You and your content creation team have put a lot of sweat and hours into your content. But after some time, you became more marketing-savvy and learned the tricks of the trade that have your content bringing you more benefits.
You’ve started creating content that brings more engagement, but it would be a shame to leave your older material like that.
You only need to optimize it the right way to bring it back to life and save it from the claws of oblivion.
Before You Start Optimizing
Before you begin with content optimization, you should catalog and rate your content.
To catalog your content, use tools like Screaming Frog to crawl your entire website, export all the URLs, and add them to a spreadsheet.
Once you’ve filled all the content from your site into a spreadsheet, fill in some information for each page. You need to fill in:
- The goal of your content.
- The keywords every piece ranks for.
- Your target audience.
- The stage of your sales funnels for which a piece of content is intended for (Awareness, Consideration, Conversion, Loyalty, or Advocacy).
- How satisfied you are with its usability, social traffic and conversions, and organic traffic and conversions.
You need to do this to get a clear picture of which pages need the most attention.
The most common problems are pages without a clear audience or goal, pages optimized with too many keywords, and hyper-optimized pages that don’t resonate with the audience.
Optimizing Your Content
Once you’ve seen which pages need improvement, it’s time to get to work.
- Improve usability
You don’t publish content for search engines, but for users. That’s why your optimization strategy must be concentrated around your users.
And that’s because your primary objective is the provide them the best customer experience.
First, you should prune your content. In other words, if your content is bloated, then you need to deflate it. Remove any irrelevant and distracting material from your pages to increase readability and focus.
Next, consider if your pages answer your target audience’s search query. When users want to Google something, they typically search an answer to a specific question.
If they don’t find it on your pages, they’ll move on to look it up somewhere else. So, if your pages don’t answer their questions, you should proceed to adjust them.
On the other hand, if they do provide the answers, you can make your material even more useful. And you can do that by adding relevant videos, infographics, reviews, FAQs. But also links to external sources (outbound links) that contain more information about specific topics.
- Boost social media traffic
Optimize Your Content More
Many people don’t know how their pages look when shared on social media. You can define this thanks to Twitter Cards (for Twitter) and Open Graph (for LinkedIn and Facebook.) Make sure to think of catchy titles and experiment with capitalizing each word. Write a compelling description, and use images that complement the content.
- On-Page optimization
To increase the organic traffic that your existing content drives, you need to raise your clickthrough rate (CTR). Don’t forget to integrate the right keywords.
You can improve your CTR by experimenting with titles and meta descriptions. Stand out by publishing online reviews (they often appear with stars, and that can make you look better and different). And use Google’s Featured Snippets to answer your audience’s search queries directly from the SERP.
As for the keywords, you should prioritize the basic HTML tags, such as title, meta description, H1 and H2 headings, image optimization, and internal links to pages. Remember not to force keywords it because it can hurt your readability.
Optimize Your Content A Bit More
- Be inviting and readable
There’s nothing more repulsive than a massive chunk of text without a structure (no images, headings, or paragraphs). Before we go through a piece of content, we usually skim it to see whether it contains the information we’re looking for. This kind of material makes that impossible. No one wants even to try to read that. To prevent this, you need to add a visual structure or hierarchy to your material by using subheadings, make separate paragraphs, use optical elements to support your text visually, and make your site mobile-friendly.
- Update and rewrite
It happens that, when you revisit a piece of content after a while, you realize that it’s not well-written. In that case, updating and rewriting it is the only way to make it perform better. Research current trends in content creation and use them as guidelines for revising your material.
Conclusion
Old content doesn’t have to be forgotten. It can be updated and optimized to remain relevant and keep building value over time. You can tune it from different standpoints (usability, social, and SEO), and those are the aspects you can control (your content quality depends on your content creators’ skills and creativity.) After that, all that’s left to do is promote it and generate some buzz around it. The last thing you should know is that optimizing content is never finished because you need to optimize, analyze, and repeat every time whenever there’s a need.
If you have any questions or comments, feel free to reach out to us, remember that we are here to help you.