Why you Should Optimize your Content

When it comes to SEO, content is king. If you’re even a little bit familiar with what search engine optimization is, you’ve probably heard this phrase before. You might even know what makes content so important to digital marketing in general, but do you know what makes optimizing it so crucial to your SEO efforts? If not, you probably also don’t know the difference between content that is optimized and content that isn’t. We’ve set out to answer all these content optimization questions and more to give you gain a better understanding of what it is and why it’s so important. In another blog, we’ll also be going over how to optimize content so you can start improving what’s on your website for both readers and search engines like Google. 

While many other aspects of SEO might be incredibly complex and difficult to understand, SEO content optimization is fairly straightforward. Here, we’ll be going over what optimized content looks like and what makes it so important Read on to find out!

What is content optimization?

Content optimization refers to the process of making sure that the content you’ve created has the best possible chance of succeeding in its intended goal. This goal could be to get users to fill out a contact form, subscribe to a mailing list, buy a product or service, inform readers about a specific topic, or simply answer a specific question. Regardless, content optimization involves incorporating certain keywords and keyword phrases throughout (avoiding stuffing), making your authority, expertise, and trustworthiness evident, interlinking to relevant pages on your site, adding a meta description and title tags, and ensuring it isn’t too similar to content that already exists on the internet.

Content optimization also involves systematically auditing and updating content that had been previously published on your website, even if it was optimized already. The goal of re-optimizing content is to change it so that it can take advantage of new trends that have emerged and rank for certain keywords that are now being searched at a higher volume. Google will also notice that you’ve provided updated useful information, meaning the page may rank higher in the results page, or SERP. There is no specific “expiration date” for when previously optimized content will again need to be optimized, but generally, we recommend trying to go through your website and update the most important content on a yearly basis.

Why is optimizing content important?

Optimizing content is important for a number of reasons. Firstly, it’ll boost the performance of the page on SERPs. SEO optimized content should rank highly for the keywords you’re targeting and have included throughout, meaning not only more traffic to your website but also more intent-driven users.

Next, optimizing your content will also help you better attract your target audience. By including relevant keywords and phrases that you know have a high search volume and/or are very intent-driven, the pages with this content will be more visible when users search for them. Essentially, you are tailoring content to your target audience when optimizing it, so it will be more engaging, informative, and relevant for them. Thus, these visitors will be more likely to convert since your SEO optimized content should be giving them the answer to what they were searching for.

Lastly, optimizing your content also helps your content remain relevant. If, for example, some blogs that were published on your site a few years ago and now contain out-of-date information or keywords that now have a low search volume, you can optimize them to be more relevant and include better keywords so that they re-gain a high ranking in SERPs. Re-optimization also helps you catch links that are now broken and information that has now become stale – two things that can make a page lose ranking over time.

While content optimization might be something you can feel comfortable doing on your own, a lot of the other aspects of effective SEO campaigns are much more complex. These are better left to the experts, like the search engine optimization specialists at SocialSEO. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help optimize every element of your site!