Most website owners, bloggers, and digital marketers want to create helpful content for their readers.

Many hours are spent on ideation, writing, formatting, and publishing. But are you achieving the desired results from your efforts?

If the answer is no, you may be falling short on the optimization aspect of content creation.

What on Earth is Content Optimization?

Content optimization is the process of systematically adhering to best practices to give your content the most visibility and efficacy possible.

When your content is optimized, it boosts the performance, reach, and engagement of your content, increasing the chances of it reaching your target audience and fulfilling your content marketing goals.

Content optimization is an ongoing project. Good content optimization requires continuous monitoring, testing, and refinement to stay apace with ever-evolving search engine algorithms and user preferences.

Effective, well-optimized content remains competitive and relevant to its intended audience.

Why You Should Care About Content Optimization

In the State of Content Marketing 2022 Global Report conducted by Semrush, 24k articles that ranked in Google’s Top 10 search results were analyzed.

What Semrush discovered was that each of these top-performing articles scored a 9 or 10 out of 10 regarding the primary five optimization areas: readability, SEO, originality, tone of voice, and consistency.

This data means it’s rationally justifiable to deduce a correlation between well-optimized content and articles Google finds useful enough to land in the 10 top-ranking slots.

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In short, your article may be thorough in describing your product and solidly written, but if it’s not optimized for Google to find it, it’ll be lost to the black hole of internet content, never to be seen.

How to Optimize Your Blog Content

Alright, you’re convinced of the importance of well-optimized content; now what? How do you optimize your site effectively?

Let’s use Semrush’s findings of how ‌top-ranking articles were optimized as a rubric.

Using those metrics, you’ll want to focus your optimization efforts on:

• SEO
• Readability
• Tone of Voice
• Consistency
• Originality

Let’s take them one at a time.

SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your content for search engines.

The most basic and widely used form of SEO is keywords.

Keywords refer to the words and phrases people enter into search engines as queries.

For instance, “best pizza places near me.”

If your content includes those keywords, a search engine will recognize your content as relevant to the query and show the user your article instead of the 200,000 other articles on that topic that don’t include those keywords.

To know which keywords to target, you’ll need to conduct keyword research.

This is done with keyword research tools like Ahrefs or Semrush. You can also use free tools like Google Search Console to see what queries users are typing into Google to get results.

Once you have your target keyword, you’ll want to find secondary keywords on the same topic. You can then use this list to create your outline for the article.

You may think the more keywords, the better, but Google will know if you are keyword stuffing without any substance to your article.

The goal is to create an informative, well-written article that also happens to contain the relevant long-tail keywords you know have the best search volume with the least competition on the topic you’re targeting.

Readability

There are several best practices that make a piece of content readable. We’ll look at a few of the most significant.

Proper Heading Structure

In the same body of research we referenced before, Semrush discovered that 47% of ‌top-ranking articles used an advanced heading structure.

This meant their articles were structured with H2, H3, and H4 headings.

This is significant for two reasons:

1. Breaking your article down into well-organized subtopics makes your article more readable and understandable to your target audience, which is, after all, the whole name of the game.

2. Search engines LOVE header structure because it helps them understand what your content is about by reading the heading code and indexing it properly.

Excellent internal linking structure

When you have a robust internal link structure, both algorithm bots and human readers understand the structure of your website.

Internal links also pass page authority onto the pages you link‌ to. This creates a healthy web of well-linked, high-traffic, SEO-rich articles that’ll reward you in both organic traffic and search engine rankings.

A great way to create your linking structure is to follow the pillar cluster model.

In this model, you’ll create “pillar pages.”

These are pages that cover a central, broad topic. These pillar pages will then link to several articles of “cluster content.” These are articles that are on the same topic as the pillar but offer more specificity.

For example, say you sell a copywriting course on your website.

First, you write a pillar article about copywriting. This page covers the topic of copywriting in general.

Then, you write several cluster articles on more specific aspects of copywriting, like copywriting tools, how to find a good copywriter, email copywriting, copywriting examples, etc.

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Lastly, you link all of the cluster articles to the pillar and each other, creating your robust interlinking networking.

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Use enticing visuals

Semrush’s State of Content Marketing 2023 Global Report discovered that articles with seven or more images got 116% more organic traffic than those that didn’t.

Informative visuals also make content more readable, as they are friendlier to the eye and easier to scan.

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An additional advantage to good graphics is backlinks  through link building, especially when implemented by a reputable SEO agency. If your visuals are educational and informative, like infographics or bite-size stat reports, others in your industry will want to use your graphics. They’ll put it in their own article and include a link to your site, and your organic traffic and site authority will grow.

Tone of Voice

Your tone of voice is your brand’s calling card. Usually, you want to strike a balance between being too informal and too stiff.

Sometimes, a brand may make the decision to sway much further one way or the other to make a splash.

A playful, informal tone has become very popular on brand X accounts, for example. The brand account for Wendy’s got a lot of popularity in 2020 for playfully roasting Burger King and has been known for their snarky posts since.

Don’t be afraid to loosen up your brand’s tone a little, but be aware of your audience. Most importantly, be consistent.

Which brings us to…

Consistency

Be consistent in your tone of voice, your article structure, and your layout. Switching it up constantly will shake the trust your audience has in you because you’ll appear unorganized and unprofessional.

It’s normal to go through periods of transition. You may be undergoing a project to link all your content under the pillar cluster model, for example. But there shouldn’t be glaring differences from post to post.

Define your brand tone and document it. Give it to everyone who creates content for your brand, complete with examples. When everyone is on the same page, consistency is more likely to remain in place.

Originality

Lastly, your content should be original.

You’ve probably read some iterations of “in today’s fast-paced digital landscape…” thousands of times in recent articles.

That’s because everyone is copying everyone else (and many are using AI). The result is unimaginative, unoriginal, and boring writing.

Write like you speak, as a human to other humans.

Understand your target audience and write to them specifically.

Don’t be afraid to have a specific point of view and write about it.

People are thirsty for authenticity and originality. Give it to them.

8 Powerful Wix Plugins for Content Optimization

For all the woes AI is bringing to the marketing table, automation can save you a ton of time and headaches if you find the tools that work for you.

Here are four powerful Wix plugins that’ll streamline your content optimization.

Wix SEO Wiz

SEO Wiz gives you a step-by-step plan to enhance your on-site SEO. It also offers tutorials, personalized keyword recommendations, and tracking capabilities.

SEO Image Optimizer

The images you insert in your content also need to be optimized. SEO Image Optimizer automatically does this by adding relevant Alt tags, optimizing file sizes, and enhancing website loading speed.

Wix Blog

Wix blog is an extremely user-friendly blog builder for your Wix site. With its easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor, you can create a beautiful, customized blog to construct your content strategy. However, if you feel unsure about your decisions, you can always outsource software development services to assist you in building your website.

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GetTraffic 

GetTraffic will analyze your site’s performance and present you with an actionable plan of improvement to boost your organic traffic.

Site Booster

Site Booster does double duty by submitting your website information to relevant directories and search engines as it collects and delivers insights regarding how to enhance your local SEO.

G-Trendalyser

This Wix plugin allows you to get top and rising trends for up to five keywords from Google Trends with no coding required.

Moz Bar for Wix

The Moz Bar is a free SEO analysis tool for your website. Simple.

SEO Rocket

Last but not least, SEO Rocket is a comprehensive SEO tool for your website that offers everything from competitor analysis to keyword research and more.

Wrap Up

Content optimization is the difference between your content ideas boosting your revenue and business growth and them never seeing the light of day.

The data has shown that high-quality content that’s been properly and strategically optimized will perform. Utilize plugins and automation wherever possible to streamline optimization tasks.

Once you have the basics down, document your process and make it a habitual part of your content marketing strategy going forward.

About The Author

Luca Ramassa is Outreach Specialist at LeadsBridge, passionate about Marketing and Technology. His goal is to help companies improve their online presence and communication strategy.