When you optimize content for SEO and for your readers, you increase your SERPs rankings and strengthen your audience engagement.
Content is a powerful marketing tool that companies can use to attract, educate and ultimately convert potential buyers of their services and products. Additionally, content plays an important supporting role in search engine optimization (SEO). Content that is optimized for both the reader and SEO allows your company to benefit in multiple ways.
What does it mean to optimize content for SEO?
Optimizing content for SEO involves employing a couple of techniques in and around your content to make it more visible to search engines. It also strengthens your site’s ranking for your specific focus through keyword phrases.
You can optimize content for SEO on many levels, including metadata such as:
- Meta titles.
- Meta descriptions.
- Keywords.
The meta title and meta description
Most search engines no longer optimize based on the metric keyword tag. However, they heavily use the meta title and meta description tags.
Meta title, as the name implies, is the title of your article or piece of content that you want to be displayed within search engines. A meta description is a short sentence that describes the content of a page. Both the meta title and meta description appear on search engine results pages (SERPs).
For example, when someone searches “gold,” a list of results will be returned for that query. Each list item is the meta title and meta description of a web page.
Optimizing meta titles and meta descriptions play a powerful role in your SEO. Write these materials in a way that accurately represents the page, captures the searcher’s attention and draws clicks to your site.
Meta keywords
You can further optimize content for SEO within each web page by incorporating keyword phrases. These are common search terms that are visible to both the search engine and the site visitor. Keywords should be naturally incorporated into the page. To help you get started, ideal locations for keyword phrases include:
- The title of the article.
- At least one of the subheaders within the content.
- Within the body of the content.
What happens if you don’t optimize content for SEO?
If you’re not optimizing for both the reader and for search engines, then:
- Your content will not show up in search engines when people search terms relevant to your material.
- You’re essentially missing out on half your audience.
Losing that audience reduces your program ROI, and it prevents you from the opportunity to sell that prospect.
What are the most effective SEO techniques?
SEO techniques change based on how search engine algorithms change, but a couple of principles remain consistent over the years.
When you’re writing content, make sure that you’re writing the content for the reader. It needs to have great readability. Only after you’ve accomplished readable content should you look to optimize content for SEO. The key areas of focus should be meta information, titles and sub-headers within the content.
In summary
Optimizing your content for SEO can have an outsized impact on your overall content and digital marketing program. When writing content, make a couple of tweaks to ensure that it is readable and effectively visible for SEO.
Need help?
If you have a content marketing program or are planning one, download our e-book 100 Mistakes Businesses Make When Starting, Optimizing and Scaling Content Marketing Programs.
This e-book will walk you through the mistakes of hundreds of other companies and the challenges they faced in implementing their content marketing programs. To learn more about how Tempesta Media can help you streamline your content creation process and deliver quality content at scale, contact us today.
