The Ins And Outs of Content Optimisation

Know your market, know your keywords!

Determine which are your most important keywords that relate to your product and services. You need to know where you are currently ranking for these keywords, and which pages are ranking for these keywords respectively. By understanding what’s currently working and what it is, you will have an idea of where these content gaps lie and a strategy may be determined... Know your strengths and weaknesses.

How do your landing pages perform?

Google analytics pulls raw data from your website and represents these a number of metrics graphically, a crucial tool to measure the success of your overall content strategy.

Tracking the rankings of your website is one thing, but what happens after a user lands on your website? How do they engage with your content, do they?

You need to look at the following:

What is the organic traffic? Has this page driven any conversions? Are you users bouncing without engaging further?

Search result landscape.

It is important to know the SERP landscape for a particular keyword that you are competing for.

This paints a picture to what type of content is needed, by not only looking at the results for the (Maps, Shopping, Images, Answer boxes etc), but more importantly, the content that is packed within the result/website (product pages, blog posts, research and more), we are able to determine what the intent for the search is, and exactly what type of content is required.

Important factors to consider for all primary terms/keywords

The type of results (knowledge graph/answer box/local/images)

The type of websites (news/business/blogs)

What are the strength of sites? (ex: brand equity/domain strength/backlink profile)

What types of content are required? (ex: product pages/blog posts/news articles)

Data Analysis

Data is the key to orchestrating a successful strategy and ultimately driving results!

What does your website do better than anyone else? Know your strengths!

Is there any room for improvement? Ranking vs Bounce-rate

Potential Opportunities? Older pages that are ranking? What could you do to further improve these pages? Call-to-action?

Identify any potential trends – Long tail keywords found now in answer boxes in Google SERP’s? Perhaps a strategy to consider?

What threats can we foresee?

In a site transition, this is really important. For top-performing pages, we need to ensure redirects are in place and content is kept in line with what currently exists, and, of course, we have to be prepared for the search engines to simply change their results.

Data Data Data!!! Put it all together:  Initiate, Integrate, Iterate