There is absolutely no doubt about the importance of good content for the success of your website – and optimizing content that you create is an important part of the success equation.
When Optimizing Content, Start with Strategy
The thing about content is that while your paid marketing efforts – such as ads – provide results for the short term, good content can bring you leads for months after posting it. It can help you out with SEO, and can be used to build brand identity. Good content can also help in ensuring the loyalty of your users.
Zone in on the Right Keywords
For content to work, you need a keyword strategy. You need to zone in on a few keywords that you feel would be the right ones, which means they resonate with your company’s ideals. Once that’s done, you need to ensure that the content you put up on your website resonates with those keywords.
Keywords can let you know what your audience wants to know, and can be used as an undying source of content ideas. They can even let you monitor your competition!
The approach to keyword research has changed a lot over the years, with search engines becoming smarter over time. So how do you keep up with smarter search engines? By keeping up with the trends.Get current and “keep up” by reviewing the up-to-date analysis below.
Setting Goals for Each SERP
It’s tempting to just focus on being in the top results positions, but that doesn’t work anymore.
Earlier, you could create a single content asset that could help you achieve search visibility. Now however, that simply isn’t enough. Being on the first page of SERPs is not enough anymore, as it may not be able to provide you with the level of visibility you’d require to gain the amount of success you want. You need to approach every single SERP in a different manner.
For example, try searching “buy X online,” where X could be any object you wish to buy. You would see that the results are no longer the simple website links. Before you even reach those traditional results, you’d see a segment where Google presents you with the images of the products and their prices, followed by the website on which they are available.
Put yourself in your buyer’s shoes, and you’ll know how much easier this has made things for buyers overall. Seeing the products on the top enables them to buy things quickly, and frees them from the hassle of checking out each website individually.
As someone who buys almost everything online, I simply look at the prices offered by different websites and go for the one I find best. And even if I end up buying from Amazon, I still get an idea about the prices other websites have to offer.
Hence, you now need to approach every single SERP differently and come up with tactics to rank in different sections of each set of search results.
Optimizing for Things Instead of Strings
Earlier, people used to try to rank their websites on certain strings such as “top destinations for backpackers,” and it used to work out for them. But since Google is evolving, if you search for the same query now, you would find results such as “top 10 cheapest countries to backpack” and “The 18 Backpacker Destinations You Need to Visit in 2018.”
As you might notice, the results still have the essence of the query but they don’t have the exact strings. Why? Google now understands queries better and gives you personalized results.
Therefore, you should now optimize the content on your website according to concepts instead of strings.
When Optimizing Content, Play the Long Game
The strategies above will help you rank content in the top of SERPs for the long haul, not just for occasional time-bursts. As new content creators publish and continue to publish, you’ll need to rely on a long-game strategy that sustains your efforts – and rewards you and your audience!
Are you up-to-date on the strategies for optimizing content? Let’s hear your POV in the comments!
