‘Content creation’, as we understand it for SEO purposes, is a new and fast-changing discipline. 25 years ago or more, you may have written an article for a publication, had it published, and then whether it was a daily paper or a monthly periodical, it was either used for the next day’s fish and chips or put on the coffee table in reception to gather dust.
Today, what you say in your website content is important. Even more important is how you say it, and tweaking that content on a regular basis is a habit that is crucial to the long-term success of your website in terms of generating traffic and keeping its rankings at a consistent high.
What is content optimisation?
Website content optimisation is when you take an existing page of older content that has performed well in the past but has lost a certain amount of traction. There may be various reasons for this. Perhaps the original search terms that you weaved into the piece are no longer relevant or trending. There may be technical issues in which the page itself is not tracking anymore. Possibly there are seasonal reasons - does your business operate according to public holidays where there are peaks and troughs of demand?
An SEO specialist will automatically know where to go to assess reasons for the drop in rankings, going through a checkbox of technical and other areas that could be causing an issue. However, technical glitches aside, website content optimisation is the most fundamental aspect to keeping on top of your rankings - and promoting good practice with regards to reviewing your content on a regular basis will act as a significant positive in terms of Google’s ranking protocols.
Algorithm Updates
There is much conversation around Google’s changing algorithms, and over the last two decades, the company has massively overhauled the way in which optimised content is crawled and assessed. If your piece of content is several years old, it could be that Google no longer wishes to recognise the almost spammy content that was a feature or original website content.
The quality of your content is crucial, and the best advice we can give you is to write for your target market, not for Google. Improving artificial intelligence these days picks up on good quality writing that offers value and advice. Cleverly weaving in quality keywords that are relevant to current trends will set your content optimisation apart from others and help to push you over and above your competitors.
Ultimately, you are working towards satisfying Google’s search evaluation guidelines that focus on EAT - Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust.
How Search Engine Optimisation is Achieved for Content Media
To that end, updating old content is a quick win in terms of search engine optimisation. Even just a few amendments will highlight the content as updated, which signals to Google that it needs to recrawl the page and push it back up the rankings based on the new material. For someone who knows what they are doing, this can be a ten minute job if it is just a matter of finding a couple of new keywords and updating some of the key terms in the content.
To further improve your page’s ‘rankability’, supplement the content improvements with photos or videos, and make sure that you both caption and optimise the pictures themselves.
If you have no external links but have the subject matter to link to a couple of high-quality authority websites (often government or academic research sites give the gravitas that Google likes), do not be afraid to add these in. In the past, the concern was that you were taking someone away from your page. In reality, being clever with your external links will help to build your own domain authority and push you up the rankings within your own sector.
When writing content, how many keywords should you optimise around?
Although there are no hard and fast rules, the general rule of thumb is that you should include between four and six keywords in your content. Evidently, the longer the copy, the more opportunities you have to weave in a few more keywords. 400 words of content stuffed with dozens of keywords will rank worse than 1000 words containing half a dozen well thought out keywords.
Content Optimisation Tools
Make sure that you use content optimisation tools and carry out competitor research as well. If your competitors are beating you in the rankings, it might not necessarily mean that you’re doing anything wrong - simply that they are doing more.
Reviving old content, bringing it up to date, and reinvigorating it in terms of content optimisation is a quick, cheap and easy way to get the rockets under your website fired up again.
If you are interested in having a complete website audit to understand how it is performing in comparison to your competitors, contact us for a chat today.