Congratulations, you’ve completed your website content audit—a profound step toward improving your content optimization strategies for better marketing results.
You’ve determined what’s working and what’s not to ensure that content aligns with your entire content marketing strategy and goal.
What’s next?
It’s time for the real magic—transforming your content audit data analytics into actionable strategies to boost ROI.
You can breathe new life or maximize your content impact by harnessing the power of the audit findings. It helps you boost performance and drive significant results.
So, let’s explore 7 effective content optimization strategies to help amplify your marketing efforts. But, first, “What is content optimization?” How important is it to your business?
Let’s address those pointers.
Table of Contents
What is content optimization?
Content optimization refers to improving your website content to ensure it aligns with your marketing goals to increase performance, visibility, and SERP rankings.
It involves modifying or updating the content to make it more appealing and relevant to search engines and human users.
These may include:
- Optimizing keywords
- Tweaking headings and subheadings
- Incorporating relevant images, meta tags, and descriptions
- Improving internal and external linking
- Ensuring high-quality and unique content
- Improving the overall user experience (UX).
Furthermore, content optimization aims to attract more traffic and engagement and improve your website’s SEO ranking.
Why is Content Optimization Important?
SEO content optimization is vital because it helps make the content reach your target audience at all stages of the buyer journey and rank higher on search.
More people will find and share the post with their friends and followers—helping you attract more inbound links, leads, and revenue.
Here are some unique content optimization benefits:
- Improved visibility: A well-optimized content can enhance your brand’s online visibility. Your articles appearing higher in SERP rankings will attract more readers and leads.
- Higher search engine rankings: An effective content optimization strategy can help your website rank higher. Higher search engine rankings mean more brand exposure to potential customers.
- Enhanced user experience (UX): Strategically optimizing content improves your website UX. Content optimization for SEO involves making your content more relevant, informative, and engaging to the reader. It helps users spend more time on your site, boosts engagement, and increases conversions.
- Increased organic traffic: Optimizing content for SEO after an audit helps drive more organic traffic to your website or product/service page. Your post becomes more discoverable by search engine users looking for related information.
- Better conversion rates: Optimized content can lead to better conversion rates. When your article provides valuable information, answers users’ questions, and addresses their needs, it builds trust with readers. Thus, it will influence their actions after reading your article.
Nevertheless, optimizing your content should ensure that associated keywords are present—adding meta and title tags and relevant links.
Content Optimization Strategies to Improve Your Content After an Audit (7 Steps)
Content improvement (aka content optimization) after an audit: You must act upon the findings to make the most of a content audit.
Optimizing your content helps improve your content marketing endeavors. So, apply the following content optimization strategies:
1. Set Up Benchmarks for KPIs.
The initial phase of a content audit involves assessing your business’ content marketing objectives as a reference point for evaluating future content performance.
Following the audit, it is crucial to establish benchmarks for key performance indicators (KPIs) and monitor progress across different analytical dimensions.
You can employ multiple metrics for this purpose, including:
- Pageviews
- Bounce rate
- Inbound links
- Time on page
- Conversion rate
- Organic traffic
- keyword position.
After outlining a set of KPIs for reference and comparison with the content audit, you can find strategies to enhance existing content to align with your desired objectives.
These KPIs guide creating fresh content that meets your primary business objective.
2. Upgrade Existing Content to Boost User Experience (UX).
Updating existing content is more than just another checkbox on your to-do list. It is an integral step toward maximizing your online success.
A website content audit lets you evaluate and identify gaps for improvement within your content. Therefore, filling those gaps should be at the top of your priorities.
Why?
It’s a proven content optimization for SEO best practices that enhances user experience. However, revamping your content encompasses more than just superficial changes.
It involves:
- Improving the content quality
- Making it more relevant to the reader
- Ensuring its accuracy
- Making the material easy to read and understand
- Optimizing with more relevant keywords for SEO
- Aligning the article with user intent.
But why stop there?
Google emphasizes more on improving UX. So, enhance UX by checking all boxes and adding relevant, captivating visuals and interactive components.
These additions will amplify user engagement—leaving a lasting impression on your audience. As a result, you will open up the content’s potential to reach more people and drive maximum ROI.
Your blog articles will rank higher in SERPs, increase conversions, and drive user retention.
3. Amplify Underperforming Pages With Topical Depth
Further to enhancing UX to Boost SEO rankings, your posts must answer questions your audience searches online. That’s where topical depth or comprehensive content comes in.
When optimizing your blog articles, you must provide an excellent user experience. Your content needs to answer readers’ search queries comprehensively.
How?
Address various subtopics related to your focus keyword to offer valuable information within the limits of your topic.
To find relevant subtopics to your primary search terms, use Google or your best SEO content optimization tool.
In this content strategy example, I’m using Google—one of the best free content optimization tools to find applicable subtopics to amplify underperforming pages.
This approach is one of the most practical content optimization techniques that drive ROI. So, go to Google and enter your primary search term(s).
For example, if your target keyword is ‘SEO Copywriting,’ enter it into the Google Search box to find relevant subtopics for topical depth.
Once entered, Google Autocomplete (Google Suggest) will show you relevant search suggestions on a drop-down of related topics your readers search online.
See the screenshot example.
This invaluable free keyword research tool will also present more relevant topics and questions in the “People also ask” box, which you can use to strengthen your content.
Those questions and keywords are excellent subtopics that answer users’ queries and strengthen underperforming pages.
4. Delete or Merge Content for Better Results
After a website content analysis, you can strengthen your content strategy and drive better ROIs by deleting or integrating similar blog articles.
Taking applicable action after a content audit is crucial for your content marketing success.
Why?
The integrate or delete content strategy allows you to eliminate any duplicate, outdated, or below-average content that could negatively impact your brand reputation, authority, or user satisfaction.
Conversely, merging or redirecting similar or related topics can prevent confusion or content/keyword cannibalization.
Cannibalization in content occurs when your posts and keywords closely resemble each other in Google’s eyes.
Google’s indexing isn’t just about keywords; it also assesses how well your pages align with search intent.
This approach will eliminate:
- Content clutter
- Simplify your website
- Enhance crawlability and
- Allow you to prioritize core topics.
5. Rectify Technical Issues
Another unique content optimization strategy after an audit to maximize your content’s potential is rectifying your site’s technical issues.
During website content audit, it is crucial to identify any technical problems hindering your SEO ranking.
Some possible technical problems are:
- Broken links
- Slow page speed
- Incorrect robots.txt file
- The lack of image alt tags
- Missing meta description
- Crawling and indexing issues
So, tackling these issues head-on is vital. It lays the foundation for improving the ranking of existing and upcoming content in organic search.
6. Apply On-page SEO
Applying On-page SEO techniques is crucial for gaining rankings in organic search results. It is essential because it gives search engines various signals to help them understand your article.
For example, for search engine spiders to understand your content, the spiders look for relevant keywords in specific areas of your page.
They strive to match your content with keywords and search queries users search online.
These on-page SEO elements direct search crawlers towards the keywords you want your page to rank for on SERP. So after a content audit, check all On-page boxes of underperforming content to guarantee optimal ROI.
How to Optimize for On-page SEO (Best Practices)
Here’s the simple SEO On-page optimization strategy.
Assure the content is valuable, format it properly, and build relevant internal and external links.
Then, add keywords in the following areas:
- Introduction
- Title tags
- Headings & subheadings (h1, h2, & h3)
- Content body
- Page URL
- Meta titles
- Meta descriptions
- Anchor text
- Images & other multimedia elements
Once published, use credible link-building strategies to build quality inbound links to boost page authority.
7. Monitor Analytics & Measure Your Content Performance
Successful content marketing requires 03 essential elements:
- A cohesive strategy
- Precise objectives
- Ongoing performance evaluation.
Regardless of your content’s quality, its true worth lies in its impact on your readers and business. So, identifying and monitoring relevant metrics is the first step toward insightful content analysis.
Tracking analytics after updating your content following an audit is critical to guarantee the content generates the desired results.
You want to see the impact of your changes and how/where to make adjustments for better outcomes.
So analytics offers a workable yardstick to measure content performance—allowing you to pinpoint new areas where your article needs a boost.
You can employ various content optimization tools to test the performance.
The following tools are ideal:
- Moz
- Databox
- Semrush
- BuzzSumo
- Kissmetrics
- SimilarWeb
Wrapping Up Content Optimization Strategies After an Audit
Achieving success in content marketing demands continuous dedication and a comprehensive strategy that incorporates technical SEO and other content optimization best practices.
Conducting a content audit brings you closer to your business objectives through content marketing.
Therefore, use the audit findings to improve your content by applying the steps above.
Enhancing your content post-audit is a proactive approach to maintaining and increasing its effectiveness—ensuring it continues to serve your audience and business goals.
Did we miss anything? Please tell us in the comment section!
Moss Clement is an expert business writer─providing article & blog post writing, ghostwriting, content marketing, proofreading, and editing services for B2B marketers. Moss works closely with B2B marketers, helping small & medium-size businesses build their online presence and brand reputation by delivering quality content that converts.
4 Responses
Hello Moss,
Content plays an important role in ranking a website and driving traffic to it. Content optimization is a very important step to scale up your blog and make it more useful to readers. Thanks so much for sharing this helpful post. Hope, it helps the newbie bloggers.
Regards,
Vishwajeet Kumar
You’re right, Vishwajeet.
Content is indeed a crucial factor in website ranking and attracting organic traffic. However, content alone won’t drive results, optimization…
…which includes keyword research, high-quality writing, and user-friendly formatting, can significantly enhance your blog’s visibility and usefulness to readers.
For newbie bloggers, this information can be a valuable starting point on their journey to creating engaging and informative content.
Consistency and a commitment to continually improving your articles are key to long-term content marketing success.
Thank you for your comment!
Content for the sake of content does little to move the needle. But, if you really strategize, write with your audience in mind, have goals for your content, and conduct deep research, your content can drive tons of business and set you up for success.
Optimization is indeed the key, Vishwajeet. When we plan and really put all we’ve got into our posts, the impact is much greater.