Content optimization is vital to any marketing campaign, including email, visual pieces, and blog posts. When you have a brand, you want it to be seen. However, you can’t wait until people find you by chance.
It’s up to you to make your brand visible to your target audience. That’s the prominent role of content optimization in marketing, making it easier to find.
In this sense, if you want to increase your sales or your number of clients (or both), it’s logical that you have to worry about standing out from your competitors. When your content is optimized, people come across your brand first.
Nowadays, in competitive markets, content optimization matters a lot. People want things very fast. If they find your brand just as quickly, you have great chances of succeeding in online sales.
Nevertheless, content optimization is not only about being the first, but it has a huge and positive impact on the quality of your marketing strategies. Optimizing your content is to make it interesting, relevant, light, and entertaining.
If content optimization is completely new territory for you, read this article to understand what it is, reveal its importance, and describe how it works. You will also learn how to optimize your own content by the end of this content.
- What is content optimization?
- Why is content optimization important?
- How does content optimization work?
- How to optimize your content
- Content optimization for conversions
What is content optimization?
The importance of content optimization in all marketing processes is unquestionable. The content that a company produces might be interesting and compelling, but what use does it have if people are unable to find it online? Is it that good?
Marketing is all about visibility. Content optimization comes into the debate to add such visibility to marketing approaches. We are talking about:
- emails;
- blog posts;
- landing pages;
- posts on social media;
- everything else.
When you worry about optimizing your content, you are taking advantage of data, which, in turn, search engines will explore to display your many kinds of content to people on many platforms.
As you could notice, content optimization is to understand how search engines work, in order to adapt the demands of these algorithms into the forms of content you produce, such as text, images, or videos.
In addition, more important than optimization of your content to search engines and algorithms, it’s optimizing your content to people, more specifically, for your target audience.
By making your content more organized and pleasant to human beings, the search engines will simply follow their lead.
Make no mistake, content optimization is something you should be doing to improve the experiences that you offer to your audience or the public in general. It’s not something to be done to machines and algorithms only.
Why is content optimization important?
Let’s suppose your marketing team has prepared awesome pieces of writing, and visual pieces as well, regarding the new release of your company.
They are well-crafted and well-designed. Moreover, they explain very clearly how the new product works, besides introducing all their features.
However, during the production of the texts, images, and videos, content optimization was something that wasn’t considered.
After a few months, when marketing metrics and KPIs were being analyzed, it was a shock to everybody that the performance of such pieces was below expected.
This scenario can be quite upsetting and frustrating. But you would be surprised to know that it happens more frequently than it should have. To avoid it in real-life situations, content optimization must be a part of the creative process of marketing strategies.
Writing the best text or designing the best layouts won’t be helpful if you don’t consider content optimization. They will simply disappear as if they never existed in the first place. In addition, we can’t forget to mention the main advantages of optimizing your content, such as:
- your content gets practical, useful, and informative;
- the content gets more helpful because more people are going to find it online;
- your site and other official pages become more credible and trustworthy;
- the overall quality of your content increases, making it more likely to be shared;
- optimizing your content is going to attract more leads;
- content optimization can boost engagement, helping you with customer retention.
Gaining visibility, promoting engagement with your target audience, and making it easier to be found are the most significant benefits a company can get by implementing content optimization into marketing strategies.
To apply content optimization to your marketing strategies, you must understand how it works. Keep reading to figure it out!
How does content optimization work?
Content optimization is directly related to adapting your texts and other media to users and to search engine robots. If your content goes unnoticed by the main search engines, people who are exploring the internet will not find your marketing initiatives.
That’s why content optimization is also known as SEO (Search Engine Optimization). It is a methodology that ensures your blog posts or posts on social media will be more visible through the world wide web.
Search engine robots run the web. They will rank optimized content higher on a search engine page, such as Google. If your content is not optimized to SEO, people will need to scroll down the page to find it.
These search engine robots are going to scan your content, weighing from its relevancy and layout organization to more technical matters, such as HTML and the presence of backlinks.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that people don’t go that far on a search engine page. They only check what appears on its top. The position that you are on a search engine page is going to determine if your content will receive visitors.
Ranking high is a matter of survival in extremely competitive markets. The only way to do that is through content optimization.
Certainly, content optimization to SEO looks complex, but it’s quite simple. Many big companies have an exclusive team to be responsible for it, but small ones can also improve their results, and rank higher on search engine pages.
Following you can read some useful, simple, and practical techniques to optimize your content.
How to optimize your content?
Content optimization should be people-driven, instead of machine-driven. However, it doesn’t mean algorithms can be totally ignored.
That being said, if you want to improve your content and results, you have to consider the following strategies.
Understand Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
When you are planning email marketing strategies (or any other one) related to the content, the most important thing to be taken into account is its relevancy and originality. It should be relatable as well. That’s the only way to make your content enticing to your target audience.
However, the first step to take when we talk about content optimization is to make it easier to be found. In light of this conclusion, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a very necessary approach in marketing, including email marketing campaigns.
To make your content compliant with SEO, you can explore some aspects. Keep reading to learn them all.
- Use headings and subheadings in your texts. Search engines are friendly with long texts, and breaking your text into shorter segments is going to make it easier to read and digest.
- Use keywords in headings and subheadings because it also calls the attention of search engine robots. Writing these keywords in bold or in a larger font is another thing to consider.
- Make use of vocabulary and phrases that have a lot of search volume. This way, you can attract more traffic to your pages if you use content optimization strategies.
- Don’t forget to include title tags, meta descriptions, internal and external links that are relevant to your content, and an optimized URL. All these elements should contain keywords.
- Update your platforms frequently. Search engine robots like updated content, just like your customers.
- Pay attention to the organization of the layout. Content optimization is to make texts cleaner and organized. Use HTML or CSS layouts, because they are easily found by search engine robots.
- Search engines will not post anything illegal. We are referring to unlawful texts, images, or videos, as well as copyrighted material. Be ethical and creative, and you will have nothing to worry about.
- Don’t ever forget that content optimization should be people-driven. Writing to search engine robots is a huge mistake, not to say a fatal one. Don’t over-link, or make keywords too repetitive. Be aware of broken links too. An SEO text is always relevant, interesting, accurate, specific, and updated, above everything else.
As you could probably notice, these useful SEO techniques are pretty simple to put into practice. You could also infer that such tips improve not only the position on a search engine page, but they have a positive impact on the quality of your content.
Content optimization goes beyond search engine robots. It’s what makes pieces of content the best representation of brands.
Implement text optimization
Writing and producing content is quite challenging. Even more so when you write and think about content optimization at the same time.
Nevertheless, producing great content is quite rewarding. It not only attracts more people to your platforms but also makes you gain credibility. Needless to say that when people believe and trust you, it’s possible to build solid relationships with your target audience.
Considering such a perspective, implementing text optimization is crucial to building a solid brand. Read the next useful tips that can improve the quality of your copy.
- Content personalization is an intelligent strategy to implement text optimization. Study, research, and understand the ways of thinking and behaving of your target audience before you produce your copies.
- Keep the language you use in mind. Content optimization is related to simple language. It means your text and other forms of media should make experiences simpler, not more complex. Eliminate complex and unknown words from your content.
- Besides simpler vocabulary, consider using simpler structures as well. Write short sentences and paragraphs. They are easier to read and understand, besides facilitating the scanning process.
- When you are producing your content, be aware of your brand’s tone of voice. Maintain a consistent tone in your texts and visual content. It helps in the mission of consolidating your brand, making it more recognizable.
Text optimization is linked to making your content more comprehensive. After all, your content is made to solve people’s doubts about your brand and products, not to raise new issues.
Simple structures and words are what make your content optimized. This way, it’s possible to conclude that content optimization is related to simplicity.
Optimize videos
Nowadays, visuals can be more compelling than words. So, content optimization is not restricted to words, it also applies to videos.
Being active on video platforms, such as YouTube, which is one of the most popular video websites globally, is an interesting choice to boost the performance of marketing strategies.
Just like Google, YouTube has its own robots to rank the videos that are available on the platform. Some strategies to get a visible position on this channel are:
- include a target keyword in the title of your video;
- include a descriptive headline to explain your video to viewers;
- add links to your website on the video’s description;
- give a proper name to the file of your video. In case it is embedded, it should be a reminder of your brand.
YouTube search results are displayed according to keyword queries, so it follows the basic rules of content optimization. By following these strategies, you can attract more traffic to your visual channel, and use this platform to make your brand stronger.
If a text can solve people’s doubts about a product, imagine how powerful a tutorial video can be.
Optimize images as well
Images are also an important part of content optimization strategies. It’s widely proved that images attract traffic to your blog posts. This fact gives you a strong enough reason to make you consider them when strategizing, producing, organizing, and publishing new marketing campaigns.
Including images within your copy enhances the messages you want to transmit through your texts. Nevertheless, they only will do that if they are optimized according to the following rules that you can read next.
- Include Alt Tags: in case an image can be displayed or suffers a loading error, the Alt tags are going to replace the image. So, they have a crucial role, as long as they are detailed.
- Include Image Tags: when a user scrolls over an image, they see the image tags. So, make sure the tags are according to the image the users are seeing, ensuring content optimization.
- Image’s file name: give a proper name to your images. They are reminders of your company.
More and more companies are relying on images to attract traffic to their official pages, as well as improve accessibility in them. Here’s a curiosity for you: alt images were originally created to make images accessible to the ones who have impaired sight.
This proves that content optimization is not only about attracting traffic. It can promote accessibility and provide positive experiences to visitors.
Position your content
Content optimization is also going to position your brand online. It means that your articles can be more conducive to backlinks.
When it happens, your company is exposed to a completely new audience. This exposition raises awareness of your brand and your points of view. Content positioning is important to effective marketing campaigns. You can get external attention by:
- exploring controversial subjects: as many companies avoid these matters, they are quite essential to call people’s attention. When you publish your view about a trendy issue will also make your content shareable and relatable. However, don’t do it just for the buzz. Remember what your mission as a company is and stick to it;
- being original: authenticity and originality are getting harder and harder to find, especially in marketing. Everything seems copied or recycled. Rely on your creativity and uniqueness. Your original texts might get some external attention if people can agree or relate to them;
- identifying potential trends: writing about what’s going on at the moment is a smart content optimization strategy. However, a lot is going on. Choose your trends carefully and create useful content. If you are trying to attract backlinks, standing out is a must, especially when we talk about trends;
- taking a stand: remember to humanize and personalize your texts. Your customers expect that your views and beliefs are shared because they care about the brand’s values, ethics, and accountability;
- having an authoritative voice: references are important to any business. Having accomplishments, studies and solid case studies will reveal why people should consider your view and analysis. Being an authority in your niche is great to make your content more clickable.
Companies are more than services and products. They also carry out ideas and opinions. If people don’t know where you stand, your content will sound generic.
Reinforcing your brand’s mission is more than content optimization, it is the only way to connect with your target audience.
Content optimization for conversions
Every marketing strategy is related to conversions. After the visitors finish reading your text or watching your video, you want them to subscribing to your channel, sharing the video or text, or buying your product.
Content optimization is also linked to conversions. If you are currently struggling with your Conversion Rate, the first thing you should be doing is to change the approach to the way you write your copies or record your videos.
We have some strategies if you want to boost your results with the Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).
Understand your target audience
How does your audience communicate? Do you know the kind of language they use? If your brand has teenagers as a target audience, you should use light language and even slang to better communicate with them.
Another thing to consider when we talk about teenagers is that they are more compelled to visual resources instead of written ones, as they get distracted very easily.
So, don’t try recording 20-minute-long videos, they won’t watch them. However, if you keep videos short, you get all of their attention. This is just one example. You have to adapt your content optimization accordingly to the audience you are speaking to.
Moreover, don’t forget to directly address the pain points and challenges that your target audience faces on a daily basis. Making your content relatable is going to help you create a connection with them.
Consider CTAs in your content optimization strategies
Every content that you produce is conversion-orientated. Even unconsciously, you do want readers to take some kind of action.
This action is made clear in the Call to Action buttons (CTAs). If you want to boost conversions, the CTAs should be optimized. Some features does an efficient CTA, such as:
- are short and specific;
- contain verbs of action and are imperative;
- are straightforward;
- are well-designed and well-positioned within the article;
- leave no space to doubt;
- consider the users’ or readers’ journey in your platforms.
When you are designing CTA buttons, use these aspects as a checklist. All successful CTAs have these elements in common.
Finally, the A/B tests will help the marketing team in the creation process of CTAs that can really convert.
Don’t forget that CTA buttons are a part of the content optimization approach in marketing, especially when we look at conversions.
The body of text and content optimization
How good is your writing? Can your article attract new people and convert them? Can your text retain your current subscribers?
When we talk about content optimization, we can go round and round, but we will always return to the starting point: the body of text.
Even in videos, the writing is present. To shoot a good-quality tutorial, for example, you need a script. The point taken here is that words matter a lot. So, to make the most of your words, don’t forget to:
- organize your texts in shorter segments, using headings and subheadings;
- write short sentences and paragraphs;
- use daily and simple language;
- write persuasively;
- focus on the reader’s needs and wants;
- offer solutions, not more problems;
- use the description to paint a picture;
- leave sales aside for a moment, and be conversational;
- use storytelling in your texts and videos;
- help first and convert later.
There’s a lot to consider when you are creating a text, but content optimization is worth it. The results are proven and the techniques work.
All these tips, which were exposed throughout this piece of writing, are going to help you with content optimization. The results will be seen in your Conversion Rates, you can be sure about that.
Content optimization can be considered a step to achieve a healthy Email Conversion Rate, but to increase your conversions, read this SafetyMails’ article about it and check some strategies to boost it.
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