In a race to mark their presence online and to get conversions from the readers, brands are focusing on content marketing to reach out to maximum audiences. Content is considered to be one of the most powerful ranking factors in search engines and for gaining visitors’ attention.
It is seen that the old content produced can deliver significant value to your website and help gain more customers. Brands have often witnessed that a higher part of the ratio of leads come through existing posts which is the old content. However, the ultimate goal of content writers SEO professionals or digital marketers is not just getting visitors on the landing page, but to get them to perform the desired action.
Informational content marketing gives the readers the value or the answers that they are seeking, but it does not motivate them to stay on the website longer. This indicates that an article with high traffic may not necessarily bring numbers to your business. Hence, old content optimization is a step towards not just getting clicks but conversions (sign up, survey filling, purchase, opt-ins, etc.) by leveraging the existing content.
As mentioned above, an informational article might be doing well in terms of organic traffic. However, to convert readers into a customer, an article should serve these purposes:
- Awareness content – Helps the brand to establish its target audience, as the content is created to attract and convert a relevant audience.
- Educational content – This content helps gain the interest of the target audience for the product that the brand is selling by letting them know how it will benefit them.
Any content written by the brands needs a final touch of optimization from the users’ perspective.
What is content optimization?
Brands are focusing on SEO to gain visibility online and content plays a crucial role in improving SEO. Google search engine favours content that is more attractive to users. In terms of SEO, contextual relevance is also important, the focus should be on how to align the content with searchers’ words and phrases. To get noticed by search engines and users, brands have to write compelling content and add optimizations to make that content scalable.
How to optimize content?
To fully optimize your content, there are a number of factors that one needs to consider. Your content should be tailored to each of your audience types, i.e. you need to write content for each different type of user. To make your content unique to your audience, check your competitor’s strategy to get a sense of their SEO performance and create effective content.
Manually looking and correcting each element in your content will require a lot of time, effort and resources. For effective content, brands are recommended to use the ample amount of tools available online and discussed in the article below. These tools target various user groups and optimize your content accordingly.
With the right skills and tools, it is possible to ace content optimization and stand-out from the competition.
Old content optimization strategies
- Include Call-to-Action in your content – The idea is to integrate CTAs with content and not let it interrupt your visitors while in-between their reading. Blending CTAs into related content will help increase lead conversion.
- Create relevant and useful content – The idea of creating any kind of content is to make it more relevant to the industry and provide value to your audience. Whether you are adding new content or optimizing the existing one, ensure it is engaging and educative for readers to turn into customers.
- Involve customers in content creation – Conduct various activities to make your customers a part of the process. Do surveys, take polls, get forms filled, conduct polls, check their comments, etc. This will help increase their trust, as well as make your customer feel valued.
- Smart Chatbots – Having on-page interactions helps the audience reach your site. With various tools, you can create an intelligent chatbot that helps build a visual interface and give answers to the questions of customers. This is a good way to let your customers feel connected to you.
- Keep a tab on competitors – Competitors play a major role for lead conversions. Know what they are doing to attract visitors, how are they making their web pages more readable and what creative are they implementing. You can use tools to track and identify your organic competitors.
Old content optimization tools
Technology is making our lives simpler and easier. There are various tools available to boost the organic ranking of old content and improve its conversions. Listed below are the top 10 tools that will help you better optimize your content and make it relevant for search engines and users.
Knowing the current traffic of the page will not be able to determine the pages that need to be updated. Therefore, to check the potential of any page, it is important to look at its rankings. On search engines, if your website ranks on the second page it might not get more clicks compared to the websites on the first page of search results. To improve the visibility of your page, you need to improve its SEO.
Ubersuggest is a keyword research tool that will help you identify pages with the high potential to bring quality converting traffic. By typing in the domain, you can see the current rankings, other pages ranked for the same keywords and estimated traffic a page is receiving. Along with finding higher-ranking pages, it can also help you find search-worthy content ideas to gain your audience’s attention. The formula to rank higher is to do more internal linking and adding target keywords in the page title. The highlighted features of this tool include domain and top SEO pages overview, keyword suggestions, content ideas, and backlink data.
An SEO powersuite tool, Website Auditor includes technical SEO guides and auditing/reporting tools in one. It enables the brands to increase online traffic to their website and deliver an experience to the user. With it, you can see and analyze your site for SEO errors similar to how search engines see it. It does internal and external audits of every resource on your site. A thorough technical website audit helps see the factors affecting search engine indexation, rankings, and user experience. It also has various tools like to create tech SEO files like XML sitemap or robots.txt. Its other features include on-page SEO audit, site structure visualizations, in-app content optimization, TF-IDF analysis and generating custom, automatable reports.
A content marketing and social media management tool that helps brands create and share the best content and increase their reach. With Content studio you can find, analyze and share good performing content for any topic or niche. It also has a collaborative planner that can be shared with your teams to create a content calendar. All your scheduled content can be published on all your channels and networks from a single place. The content from all the channels can be analyzed by measuring its KPIs and performance. It has an easy to use interface and is an effective content optimization tool for brands.
SEMRush has a content marketing platform that provides various features for creating a powerful content strategy by combining creativity and analytics. Similar to Content Studio, this tool also does a content gap analysis and Finds relevant and popular topics with good SEO potential. Along with making your content SEO friendly, you can manage your content calendar with your team. It has an option to automate content audits and analyze external content too. You can get a list of backlinks that you can create from different domains. For the optimization of content, it uses 4 different characteristics; Readability, SEO, Originality, and Tone of Voice. With its recommendations, brands can rank their pages on the first page of the search engine results.
Grammarly is a must-have tool for all content writers. It is a brilliant tool that identifies errors and also helps you with other aspects such as sentence structure, style, tone etc. It is available for free and can be used anywhere (word doc, chrome extension etc.). It is an AI-based tool in which you can add words to the grammar, set your style of writing before you start based on which it will suggest changes to you in real-time. It also has a premium version starting at USD 11.66 per month which offers a host of additional benefits such as plagiarism check, engagement, delivery style among others.
RankMath is a free-to-use plugin by MyThemeShop for WordPress which helps you write SEO-friendly content, thus enabling you to rank higher in online searches. With its inbuilt google autocomplete tool, it provides excellent keyword recommendations for on-page optimization. Apart from that, it provides suggestions for internal links based on relevant focus terms. You can use it for multiple keyword optimization (up to 5) and is perfectly compatible with any WordPress theme. However, since it is a free-to-use plugin, it is not completely developed and also makes it difficult to revert to any other plugin from this as most other plugins do not have the option to import settings from RankMath.
Readability is an important factor to consider when working on the optimization of content. The tool helps to achieve better ranking in search engines. Once the content is prepared, you can paste it on this site and it gives you the readability score from 1-10. Along with this, it also gives you suggestions of the editors to improve the readability of your content. It helps identify sentences which are dense and complicated. Correcting those by splitting logic will ensure that your readers are not losing their attention while reading it. A free tool for everyone, it has an easy and clean interface for the users.
Once you have a visitor on your website, you want to convert them into a potential lead. LeadFWD allows you to capture information of an anonymous visitor on your site, follow them up and make them turn them into a paying customer. By optimizing old content, lead generation is the main aim for the marketers. The tool tells you how much time a visitor has spent on your website, according to which you can edit your content and engage the audience for a higher time period. The tool in short gives you real-time insights to help you with lead generation and content creation for the right audience.
One important aspect of content optimization involves following your organic competitors closely. Serpstat is an all-in-one SEO platform that provides site audit, rank tracker, competitor analysis, backlink analysis etc. With the help of Serpstat’s ‘top pages’ report, you can identify your direct competitors. By typing a keyword, you can get a list of all URLs that are ranked closely to that keyword or query. It has various plans starting from USD 69 per month. The good thing is that even the base package has all advanced features, as pricing is based on usage level, which makes it worthy for solo freelancers.
Engaging with customers and providing them with solutions in real-time is a competitive advantage most businesses have these days. With the advancement in AI-based technologies, you can get away with the hassle of developing your own chatbots. MobileMonkey is a chatbot platform for providing customer support. With its help, you can give smart answers to your visitors’ problems in real-time and eventually funnel them towards conversion. It has a free version which provides all basic services including the ‘omnichat’ feature. For advanced features such as analytics or SMS tools, it has a paid version starting from USD 19 per month.
By using both, the mentioned strategies and tools you can optimize the content to improve SEO for increasing your online visibility. Select the best tool that suits your needs before you begin with your content process. Use as many tools as you can to smoothen your process of old content optimization.
The list of content optimization tools is not limited to the ones mentioned in this article, you can explore a number of other tools on the internet and find the best fit for your brand. Remember to make sure that the content you create is valuable to your audience for the best results.
Author: Hetvi works as a Marketing Associate at Refrens.com – India’s most powerful platform for freelancer’s finances and growth. She has worked for some renowned companies as a Brand and Digital marketing associate.