Content optimization in SEO involves ensuring content is written and presented in a way that search engines can understand and serve it to your target audience.
The process essentially means making sure your site’s pages are attractive to both search engines and users.
Going hand in hand with SEO, solid content optimization creates a strong foundation for high performing web pages.
Content optimization matters for SEO purposes.
Creating relevant, engaging content is not enough to rank highly in SERPs if each piece isn’t properly optimized.
Optimizing your content will give it the best possible chance to rank well and receive high volumes of organic traffic.
Uncover a few relevant keywords to target within the piece of content.
Implement the target keywords in a natural-sounding way. Be careful not to overstuff the keywords and risk a Google penalty.
Below is an extreme example of the kind of harmful keyword stuffing you should avoid at all costs.
As well as in the text, include the keywords in a few of the headers.
Nothing makes a site look less reliable than inaccurate spelling and grammar. Run your content through a spell-checker a few times before hitting publish.
Internally linking to other relevant pieces of content on your site is a good idea. This helps Google index these pages more quickly and gives you more of a chance of showing up in search results.
There’s nothing worse for readers than a big block of text with nothing to break it up.
Adding images, graphics and videos is a great way of keeping your users engaged with the content and increasing dwell time.
Create enticing meta descriptions and catchy title tags to grab your readers’ attention while they browse the search results.
Here's a list of some of the best content optimization tools in the market:
Surfer is another content helper tool that gets you a complete content strategy for your desired topic in a few clicks. It helps you outrank your competitors by providing information on the ideal word count, better keywords to use, the structure to follow, and much more.
For any of your content that doesn’t show up on Google’s first page, Surfer provides a detailed checklist for you to identify what is lacking in your posts, and how to introduce those things to achieve better ranking and get more organic traffic.
A highly automated and easy to use content optimization tool, Frase provides its users with content planning that enables their content to rank and convert.
An excellent feature of this tool is its use of Artificial Intelligence not only to provide insights for optimized content but also to answer questions from your target audience. It takes data from your landing pages, product catalogues, blog posts, and all other resources on your website and uses it to provide essential insights.
Scalenut is an AI-powered solution aimed at streamlining the entire SEO lifecycle. Designed to simplify your SEO strategy, it guides you through content planning, content creation, optimization, and analysis, ensuring that your web pages perform well in search engine rankings.
What sets Scalenut apart is its data-driven recommendations tailored specifically to your content needs. Its Traffic Analyser can identify gaps in your existing content, and suggest ways to improve its SEO impact. Features such as Fix-It allow you to auto-optimize NLP key terms, Featured Snippets, H-Tags, Meta tags, and more, making content optimization more focused and effective.
GrowthBar is the SEO tool for web growth. It uses OpenAI GPT-3 to generate content outlines with keywords, word count range, headlines, links for references, and even images that go best with your topic. All this makes content planning a breeze.
It's an all-in-one kind of SEO tool. One of its standout features - it highlights your competitor’s marketing strategy by showing their Google Ads, Facebook Ads, backlinks, and their organic keywords.
This tool also features an app that's lightweight and that empowers the writer with volumes of SEO data to rank better and generate more ROI.
Dashword is a great tool for creating content strategies that are well-aligned with search results. A simple click offers all that needs to be included in your next blog post. The tool also draws a comparison between your content and that of top-ranking businesses.
It increases the relevance of your post by revealing questions your audience searches for and tells you how long your post needs to be. It also provides a content score for your post. The higher the score, the better the chance to rank well.