When it comes to content marketing, creating high-quality content is only one piece of the puzzle. The second piece is content optimization, so it reaches the right audiences. Every business’s ultimate goal is to rank high on Google’s search engine results. However, this can be daunting and difficult, surrounded by so much competition.
It’s critical that you continually keep your audience in mind and create content around topics that resonate and provide them with the most value. Utilizing best SEO practices will help Google understand your business and present your content to your target audiences.
What is optimizing?
Optimizing is utilizing the best and most effective practices to improve results. The primary goal of content optimization is to make it functional and easy for your audience to understand.
Benefits of Content Optimization
Content optimization is an essential part of your marketing strategy. After all, what’s the point of creating content if no one can find it, or it won’t drive organic traffic and convert leads? If search engines understand your business, they can help the right audiences find you. Furthermore, content optimization isn’t a one-time task. Performing content optimization regularly by updating existing content and tackling technical SEO issues will help improve your results.
Best Practices for Optimizing Your Content
At some point, all marketers run into the issue of stagnant organic traffic. This often occurs because of evolving industry trends, how much content you’re creating and its quality, how your audience is digesting it, and how relevant your older content is. There are a few ways to optimize your content marketing to drive organic traffic and help you achieve desired results.
1. Always Keep Your Audience in Mind
If the content you’re creating doesn’t benefit or provide value, it’s not going to resonate with your target audience. Think of questions they might be searching for answers to or problems they’re trying to solve. Then, build your content around this information.
2. Repurpose Content
You may think that you need to constantly create and publish new content to achieve the best results, but that’s not always the case. There’s power in repurposing your existing content. Sometimes, all it needs is a refresh to keep your audience interested. For example, you can turn a blog post into a video tutorial or use internal data to inform a case study. Decide which content to repurpose based on what has performed well in the past and what you can breathe new life into with a unique spin.
3. Gain Insight from Data Analytics Tools
Tracking metrics to see how your content is performing is critical to gaining insight for future content marketing. The last thing you want to do is create content that doesn’t interest your audience, drive traffic, or give you a return on investment. These analytics provide value for determining what types of content perform best and the topics that resonate with your audience the most.
4. Inform Business Decisions with SEO
Before you start creating content, you must find suitable topics for your audience and search queries that present the best opportunity to drive your business. Tools such as Google Keyword Planner allow you to pull up any search query and check its monthly search volume and keyword difficulty. Typically, anything above 30 is difficult to rank for. It’s best to target keywords with high search volume and low difficulty.
The Takeaway
Content optimization can significantly help your business. By creating content that provides your audience with the most value, and having a strong SEO strategy in place, you’ll increase your chances of ranking high on Google’s search engine results. Additionally, tracking your performance metrics and repurposing best-performing content will provide your audience with a fresh, unique perspective and help you improve your overall results.