads like it was created to target keywords? If so, remove it.
We’re not suggesting that you completely ignore search engines when optimizing your content. Rather, we’re challenging you to deeply consider what your content needs most. Sometimes, content simply needs more content.
Feature Partners, Customers, and Thought Leaders in Your Content
Google loves content with E-E-A-T, and featuring insights from thought leaders helps establish your brand as an authority in your space while also strengthening your optimization strategy.
Leverage Customer Stories
Add quotations from your clients that discuss their challenges and successes. If it’s relevant to a topic you’re optimizing, relate it to your target audience’s pain points. People are more likely to read through blogs that sound like they were written by someone who understands them — someone with similar, real-life experiences. In Forrester’s 2023 B2B Brand and Communications Survey, 90% of respondents say that they completely or somewhat trust peers in their industry.
Lean on Your Partners
Utilize webinars that you’ve hosted with guest partners, internal SMEs, or external thought leaders by embedding video clips from those webinars into relevant pieces of content. You’ve already done all the heavy lifting of executing a webinar. Continue to reap the benefits by identifying bite-sized timestamps that discuss topics within the content you’re refining. Semrush found that articles with at least one video receive 83% more traffic, and articles with three videos or more attract 55% more backlinks.
Reach out to Your LinkedIn Network
Tap into your LinkedIn network to add more thought leadership to your piece. Reach out to any influencers whose content you enjoy following personally, and ask if they’d be interested in contributing a short blurb to your optimized content. Publish a post asking for insights from industry experts and reward those who engage by featuring them within your content. Thought leaders want to increase their own reach, and your content could be in need of more original insights in order to drive leads.
Leverage Subject Matter Expert Review
If you work in a highly regulated industry, such as medicine, law, or finance, consider working with subject matter experts in your field to review your content and assure its accuracy. Google loves firsthand experiences from people who really know their stuff. An SME review can help satisfy search engines while strengthening your content’s quality.
Subject matter experts often have higher education degrees or doctorates, are trained in SEO best practices, and hold various industry-specific certifications. By having them review your writing, you're aligning your content with Google’s Helpful Content Updates.
Recruiting and vetting external SMEs can be a time-consuming process. Compose.ly’s Subject Matter Expert Review finds an SME for you who quickly augments your internal team with experience in your particular field.
Enrich Your Content With Rich Media
As kids, we loved picture books, and that never really fades as we get older. Our attention spans have only worsened thanks to TikTok’s terrifyingly accurate For You page.
Web content containing visuals like images or videos performs better — on average, receiving up to 94% more views (Search Engine Journal). However, it’s important to optimize rich media files so they don’t slow down your page speed.
<div class="tip">Repurpose and resize design assets from your top-performing social posts, especially carousels, to become infographics within relevant blogs as you optimize. If a specific design resonates with your audience on more top-of-funnel channels, like Instagram, there’s a higher likelihood that it will resonate on top-of-funnel blogs as well.</div>
We recommend bookmarking a quick reference point to keep up with spec sizes, like Shopify's Website Image Size Cheat Sheet for good measure (pun intended).
Here are some best practices to keep in mind when optimizing your content with images:
- Images with file sizes larger than 20 MB can negatively impact your page speed. Compress your images to be anywhere from 500 KB to 2 MB.
- If you plan on adding blog banners, we’ve found that these dimensions tend to work best: 900 x 300 px.
- Exporting a JPEG as a PNG reduces an image’s file size while keeping most of its quality intact.
- Add alt tags to your images in case your content page ever loads slowly, and make sure to include your target keyword within it. Be sure to write a clear description of what’s going on in the image.
- Adjust the file names of your images to include your keyword. A file name with random letters and words won’t make sense.
Here are a few tips for optimizing video files:
- If you’re adding a video to a landing page with minimal copy, try to keep your video under 3 minutes long.
- If you’re embedding a video clip on an in-depth blog, aim for a video length between 30 seconds to one minute.
- If you host your videos on YouTube, you’ll need to give them compelling titles and descriptions that include your keywords. Approach them like you would meta titles and descriptions.
- Add closed captions to your videos for accessibility purposes.
- Adjust the file names of your videos to include your keywords as well.
Maintain a Consistent Brand Tone and Voice
The more apparent your brand tone, voice, and writing style are throughout your content, the easier it is for readers to visualize an actual person behind the brand. It might be good to give your brand guidelines an audit or refresh if you haven’t reviewed them in a while.
If you’re optimizing older content, it’s likely that someone else wrote the first version, especially if you’re on a large team or work with freelancers. It’s important to sprinkle in your brand voice as it stands today while maintaining the integrity, message, and research of the writing done before you.
Don’t just add in a few jokes or fun phrases because your brand voice is more playful now. Read the room and adjust the tone to make contextual sense. Once you’re done optimizing a piece of content, it should never sound like it was written by two different people.
We recently updated our tone and voice guidelines and found these exercises helpful:
- Narrow your brand voice down to three characteristics. Write a short description for each, what they mean when applied to your brand, and what they don’t mean for your brand.
For example: Compose.ly’s brand voice is witty. That means it is clever, cheeky, and humorous. It does not mean it is cheesy or immature.
- Make a list of your audience segments, and describe what your tone should be when addressing each.
For example: When our content is targeting content leaders, our tone should be more assertive and confident. When it addresses content managers, it should be more inviting, empowering, and encouraging.
- Distill your services or products into their key value props, and identify how you would apply your tone to convey those values.
For example: Our content editing services strengthen brand trust and readability, therefore our tone should be more polished, authoritative, and accurate when discussing this offering.
How To Strengthen Your Conversion-Based Optimization
Getting your content to reach more of the right people is only half the battle. Now that you’ve caught your audience’s attention, the floor is all yours, and you better be captivating. It’s important to strike an emotional chord from the start while also providing a frictionless user experience throughout. That way, if qualified folks want to further engage with your brand, more information is a click away.
A majority of your organic traffic enters and stays put at the top of the funnel. Let’s discuss some ways to optimize content for conversions.
Be Empathetic
- Relate to your audience by calling out their challenges. Showcase that you know exactly what they’re going through, and better yet, you’ve done the heavy lifting and researched strategies, best practices, and resources to improve their day-to-day.
- We found success in a recent webinar series campaign by sending promo emails that touched on pain points the recipients were experiencing, letting them know that they’re not alone, and then tying in how our webinars could guide them through their challenges.
- The email that generated the highest CTR for webinar signups followed this structure and outperformed the average CTR by 89%.
Focus on Your CTAs
- Everyone says to write compelling CTAs, but it’s important to be strategic about their placements as well.
- Test your form above and below the fold.
- Place pop-up CTA buttons that are short and sweet throughout your page where they make the most sense contextually.
- Experiment with in-text, bolded CTAs. This will help you identify your most qualified leads — people who engage with hyperlinked CTAs are actually reading your content.
Conduct A/B Tests
- Use these tests to identify which of your messages is more persuasive. Make note of which copy drove higher click-through rates, and format future lead generation landing pages to follow suit.
- You should only A/B test one aspect of your page/copy at a time. Some page elements you can A/B test are H1s, hero copy, form headers, and the colors of your CTA buttons or hyperlinks.
Talk to Your Audience Like a Peer
- The more you can personalize your content, the better. This will require some audience research and segmentation in order to better understand their motivations and behaviors.
- Be cognizant of where your audience is on their journey. Keep the focus of your content on their awareness level, not your products. If you are truly matching your audience’s search intent, your content should correspond to their exact stage in the buyer's journey. For example, if someone is engaging with your content and at the awareness level, the focus of that piece should be to guide and educate, not give them a sales pitch.
- If their first touch point is a “how to” blog, consider adding a module at the bottom of blogs that features three supplemental, relevant pieces of content.
- If a prospect has engaged with a recent customer story on your page, consider adding a CTA that drives them to a relevant webinar you co-hosted with a partner or customer.
- If an audience member is visiting your pricing page, consider a pop-up CTA or chat message for a free trial, demo, or sample of your offerings.
Can AI Optimize Content?
Generative AI tools, like ChatGPT, can certainly help streamline your content optimization process. However, if your content quality and authority need optimizing, ChatGPT can’t generate original insights or points of view. It can only present and summarize pre-existing thought leadership.
So, how does AI content optimization work? ChatGPT can be used to help optimize your SEO efforts. For example, it can analyze the keyword difficulty and search volume of a set of keywords and identify the best one for your content. You can ask it to generate SEO-optimized meta titles and descriptions and categorize the search intent for any keywords you’d like to include in your piece.
ChatGPT can also help you optimize for readability, grammar, and punctuation. Try asking it to condense paragraphs or sentences without losing any primary messaging or themes, and you’ll be shocked at how succinct you could’ve been.
If you’d like to A/B test copy before implementing and optimizing, submit a prompt asking the tool for A/B testing variations.
Content Optimization TL;DR
- Some of the main benefits of content optimization include increased organic traffic, rankings, and conversion rates.
- Although there’s no exact science to getting your content to rank, Google rewards high-quality content with a smooth user experience.
- Optimize your content for SEO by outlining detailed briefs ahead of time, conducting a content gap analysis, leveraging relevant internal links, improving your readability, and writing strong meta titles and descriptions.
- Increasing your content's SERP ranking, organic keywords, or backlinks is meaningless if it can't keep your audience engaged and on the page.
- Optimizing your content’s quality is the most effective way to say something unique with your content that differentiates you from competitors.
- If you want to increase your CRO, try first being empathetic to your audience’s pain points and journey, then personalize your content and A/B test CTAs and headers.
- It’s important to remember that AI tools can only present and summarize pre-existing thought leadership, but they can help with SEO content optimization.
Simplify Content Optimization With Compose.ly
Hopefully, by now, we’ve helped empower you to give your content the best performance potential — your hard work deserves to succeed and be celebrated. We’ve also probably dispelled the myth that optimizing old content takes less time than creating a new piece.
If beginning the process seems daunting, we can audit your content for you and provide strategic recommendations with our content optimization services.
Our SEO Specialists thoroughly review your content pages for performance and specify which pieces of content should be optimized, rewritten, or removed. Based on that review, they’ll also dive deep into specific pieces and search queries, ensuring your content matches user intent and has a chance to rank.
If you’d like to capture more quality leads and move them through your funnel with even stronger content, connect with one of our SEO specialists and drop us a line!
