What is content optimization?
Content optimization, as the name suggests, is the process of optimizing your online content—written ones in particular—to improve its SEO friendliness, making it rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs) and ultimately more likely to be seen by your target audience.
If you want more information on this topic, check out the FAQ section below:
Question #1: Why is content optimization important?
Content optimization is important because it helps ensure that your content is seen by your target audience. After all, even if you have the best content around, if nobody knows about it, then it will not do your business any good.
The problem is that with over 5 million new blog posts being published every single day—at least at the time this was posted—getting your content seen by your target audience is becoming more and more difficult. And this is exactly why it is more important now than ever to optimize your content for maximum visibility.
Question #2: What is the purpose of content optimization?
The main purpose of content optimization is to increase your content’s rankings on SERPs. After all, the higher you rank, the more traffic you get, and the more traffic you get, the more chances you get to sell your products or services.
Of course, this only works if you have a proper content marketing strategy in place. Just because you produce content that people consume does not mean you will be able to boost your sales.
To capitalize on the increased traffic content optimization is designed to bring you, you will need to be able to deliver the exact content your prospects want to see at every stage of the sales cycle. Otherwise, your traffic will consist primarily of people who are not looking to buy anything.
Question #2: Is content optimization the only way to improve my content’s visibility?
No, content optimization is not the only way to improve your content’s visibility. In fact, it may no longer be the most effective method, considering organic reach has significantly declined over the past few years, thanks to the sheer volume of content being published every single day. It is just significantly more challenging to reach people even if you do everything right in terms of content optimization.
If you have the budget, it would be wise to also explore paid content distribution channels, such as Google Ads, because they allow you to easily cut through all the noise and push your content directly in front of your target audience.
These tools all have super powerful targeting features, allowing you to really define who you want to see your content—and then provide you with equally powerful analytics tools so you can keep optimizing your ads for maximum ROI.
Another way to improve your content’s visibility is through earned distribution. Simply put, this just means people voluntarily talk about and share it. The only problem with this option is that all you can really do is keep putting out valuable high-quality content and hope that people decide to share some of it.
Question #3: Are there content optimization tools I can use?
Yes, there are a lot of content optimization tools you can use, depending on what you are looking to accomplish. A good starting point would be Google Search Console. Not only is it 100% free, it also provides you with a more in-depth understanding of how you can improve your content’s ranking on Google’s SERPs.
But if you are looking for a more all-around SEO tool for your posts, then something like Yoast would suit you better. It is designed to simplify a wide array of SEO tasks, such as keyword research and optimization, internal linking, and using structured data. In addition, if you sign up for a premium Yoast account, you will also get unlimited access to all Yoast Academy courses, allowing you to gain a better understanding of content optimization and SEO in general.