So, what is content optimization? Content refers to your website copy, blog, and any other webpages that you own and optimizing it means that you’ve made that page (or particular group of pages) more attractive to search engines.
Content optimization isn’t exactly the same thing as SEO optimization in that the latter has more technical elements to it and aspects that pertain more to your overall online presence while content optimization zeroes in on strategizing and crafting your content.
As the world of content marketing constantly changes, shifts, and grows we will be covering various topics and subtopics related to content optimization at Content Marketing Conference 2017.
Leading up to the conference, below are a number of resources you may want to peruse to get a head start on learning how to optimize your content:
- Moz’s Guide to On-Page SEO Factors This best practices for SEO guide features many areas that overlap both SEO and content optimization and can help give you a better understanding of how search engines use the different parts of your webpage to determine your ranking and drive traffic. It’s also important to factor in user experience in your content optimization since a bad experience will increase your bounce rate, and you will get a nice primer in how to create a better experience after the traffic has been driven.
- Are You Optimizing Your Off-Site Content? Content doesn’t start and stop with what people can find on the webpages you’re trying to draw traffic to. What about social media pages, tertiary blogs and websites, reprints, press releases, pieces that influencers wrote about you, and anything else on the web that be traced back to your business? There’s some surprising ways you can optimize your off-site content so that people find you through these means in addition to your own blog and site copy.
- A Technical Argument for Quality Content What exactly makes content “quality”? Helpfulness? Readability? How often it’s shared? All of these aspects factor into what makes content “quality” but the real answer is that it’s all about getting what your users want so “quality” has different definitions for every organization and their audience. In optimizing your content, you need to learn how to do the type of research that will give you a better idea of what your audience is looking for so that producing quality content doesn’t have to be an incredibly expensive experiment if you simply give them what they’re looking for in the first place.
- 7 Steps to Truly Understanding Your Audience With the need for quality content established, you need to dive deeper into understanding your audience so you know what they’re looking for. This guide gives you an in-depth breakdown that moves past stock buyer personas and unreliable online surveys!
- Can Company Structure Spawn Cannibalization? When devising a content optimization strategy, you want to make sure that cannibalization– internal content duplication– is kept to a minimum. Topics can start to sound similar and a blog post or webpage can essentially become duplicate content. Whether you’re the CMO of a Fortune 500 organization or a solo internet marketer, you need to be careful that content with similar search themes and sets of keywords doesn’t resemble the original content too much or else it can cause problems with ranking.
You may also be interested in the Content Marketing Workshop taught by Arnie Kuenn of Vertical Measures.
Consider Andy Crestodina’s SEO Masterclass if you’d like to learn more about how to calculate your ROI and actions that you can take specifically to increase your ranking and attain more targeted traffic.
We hope to see you at #CMC17 in Boston this April! Visit Content Marketing Conference to learn more and register!