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Use content optimization techniques to help improve your web traffic and lead conversions.
You might be thinking, I write lots of content but my website traffic is not growing and my content is not converting. My marketing content, so I thought, was tuned for the search engine with meta descriptions, title tags, backlinks, and keywords. Nada! How can I use content optimization strategies to fix this?
So let’s dive in!
Customers are tired of social media posts that focus only on selling and don’t bring anything new for them. Your target audience wants original content which keeps them connected to the latest information on the market. So, not the type of content you choose to publish is the most important.
What is even more crucial is how you present the information and how digestible it becomes for your readers. For example, you can present it as a blog post, infographic, or video. Any form is great as long as you make it clear and easy to follow for your readers.
When you launch your company website, the blog section should be on top of your priorities. Blogs occupy the 5th place as the most trusted sources of information. Therefore, once a potential client enters on your website, he will most probably visit your blog trying to learn more about your products or services and understand whether you have a solution to his problem.
When asked about the company’s marketing content strategy, the CEO of PickWriters mentions: “A good content strategy shouldn’t persuade the customers to order your services. A business owner can influence his target audience to buy a product by creating stories and keeping a natural tone. It is very important for a customer to identify the solution to their problems immediately. This is why he will come back regularly and trust more.”
Content optimization is important for content developers, CMO’s, marketing managers, and SEO’s. Get it right and watch sales grow.
What is content optimization?
Content optimization is used to provide valuable information about your business. It helps search engines determine what your business is about. Therefore, whenever your target audience is looking for a solution that you can provide, the search engines will show your website as a top result.
More than 6.5 million people blogging in the world who use their creativity to the maximum to attract as many customers as possible. So, you need to stand out from the crowd with your content and come up with innovative ideas to attract your customers. Therefore, if you want to be successful with your content optimization process, then you need to know how to avoid the myths about content creation:
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Define your target audience
As we already mentioned, a top-quality content doesn’t necessarily bring more readers to your website. You will need to know your target audience very well if you want to increase your number of clients. After you finished defining the purpose of your content, the next step will be to determine who is going to be your target audience.
If you want to produce compelling content, this doesn’t mean that you should write only about the things you are personally interested in. It is essential to be passionate about your business and the things you write about, but this is not enough. Your readers should feel involved in your stories. The most effective content strategy is the one that offers clear solutions and answers to their most pressing questions.
The first step to define your target audience is to determine the demographic parameters. You need to establish the age, gender, location, education degree, etc. For instance, you will need to create a different type of content for a target audience between 30 and 45 than if you would write for someone who is around 20 years old.
On the other hand, you will need to do more research on psychographics. This means to find as much as possible about your audience beliefs, values, and interests. For example, you cannot write against family rules if your target audience believes in family values and has strong moral principles.
Once you have the demographic and psychographic data, you are ready to create the buyer persona. Now, you should create a customer avatar with the characteristics and interests your target audience should have. Once you have an in-depth knowledge of the customers that make up your target audience is the difference between a marketing content strategy that works and one that doesn’t.
This is how you will be able to target your content better. Therefore, you will address your customer’s challenges, pain points, gain creators, and motivators. Once you have identified all these, you will be able to understand:
You can obtain even more details about your target audience by asking for feedback from your current customers. This is how you will understand which is their impression of the content you currently produce and what problems they need to solve urgently. Thus, you will be able to address their problems more efficiently and establish a long-term relationship with them.
Write for your readers to boost content optimizatio
Your success is guaranteed if you write about the things your customers are interested in. Think about it you want better content performance. You need to do your research and find out what your clients like and what keeps them engaged. If you want your readers to come back for more content, you should stop writing for everyone.
You already learned how to define your buyer persona. Therefore, when you create your content, think of a unique person who is going to read your posts. You cannot write for a crowd of people if you don’t know what they like and what makes them resonate.
You should leave aside the corporate language and adopt a more conversational tone. This will help with content optimization. You should adapt your language and speak directly to the individual. For instance, you should use words like “you” instead of writing generic phrases. This is how you will create a level of intimacy with your reader, and he will trust you even more.
In addition, if you want to engage your readers, even more, you can also share your personal experiences. You can offer them a solution to a problem that bothers them also by talking about a situation you recently encountered and explain how you solved it.
This will make the readers discover your human side, and they will resonate even more with you. Plus, this will also make them respect you even more and come on your website for more stories.
Content optimization will not happen over night, so be patient. If not run an ad, pick up the phone, or send 1,000s of emails. See how they work.
Content SEO optimization
Want better content optimization? Seo is critical and it’s
You will increase your visibility with SEO optimization. Without clarity and exposure, your content will be just like all the other million blog posts out there on the market. If nobody sees your content, nobody will share it, and your target audience will not know about your business. This means that you should focus on SEO optimization more than ever.
The first thing you should do is the keyword research. Even though you have defined your buyer persona and primary goal, you will need keywords. This is how search engines can find you. When you start the keyword research, you should keep in mind the following rules:
When you determine your list of keywords, you should choose only one word which best matches your topic and returns the highest results. This is going to be your main keyword. Then you can choose other words with a generous number of results which are going to be your secondary keywords. This is how you are going to avoid wasting time and be able to create more relevant content.
What is more, you can increase your credibility by linking to relevant and trustworthy external sources. Backlinks are one of the most efficient methods when you optimize your content. In addition, SEO optimization means that you should also optimize the title tag, meta description, and URL.
Apart from keywords, these three elements have some particularities. The title tag should be below 60 characters. You should place the main keyword in the beginning and be specific when you create it. In addition, the meta description should contain a maximum of 160 characters. It should be concise and offer a clear overview of what you have to offer. Finally, the URL should be readable and determine your client click on it when he first reads it.
Do you know how to measure your content marketing success?
If you want to win at content optimization you have to know where you are. Remember Alice and Wonderland?
“One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree. ‘Which road do I take?’ she asked. ‘Where do you want to go?’ ‘I don’t know,’ Alice answered. ‘Then,’ said the cat, ‘it doesn’t matter.”
Even though measurement comes at the end of the content marketing process, it is actually the beginning of a long journey. Based on the results obtained, you will adapt and improve your marketing strategy.
In addition, even though you can measure almost everything these days, this doesn’t mean that you should do so. You need to concentrate your efforts around those metrics that really return relevant results for your business. Below you can find a list of KPIs that will help you measure your success:
Wrap Up for Content Optimization
The content marketing strategy never ends nor does your content optimization duty. There is always room for improvement. So, you should always keep an eye on the market trends and adapt accordingly.
Measuring how your content strategy is doing is very important when you want to evolve. Asking questions and finding solutions for each problem you encounter will help you evolve and engage your readers even more.
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Kristin Savage nourishes, sparks and empowers using the magic of a word. Along with pursuing her degree in Creative Writing, Kristin was gaining experience in the publishing industry, with expertise in marketing strategy for publishers and authors. You can find her on Facebook and Twitter.