Optimizing your Content
In the digital marketing world, we always come across the line, content is king. Do you believe this? Well, with 87% of B2B and 86% of B2C companies that use content marketing as their primary strategy, you might get easily convinced. However, this can also be a trap. Your content would not be valuable if no one finds it. This is why SEO and content marketing must work hand in hand in order to position your business on the front line.
Fortunately, there are well-tested SEO practices that you can use to optimize your content and get them seen by your target audience.
Keyword Research
First and foremost, keyword research must be done in order to ensure that your content will be relevant to what your audience is looking for. This can impact your business when it comes to traffic and conversion rate in the long run. Keywords are great indicators that your content is meaningful and they also serve as a proxy for your customers’ intent.
Here are the factors that you need to consider:
- The number of people searching for those keywords
- A keyword’s competitiveness
- The position of the keywords in a buyer’s journey
Moreover, looking for relevant keywords must be done on a regular basis as the market’s landscape continues to shift and evolve.
Result Type
Google’s results pages have long said its goodbye to the list of links. Now, searchers can see different kinds of user-friendly visuals that allow them to find what they are looking for in a much faster way.
Google shows different result types in the form of local packs, featured snippets, videos, and others, depending on the search performed by a user. So make sure to choose your result type as this can help you position your content at the top of the results page. Moreover, this can also improve your click-through rate.
While there is no perfect formula available to secure a universal result type for your business, here are some optimization steps that you can do to influence the results.
- Find and use keywords that can trigger a universal result type. Most of these ask a question.
- Work on the structure of your content. Answer boxes are usually being pulled from tables, paragraphs or lists in your content. For paragraphs, make your answer brief and straight to the point. For tables and lists, ensure that you have the proper HTML markup to ensure that search engines can crawl them.
- Provide complete and accurate answer. Google’s algorithms are always in the round and they reward websites that can give the most accurate answer to the question.
Video Transcript
If you’re using video content for your marketing strategies, then there are plenty of ways you can even level it up. Add a transcript of the video on the landing page. This will be crawled by the search engines for indexing. Moreover, it allows search engines to understand the content of your video and then eventually rank it for the relevant search terms. The video transcript can also be used for other content purposes such as social posts, blogs posts, and white paper, among others.
Page Speed
You are losing half of your potential customers if your website takes more than 3 seconds. Yes, this is supported by Google’s data. Most people tend to be impatient especially if they are in a rush. They will easily move to another site and that is one of the last things you’ll ever want. So make sure that your pages load quickly on all kinds of devices to improve your content’s performance.
High-quality Images
While it’s quite easy to find the corresponding images for your content, you must keep in mind the sizes of your photos as they can impact the loading time of your content. Before hitting the publish button, ensure that the images you used are sized accordingly in the correct file type.
Content optimization is not a step that can wait. Do it today and you’ll begin to draw more traffic and conversion opportunities that will be beneficial for your business in the long run.
