In conversations about content marketing, you’re likely to hear one word rise to the surface again and again: “Optimization.” If you’re new to digital marketing, you may be wondering why it matters so much.
Here’s a closer look at what you should know about content optimization, including why it’s critical for reaching your target customers and how to get started using it.
What Is Optimized Content Marketing?
Content marketing is one of the best ways to boost your business’s bottom line. It is a cost-efficient way to engage customers, attract traffic to your website, generate and nurture leads, and drive conversions.
When it comes to making the most of your content marketing efforts, however, it all comes down to optimization.
So, what does optimize mean? Content optimization is making sure that your content is written or created in a way that it can reach your largest possible target audience.
In the context of digital content, web content optimization refers to the process of making your content as accessible as possible for search engines in order to achieve the highest search engine results pages (SERP) rankings.
Optimization and SEO
Optimization is the “O” in SEO. The “S” and the “E” refer to “search engine.” Put them all together, and you get “search engine optimization.”
To fully understand the link between your content and SEO, let’s take a quick look at how search engines function.
Google and other search engines work by “crawling” web pages using automated software agents known as spiders, crawlers, robots, and bots. These tools visit websites looking for information they can use to determine what the website is about.
Next, they add the data to a structure known as an “index,” which contains all the URLs they encountered along with “key signals,” such as content type, page freshness, and previous user engagement.
Finally, when a user enters a search query into a search engine, the search engine then uses an algorithm to rank all the index data in order to generate a hierarchical rank of results. The more relevant the algorithm deems a particular page to be, the higher it will rank. The higher your page is ranked, the more likely it is to be found by your target audience.
Why Optimized Content Matters
Considering that more than 25 percent of Google searchers click on the very first result, the fuss over rankings is well-deserved — especially when you factor in that very few searchers even make it past the first results page.
But content optimization has other benefits, too. For starters, it improves the relevancy of your content, ensuring that your posts are being delivered to the exact customers you’re looking for who are also looking for you. Additionally, optimization lets you target users wherever they are on their buying journey with relevant and useful content.
On a related note, optimizing your site also makes it more user-friendly to your audience. It helps your blog visitors to quickly scan the page for the information they need to support the action you want them to take, such as signing up, purchasing, or downloading.
Furthermore, because it is so valuable, your audience is also more likely to share optimized content.
Tips for Optimizing Your Content
Now that we’ve established what optimization is and why it’s important to optimize your content, we get to the good part: how to optimize your content to get more clicks, visits, leads, and conversations.
Here are just a few examples of ways to optimize your content:
- Include primary keywords
- Include secondary keywords
- Increase your keyword relevancy
- Write a strong meta description
- Use appropriate meta tags
- Improve your blog’s readability score
- Include relevant internal links
But that’s just the start of making the most of SEO.
From including videos to updating your content regularly, there are many tactics for improving your search engine optimization toward achieving a rank on top of the search engine results.
One last note on SEO? The goal of search engines is to help users get the best and most useful answers to their questions. In order to achieve this, they’re constantly changing and refining their algorithms.
The takeaway? Best practices for SEO today may not be best practices for SEO tomorrow. Keeping up with the latest SEO trends and developments is the only way to position yourself for lasting success. While this may be possible for large businesses or for those with on-staff digital marketing departments, it’s a significant challenge for others.
This is why so many forward-thinking businesses choose to outsource their content marketing, SEO, and other online marketing initiatives to a digital marketing agency. Not only will doing so help you maximize your digital marketing, it also frees you and your team up to focus on what you do best.
Optimizing your content helps improve, enhance, and amplify your overall marketing strategy and results. At The Light Digital, we specialize in content optimization and SEO designed to maximize organic traffic to your website. In addition to using proven strategies like link building, director submissions, continuous optimization, and strategic keyword usage, we also provide rankings reports and tracking so you always know where your efforts are succeeding, and where you need to change course.
If you’re ready to start putting the power of content optimizationa and SEO as whole to work for your business, we’re ready to help. To get started, contact us today.