Content is critical to the success of your website, and is a key factor contributing to overall marketing success. If you position yourself as an expert in your field through insightful content, new users and customers will flock to your site.
But now there is more competition than ever. Everyone sees how effective content marketing is, which makes it harder to become the most authoritative source on any particular subject.
This means that marketers need to start focusing on creating optimized content. Through optimized blog copy, headers, and on-page elements, digital marketers can make great content stand out and earn the rankings it deserves.
How Does Optimized Content Work?
In a broad sense, optimized content is content that serves a specific purpose and does it well. People who are new to content marketing are often surprised to find out that a single piece of content can serve multiple purposes.
These include:
• SEO. Earning SERP rankings on major search engines.
• Backlinks. Earning backlinks from other content writers and website owners.
• Education. Informing website visitors about important aspects of your industry or field.
• Social Engagement. Getting shares, comments, and social media traction – going viral.
• Lead Generation. Using calls-to-action to get leads talking to your representatives.
For content to truly be optimized, it must meet one of these needs specifically. Although certain elements can and do overlap, content marketers want to be as specific as possible when making new content.
In either case, you never want to simply create content because your boss said so. Nor do you want to fall into the trap of believing that posting new content every day is good for rankings.
You need to create content that is optimized to reach specific goals. By following content marketing best practices, you can earn great results for your website’s inbound lead generation.
Content SEO Best Practices: What Optimized Content Looks Like
There is very little functional difference between creating great content and creating content that ranks well. Even if you plan on using content solely in a closed-circuit email newsletter, the considerations that search algorithms use to determine ranking have a real effect on the overall content quality.
Use these best practices to optimize your content:
• Target Keywords. Keywords should be your starting point when writing any new content. If you have excellent, well-researched long-form keywords, your content will almost write itself. A good long-tail keyword almost always addresses a specific problem or asks a specific question – address it and you’re on the right path.
• Optimize Your URL. Search engine-friendly URLs share meaning with the content they point to. Not only that, but many users do read URLs when deciding whether to click on a link. This is especially true of cyber security-savvy users with phishing and authenticity concerns. Also, an informative URL demonstrates trustworthiness and value.
• Optimize On-Page Elements. Your copy should use optimized headers and good formatting to make its point. New visual editors like WordPress Gutenberg make this almost necessary – there is no excuse for a page of content to look like a giant wall of text.
• Use Multimedia-Rich, Responsive Design. Google has long penalized websites that aren’t mobile-friendly, and will continue to push desktop-only websites to the background moving forward. Mobile-responsive web pages with attractive, rich media snippets rank better and keep users engaged.
• Use Outbound Links. One of the ways search engine algorithms determine the topic of your page is by verifying your outbound links. If you want to focus on a specific subject or long-tail keyword, outbound links can be a powerful asset to provide greater context to a user.
• Boost Page Load Speed. Not only does Google clearly prefer web pages that load quickly, but studies show that users do too. This is especially important on mobile devices, where users are likely to be even less patient than usual.
• Write High Quality Long-Form Content. Long form blog posts routinely outperform shorter posts on all metrics. Search engine algorithms know this, and users do too. Optimized content is not only unique and educational, it is also comprehensive. Your content should cover everything someone wants to know about the subject you are writing about.
Go Beyond the Fundamentals of SEO
It’s important for marketers to avoid looking at SEO as a series of boxes to be checked. While there are specific elements you should implement – like page speed and multimedia-rich design – it’s also critical that you let content flow naturally and truly engage readers. Great content answers pressing questions and leads users to consider you an expert on the field.
Need a helping hand creating and broadcasting high quality content with professional marketers? Talk to Amplify and find out how we can help you.Content is critical to the success of your website, and is a key factor contributing to overall marketing success. If you position yourself as an expert in your field through insightful content, new users and customers will flock to your site.
But now there is more competition than ever. Everyone sees how effective content marketing is, which makes it harder to become the most authoritative source on any particular subject.
This means that marketers need to start focusing on creating optimized content. Through optimized blog copy, headers, and on-page elements, digital marketers can make great content stand out and earn the rankings it deserves.
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