Hello, my friend and a very warm welcome back. Today we are going to discuss How Content Optimization Can Improve Your Google Rankings?
Blogs have become important sources of information they help many search engine users to answer their questions and they are growing daily.
Having up to date and relevant content on your blog is an important step for content optimization.
Blogging can seem like you are being pulled into so many different directions with the number of tasks we need to consider, learning how to be a copywriter, updating blog posts, doing keyword research, writing consistently, creating the right content for traffic, and being an authority on your subject.
I am aware this is a lot to take on board when you start blogging but, with the right strategy and optimization planning you will be in front of the pack compared to other bloggers.
This post may contain affiliate links. This means if you click a link and make a purchase I will receive a commission. The price you pay will not be affected.
In this post, I’m going to cover the most important factors that will make an impact on your Google rankings.
Learning About Content Optimization
As bloggers, we need to know what optimization means:
It means to make changes or improvements in order to achieve maximum efficiency.
Our goal with SEO is to get on the 1st page of Google ultimately and to achieve this we need to carry out certain processes, placing keywords in the title, in the alt text and other tags especially the meta, optimizing lead magnets as well as content is also crucial.
User experience also has to be given great consideration because without visitors our blogs will not make any money!
Marketing is another factor for success and once you have optimized your content, you need to then market it effectively.
Marketing For Your Content
As I’m sure you already know content marketing is a billion-dollar industry in 2021, and it will continue to grow year on year.
Who wouldn’t want to be a part of this way of working?
How many blog posts do you read before you make a purchase?
A study released recently showed the average person reads between 3 and 5 posts and then buys something.
If your content is good and has affiliate links some will buy from you there and then!
Your quality content is what is going to bring you traffic and that’s one of the most important things for a blogger to focus on.
Content marketing is simply a process of creating content for your blog and then using social media to advertise that material or alternatively, you can advertise online.
We need an audience and these are some of the best ways to gain one.
Stories sell that’s why people buy newspapers and magazines and this is no different for bloggers telling your story to your readers is a brilliant way to build up trust.
When you share information, whether it’s text or video on Pinterest or Twitter, for example, this will help you to gain users and readers that are interested in your posts.
Marketing can be split up into these categories first the content optimization, second growing an email list, third promotion, and lastly maybe selling your own products.
Now we are going to dive into optimizing your content to help it rank better.
Content Optimization Strategy
The main reason to care about your optimization strategy is Google will reward you with more traffic if your content is high quality.
You want posts to be related to the topics as the title of the blog suggests like DIY or Travel for instance.
The best places to stay in California will be about travelling and it will contain lots of juicy appealing images.
Doing this will get you the traffic flood you are searching for.
In the next section, I’m going to cover 3 basics every blog post should have optimized.
Make Sure Your Blog Title Is Optimized
Let’s face facts here the first thing anyone see’s on social media is your blog title and that is one reason why your headline is very important another is where you are found in the search engines.
Organic search traffic is what every blogger craves and having an SEO keyworded headline will put you exactly where you want to be with click through rates.
A quick example of a longtail keyworded title: Awesome Lead Magnet Ideas To grow Your Email List.
This is an optimized blog post title because it has the keyword phrase that I’m targeting at the end of the sentence.
Optimizing titles this way helps search engines to understand what your article’s content is about, and rank it higher for relevant searches.
One thing to note is that search engines have a character limit of 60. Try to stay in that range as much as you can or some of your titles will be missing!
Don’t make these mistakes:
- Don’t add punctuation, symbols or spaces.
- Don’t use abbreviations.
- Category or subcategory names.
Including the above in your title can cause many problems for you with the search engines not crawling your post and that is not what we want after all of our hard work.
Ensure Your Meta Description is Optimized
The meta description is the short piece of text that appears under your URL in Google.
This can also be found when doing a search on Google and it’s slightly different than what shows up as “snippets” at the top of the page, which are generally pulled from your content.
What you choose to write in the meta will help visitors to know whether to click through or not. You do have a couple of choices with the meta description.
The option I go with is to let WordPress choose what is going there. This is my preference because different keywords bring up different meta descriptions.
Another option is to let your SEO plugin choose the optimization for you and the All-In-One SEO plugin that I use can do this.
Is Your URL Optimized?
A blog’s URL is either its brand name (for example, mistakesbloggersmake.com) or an alternative version of it that the site owner has chosen to represent their business online.
Sometimes, a blog post title will be included in the URL so readers know what they are clicking on.
On your blog, the URL should be simple and easy to remember that relates to the content of your blog post (doing this will make it easier for people who are sharing your content).
This next section will cover the 6 ways to create a content optimization strategy for your blog.
1. Update Your Old Blog Posts
In an ideal world, this should be carried out once a month. Unfortunately, it’s not something I do very often and I need to start doing it! (slaps my wrist 🙂 )
Which posts should you tackle?
- Choose posts that are not ranking after a couple of months
- And those that are going down in the rankings.
Doing both or either of these will have your business growing quickly and will also save you a ton of time.
Updating your old content means making sure you add the latest information to keep your content engaging.
Here are some tips that will help you to update older blog posts:
- Add new keywords if needed for better ranking.
- Answering more questions about your topic will increase the word count as well as add value. If you have good quality content, then it should rank well even after making a few changes here and there.
- Change any broken links in your blog posts to help improve the user’s experience.
- Update your post with any new relevant information. This can include new facts and statistics to help it make your content more up-to-date
- Swap out old images in your blog posts and use updated versions.
2. Find The Right Niche Keywords
For you to find the right keywords you need to understand your niche and to help me with the process I use the keyword research tool Jaxxy.
Using certain keywords in different ways in each blog post will help you to attract more readers because you’re using different keywords throughout the article instead of repeating yourself.
Once you have found the keywords you wish to use you need to be able to implement them and there are several ways this can be accomplished:
- Make sure keywords are relevant and natural – you don’t need to include your keywords over and over again. This means no article spinning which is considered to be spam or using synonyms of the keyword so you can keep using it on every page. It’s better to find related keywords.
- You Must Be consistent – Using your main keyword throughout your content (but not stuffing it in) is important. Not only will this bring in more search engine traffic and not confuse the reader with constantly using different keywords that don’t make sense to them or relate back to what they originally searched for. There is no magic number on how many times to use your keyword but for long-form blog posts, I would go for 10 or even less.
- Keep sentences short – Keep all of your sentences short where possible to help people stay on your blog posts longer. Remember, Google looks at how long people stay on your site? Once a person clicks on a blog post how long do they read for? If they leave pretty much straight away that’s a signal to Google that your post didn’t answer the user’s question.
You have to remember posts don’t rank immediately so be patient!
3. You Are The Authority
When writing posts you need to show that you are the authority this will assist you in the optimization strategy arena.
For certain niches to work it helps if you are a professional, like dentistry or nursing for health-related niches even if you are none of these there are ways to get around this by using stats and giving examples in your writing.
I have given up my job to be a full-time blogger in the make money online niche and this was achieved by following certain criteria:
- Speaking about my experience with the topics of affiliate marketing, blogging and marketing.
- Show people stats so they can see there’s a need for what you provide in your content. Make sure these are real, not just made up ones from random sites around the web! Use stats from somewhere like the first page of Google.
- Share relevant studies that help add authority to what you’re writing about and make it more credible. Using case studies or even sharing your own personal experience can add relevance to your authority.
- Make sure each post is long enough to talk about your topic as much as it needs to cover everything.
4. Be A Copywriter
Copywriters are people who write articles using words effectively by putting the right words in the right place and using them to get their point of view across.
Bloggers can do this by using SEO, which will help increase their search engine rankings and website traffic.
Formatting your posts properly is a form of copywriting as is if someone reads about how they should use hashtags in their Twitter posts then you make a cheat sheet of Twitter hashtags and add that to the post – you will get more Subscribers!
These tactics are how you will use your content to convert readers into subscribers or buyers.
5. Write With Consistency
Writing blog posts consistently will help you to rank better in Google and help you to challenge the big boys who have thousands of posts that have been written over a 9 year period.
Me? my blog is fairly new and it has 241 posts. I have had to build my content library quickly so that Google sees that I’m an authority which is another content strategy to use.
6. Choose The Right Posts For Traffic
There are a ton of different types of blog posts that can be created to help drive traffic and rank in Google.
Each type of post has a purpose, some for immediate traffic while others work overtime for better ranking potential.
It’s imperative to know what each blog post is good at so you can get the most out of your blogging efforts.
The best posts to create are:
List posts, How-to posts, and question posts.
If you have been having problems finding the best way to optimize your content for search engines, hopefully, this post has helped you out.
What are your thoughts on starting a Content Optimization Strategy today?
Let me know in the comments if I can help you any further and don’t forget to pin me!
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Lisa. Founder and CEO of mistakesbloggersmake.com
