Headings are important to humans and search engines in understanding the structure of an article. Take a look at the subheadings from this article. Notice how easy it is to understand the structure.
Improving Content Quality Versus SEO Optimization
What’s the difference between optimization and content quality?
Optimization refers to all the technical fixes you make to improve your SERP ranking. That includes the use of keywords throughout your piece, proper technical formatting (title and H2 tags, for example), metadata; and proper, working internal and external links.
All of these details help Google’s crawlers get a clear picture of what your content is. It also gives them the first clue as to whether or not your content is quality. If you’re missing H2 tags, for example, it signals to crawlers that your blog post has no subheads and may not be covering the topic in depth.
Other optimization techniques include the appropriate use of quality imagery; content that is responsive or mobile-first; or quality video, infographics or other visuals that enhance the user experience. These are also a big part of how Google ranks content.
Quality content, on the other hand, refers to how well-written your content is. To evaluate that, Google uses a combination of crawlers and real people. Content is examined to ensure that your topic is truly addressed in an in-depth way, and that it matches a user’s search intent, rather than detracting from it.
Now, at this point you might wonder if you could just get away with optimizing your content for those ranking factors without having to go back and edit (or rewrite) your blog post.
Not really. You should absolutely make sure every piece is optimized, but be aware that Google and other search engines are putting more and more emphasis on quality content when they rank search results.
Why Is Traditional On-Page SEO Not Enough?
There was a time, from about 2005 to the beginning of this decade, when the name of the game was on-page SEO . You had a keyword phrase on which you wanted to rank. You plugged that keyword into your title, the first 50 words of your post and then every 100 or so words after that (if your piece was even that long). You threw that same keyword phrase into your conclusion plus a few times in your metadata and you were good to go. That was the extent of on-page optimization.
What Is Content Optimization?
These goals might be to improve your content’s ability to rank well in Google, draw in traffic, convert visitors, or generate backlinks. In fact, when done correctly, content optimization can help you achieve each of these goals simultaneously.
Content optimization involves tweaking your content so that it’s more intelligible to search engines and more appealing to your target audience. As we’ll see, these tweaks can include better integrating your target keywords, improving your content’s readability, and adding new, salient information to your posts.
Why Is It Important?
Content optimization is essential even if you’re fully committed to consistently creating high-quality content. It’s a crowded and competitive world out there, so you need to pull out all the stops to get your content noticed.
- Improved rankings: Optimized content is easier for search engines to interpret, giving your pages a better chance of ranking prominently in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
- More backlinks: If your content is high-quality and easy to find in search engines, you’ll naturally accrue more backlinks as people link to your site as a source. The more backlinks you receive from reputable websites, the more your domain authority (DA) will increase. This, in turn, will make it easier for your content to rank well in search engines.
- Increased brand authority: If members of your target audience keep noticing your brand appearing in the SERPs when they search around topics in your niche, they’ll begin to view you as a trustworthy industry authority.
- Better quality traffic: Since a well-optimized piece of content reflects the user’s specific search intent, it will tend to attract better-qualified and more conversion-ready visitors.
- Prevention of content decay: By continually optimizing your content assets, you safeguard against content decay. Content decay occurs when you fail to update your content regularly, leading your competitors to overtake you with more fresh content.
What is SEO optimized content? (And how to do it without writing like a robot)
The trick is starting with the overall content structure and aligning it as tightly as possible to what Google (like there’s any other search engine) is already telling you people want to read.
This, together with rich snippets, instant answers, the Knowledge Graph, and “related searches” (scroll down to the bottom of the results and look at the recommendations), and you have the rough outline of an article in front of you.
Investopedia uses this same playbook, aligning content subheads with the biggest questions people are already asking when they type in a query like “what is compound interest”:
What you have now isn’t just a single, one-off piece of content. It’s a roadmap. You now have a template to build an entire compelling content plan around, with hundreds of similar pieces of content here that could be scaled out using the same overall structure.
The phrasing is slightly different. But make no mistake – these are the same overall templates and article structures being used. Read the individual content to see for yourself.
Yes, there is some pretty sexy stuff being pumped out with GPT-3 tech. And AI writing software are all the rage right now. However, you don’t even really need fancy stuff to see how to actually write SEO optimized content.
You just need some eyeballs and about ten minutes of research to see what’s already working, what people are searching for, and determine how to align your own stuff.
SEO Content Optimization Tips
1. Match Content With User Intent
A piece of content will often have trouble ranking if there’s intent mismatch. Get it wrong and all the optimization tips in the world won’t help your content rank. MarketMuse can help you do some of that intent analysis at scale and alert you to cases of fractured intent. Those are situations where the search engine results page (SERP) shows multiple intents.
MarketMuse Topic Card showing SERP features for the topic “user intent.”
Still, you should examine the SERP manually to understand why searchers use the term you’re targeting. If the search result is oriented towards one intent, and you have a different interpretation, that could be problematic.
Think about how you can answer those searches in a meaningful way for your audience. What is the true intent behind a search? For example, if you want to write content about beach destinations, think about who your audience is. Are they younger readers looking for lively beaches with walk-up bars, or are they families looking for quiet beaches where their children can play safely?
Pay attention to any rich snippet as it can guide you to a better understanding of that intent. Either modify the intent of your content to match or consider creating a whole new piece.
2. Focus on Related Topics Not Keywords
Writers often struggle turning a list of keywords into great content. That’s because keywords tell you how people search for a topic, not how to write about it. For that you’ll need to turn to topics and topic modelling like that provided by MarketMuse.
Plan Future-Oriented Content Strategies with Finest Tech Solution
The Finest Tech Solution is a visionary digital marketing and complete digital support agency. We are among the first few agencies that can build a future-oriented content optimizing strategy.
Finest tech solution has a great team of researchers, who can provide impeccably searched data and the latest technology trends to forecast the future digital marketing and provide you with great lead-in content optimizing for your website and blog. As the technology and public trends are rising, we ensure to offer higher ranks and lead generation services for business. We can deliver the latest trending and SEO optimized content with precise details and information. Content Optimization Tips in 2022 – A Definitive Guide by Finest Tech solution is the sole and most promising guide you will ever need to mark your glittering presence on the Internet.
References:
https://blog.marketmuse.com/seo-content-optimization-tips/#:~:text=Optimization%20Tips%20That%20Improve%20Content%20and%20Help%20SEO,SEO%20optimization%20elements%20every%20piece%20should%20contain.
https://www.wordagents.com/content-optimization-tips/
https://wordable.io/content-optimization/
https://blog.marketmuse.com/seo-content-optimization-tips/
https://finesttechsolution.com/blog/content-optimization-tips/