10 tips to optimise your content for good SEO

In a time when 68% of all online experiences start with a search engine, your digital marketing strategy should focus on ranking high search engine page results (SERPs). But we know that staying ahead of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) trends is one of the most challenging things, given Google is constantly evolving its algorithm.

Despite these changing trends, one thing is established as standard – good quality content is the new gold in the realm of digital marketing. Why? Because content is the backbone of the internet and social media platforms. In fact, as compared to conventional outbound marketing, content marketing creates will give you 3x leads at a 62% lower cost.

Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing as the following:

“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

But you can’t stay afloat with just any content. This content must be high-quality and optimised for search engines and your platform of dissemination for Google to index you and rank you higher on the SERPs. 

Don’t worry; we’ve got some amazing tips for you regarding website content optimisation. But before we get to it, let’s brief over some basics. 

Why is content marketing optimisation important?

Research from Ahrefs revealed that Google does not route its organic traffic to 90.63% of websites because it isn’t SEO-optimised. So, whether you’re a one-person business or a global conglomerate, content marketing should be on your list. 

But it won’t matter how great your content is if users can’t find it, right? You will not be able to show up on SERPs if your content is not optimized because there will be a disconnect between these two things:

• Your intention towards creating the content 
• Search engine distribution and delivery to its users

Therefore, if you want to show up at the top on SERPs, optimisation is a must to be among the 9.37% of websites that get traffic from Google’s organic search results.

Who knows, if you crack the code of SEO optimised content, you might even become amongst the elite 0.21% that gets maximum traffic. But that demands a consistent effort in polishing your content optimisation strategy and creating high-quality content. 

To help you create high-quality SEO optimised content, we’ve created a content optimisation checklist to use as a guide. So what’s the wait? Keep reading till the end to master the art of optimising your site content for search engines.

Tip no. 1 get the best keywords

Any content creation should always start by first figuring out keywords that will help it rank high in the SERPs. If you optimise your content for certain keywords, search engines will more likely display your content in result pages when users enter it in their searches. It may aid in expanding both your site’s organic traffic and readership.

When you’re choosing your keywords, you’ll be looking for two types of keywords:

Primary keyword

This is the one you want to focus your optimisation efforts on the most. Your article’s principal keyword should signify the content’s core topic.

Secondary keywords

These keywords refer to certain relevant sections you’ll put in your content. You want these terms to complement your primary keyword, not steer the piece in another direction.

There are several tools paid and free tools in the market that you can use to carry out keyword research. Some of our favourite tools are mentioned in the table below: 

Bonus Tip: When choosing the right keyword, aim for high search volume, lower difficulty or competition, and high trending, as recorded through Google Trends.

Tip no. 2 determine the search intent

Google spends a lot of time and resources training algorithms to assess user intent when providing results accurately. The motivation or reason behind a user’s query is known as their “search intent.” As such, it plays a significant role in the overall rankings. 

Depending on the user’s search intent when they type in your targeted keywords, you’ll want to tailor your content structure, tone, and call-to-action (CTA). When a user searches, their search intent is categorised as one of the following: 

Users use specific keywords specific to the type of intent, and you can curate content accordingly, keeping them in mind. Let’s discuss them one by one:

Navigational intent

Users looking for a particular page or website will utilise navigational keywords in their searches. If your business is well-known and you get a steady stream of visitors, you may target these queries. You may do this with website content optimisation to target branded keywords on the homepage of your platform, its About section, and other pages.

Informational intent

Informational terms like “guide,” “tutorial,” “recipes,” or “checklist” or question phrases like “how” and “what” imply that consumers are interested in learning more about a specific subject. You can write thought leadership pieces, blog posts, tutorials, industry studies, and how-to guides with titles that target the keywords we’ve mentioned for informational intent. 

For example, if you’re a food blogger, an article on “How to Make Mushroom Bulgogi” or “Mushroom Bulgogi Recipe” can cater to informational intent. 

Commercial intent

When users are thinking about buying something and want to learn more about their options, they browse with commercial keywords, such as “cheapest,” “great,” “review,” and “compare.” Or variants on a product name, such as “Nike vs Adidas,” “Converse features,” etc. 

Such search queries are best served by content like product comparisons, reviews, and articles describing product features and specs.

Transactional intent

When a user is ready to make a purchase, they search for terms with transactional intent, like “purchase,” “price,” “discount,” and “deals.” You may utilise these keywords on product pages or optimise search intent with discount pages.

Now that you know that you need to be flexible with your writing style and the content format to carry out search intent optimisation, let’s move on to our next tip.

Tip no. 3 conduct competitor research 

Competitive analysis gauges how well one company performs compared to others in the same market. It’s a strategy for collecting information and making it useful. Keeping tabs on your competitor will help you create a content optimisation strategy that is better than theirs.

To win the traffic war against your rivals, you must learn whose platforms are the most widely used and highly visible. To discover your competitors manually, type your focus keywords into the Google search window and see who comes up first. Repeat this process with a slew of other keywords, and compile a list of your competition. 

Here are some other resources you may utilise to identify rivals and monitor their content marketing tactics:

• Suppose you’re focusing on popularising your content in areas other than your location. In that case, you should gather information on search engine rankings in other countries utilising programs like Semrush and Ahrefs.
• Use competitor surveillance technology like Similarweb and BuzzSumo to learn about (and track) your rivals’ online activities and footprint.
• Use social media to snoop on the information your rivals have posted and learn about the promotions they use to attract customers.
• If you subscribe to your competitors’ newsletters, you may keep a tab on what’s new with the business and what kind of content they’re promoting.

After completing a competitive analysis, you’ll need to focus on technicalities, which brings us to the next tip!

Tip no. 4 optimise meta title and meta description

Meta Title: The clickable headings in SERPs are called Meta titles or Title tags. Users choose which result to click depending on what they see as meta titles. Meta titles should be 40-60 characters long and written in a compelling way that persuades readers to open your page. 

Meta Description: The meta description is a brief synopsis (about 50 to 160 characters) of a page that appears underneath the meta title in search engine results. It persuades readers to click the link and visit your page. There is no correlation between meta descriptions and search engine rankings. Nonetheless, they affect the click-through rate (CTR), a ranking criterion. 

Here’s how you can optimise the meta title and write a good meta description:

• First off, refrain from misleading the readers through wrong information or promise in either the meta title or meta description. Users will bounce off your webpage quickly and it will substantially push you down in SERPs when noticed by Google.  
• Keep each meta title and description unique for each page, as there should be no duplication.
• Use your primary keyword to improve rankings, and also consider including secondary keywords if you can.
• Use power words, numbers, related keywords, current year, etc., in your meta title to draw attention. For compelling meta description, tell the reader what problem the content addresses and provides a solution.
• Use a CTA, such as “find out now”, to create a sense of urgency.

Tip no. 5 give a proper structure

What would you do if you go to read an article and it just keeps going as a single long paragraph? You’d leave the page to find another more organised and straightforward result. This is why the structure of an article can directly impact the content’s readability, making it an essential criterion for ranking. 

Planning out a proper structure is crucial for content optimised for SEO, and you can do so with header tags with H1, H2, H3, H4, etc. The highest and most crucial level is H1, while the headers that come after are in decreasing importance. H1 tags typically serve as the headline or the title, H2 tags are the primary subtopics, and H3 tags and later are subheadings inside H2 tags.

Here are some other things you can do to structure your content for readability and ace optimising your site content for search engines:

• Use more bullet points and numbered lists.
• Use short sentences where possible.
• Answer direct questions users might have related to the heading.
• Keep paragraphs concise and to the point.
• Highlight important information with visual emphasis using bold fonts, highlights, quotation marks, etc. 

Tip no. 6 provide internal links and external links

When optimising your site content for search engines, linking can help gain readership and increase traffic. For any small business, the thumb rule is:

More links to your page = more search traffic = more customers 

There are two types of linking you must know to use for content marketing optimisation, these are: 

1. Internal Links

It routes to relevant references and resources within your website. When you add an internal link to your content, you improve the SEO in the following way:

• Help Google crawlers to index your website with ease.
• Allow users to navigate through your website and discover more.
• Increase the average time of users and reduce bounce rates.
• Add value, credit, and authority to your pages.

2. External Links

It routes visitors to a new page on a different website. Here’s how external linking to high-authority pages would help your SERP rankings: 

• Boost the usefulness of your content and provide your audience with more relevant data.
• Increase credibility in the eyes of users and search engines.
• Promote quality backlinks from the content’s related sites.

Tip no. 7 optimise your images

SEO for images is crucial, but we’ve realised that many people overlook it when optimising your site content for search engines. There are some things you need to keep in mind for optimising your images, which include:

• Using high-quality original photos that are relevant to your content
• Naming the files right with relevant keywords to get them discovered easily in image search
• Using keywords in Alt text that helps crawlers to understand what the image is about
• Choosing the appropriate file type between JPEG, PNG, WebP, and SVG as per their function
• Compressing to get optimum size so your website loads quickly
• Fit the picture size to the screen resolution and place them in relevance 

Images improve comprehension for both your website users and search engine crawlers. In addition, they boost things like user satisfaction, interaction, social sharing, subject relevancy, and more.

We want to point out that SEO can benefit from visual content besides images, including infographics, videos, templates, GIFs, and other graphic materials. It may simplify otherwise tricky concepts for the audience and is an excellent tool for impacting your audience. As a bonus, it is popular online, especially on social media. But you must make sure these visual elements are also SEO optimised content.

Tip no. 8 aim for featured snippets

The featured snippet is Google’s approach to providing the most relevant information in response to a search. These are highlighted sections of search results that flip the usual order of search results to highlight the most informative excerpt first. They might also appear in similar inquiries as “People Also Ask.”

Marketers typically refer to featured snippets as “Position Zero” since it shows before the organic results. The organic listing at “Position Zero” has recently surpassed all others on search engine results pages, so who wouldn’t want their content to show up there? And the way you get featured in position zero is by making your content “snippable.” How?

• Use the snippets for your target keywords as a guide. 
• They are often questions with search words, such as “what,” “how,” “who,” “when,” “can,” and “why,” which trigger the most prevalent snippet-triggering keywords. So, answer them!
• When producing content, you can use formats often displayed by Google in position zero; this can be:   

         – A paragraph to directly answer most asked questions

            about the topic

        – A bullet list with subtitles in your article that

            addresses the questions

        – Giving tables with targeted keywords

        – Using videos with titles using the snippet question

That’s it! By following the above points, you can take your shot at getting ranked by Google in featuring your content’s snippet. 

Now that we’re coming closer to the end content optimisation checklist, we’ve saved two of the most important tips for the last. So stay with us till the end! 

Tip no. 9 keep the quality of content high

We’d like to point out that the length of the content matters. Studies reveal that articles over 2,000 words dominate the top 10 search engine results. We’ve just recognised that publishing quality in-depth articles in Long-form articles (above 1,000 words) offers various SEO advantages. This is because: 

• More ground can be covered
• Expands keyword usage
• Enhances the satisfaction and involvement of your users
• Raises engagement metrics like CTR and average time on site (time on the page)
• Boosts closing percentages
• Get respect, credibility, and experience in your field
• Get more high-quality inbound links

But let this be a resounding declaration for all content writers- you cannot neglect the quality of the content at any cost to increase the length of the content or to publish regularly! 

Adding internal links and modifying meta tags are simply the tip of the content marketing optimisation iceberg. And yes, keywords will be necessary for ranking, but stuffing them mindlessly or using every SEO strategy without working on quality won’t work. It is crucial to enhance the quality of your material to make it more enticing and readable, not only for search engines but also for human readers. 

Search engines prioritise material that directly responds to a query while providing helpful information to the user. Here are some questions to ask to keep a check on the content quality:

• Does it deliver value? How?
• Are the subtopics relevant?
• Does it provide answers to problems about the topic?
• Are you linking to credible sources?
• Are you linking to relevant sources on your website?
• Is the structure organised as discussed above in this article?
• Is the content free from factual or grammatical errors? 
• Is your content free from plagiarism and not copied from anywhere?
• Is the content up-to-date? 

The last point brings us to the final tip that we’ve got for you. Keep reading to understand how you can keep your content fresh at all times. 

Tip no.10 regularly update the current content

No one likes to read content irrelevant to the current time. How would you feel if you read this article to find out all these tips need to be updated and won’t work for you given the current algorithm of Google? Not great, right? You’d rather not read it. 

That is why the content you provide your readers must be up-to-date, and this can also mean regularly updating previously made content to keep it fresh. These are a few methods for updating and improving archived material:

• Change old information to new, updated information
• Increase the length of the content by providing more value and increased expertise
• Change older links to new links
• Remove links that no more work and replace them with relevant links
• Change images that are not optimised for SEO or if they’re not high quality
• Add relevant keywords
• Use fresh CTAs
• Reshare and repromote content to gain more readers

New material is essential for both consumers and search engines. You can revise old content for better quality, more authority, enhanced user experience, and more. Furthermore, updating previously published information is more manageable and yields quicker results than creating new content for the same topic.

Conclusion

Creating content is one of the most valuable tools in digital marketing. By now, we’ve already established how optimising your site content for search engines can help drive more traffic. With the right content optimisation strategy and SEO practices, you can quickly increase your revenue by establishing yourself as an authority in the market. 

If you don’t optimise for search engines, you might see your rankings in SERPs plummet. With the tips that we’ve given, we’re sure you’ll see positive results as you apply them consistently. But remember, consistency is the key to winning over search engines, and many facets of an effective SEO plan will demand your attention in this journey. 

At Anglara, we assist our customers in developing online and mobile app solutions that enable content optimisation to help you enhance your brand’s SEO. Get in touch with us today to find out more about how we deliver that. Fill out this form, and we’ll contact you to set up a free 30-minute consultation.