Content Optimisation: How to improve content on your website

September 13, 2022
Ellie Watts
Visit author profile

Eager to ensure your target audience finds your well-written, relevant and informative content? Before you begin to brainstorm ideas for new and unique content that’ll draw in potential customers, it’s essential that you optimise your existing content first. To do this, we recommend giving your high-quality content a helping hand with a touch of effective content SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).

However, this is by no means a small job. From product pages and service pages to blog posts and even those essential terms and conditions pages, the majority of websites are populated with important content that requires optimising.

To discover how to make these pages and their sought-after content show up in all the right places, simply carry on reading!

What is content optimisation?

If you’re new to content optimisation, then you might want to find out more about what it involves and why.

Put simply, content optimisation refers to ensuring that content is written in such a way that it reaches the largest possible target audience.

The content optimisation process has various components and is often supported by different SEO tools and expertise.

What does content optimisation do for SEO?

Optimised content is simply another component of SEO. The overall aim of SEO is to encourage search engines like Google to rank your website higher than those of your competitors. Optimised content supports this because search engine robots are able to identify this content, assess its value and ensure it’s more visible in SERPs than content that hasn’t been optimised.

Why is content optimisation important?

Due to the fact that content optimisation helps search engines to find and rank your content with ease, it can make your content more accessible and visible to your target audience. If a greater proportion of your target audience is able to find your content, then you’re likely to see significant improvement in many different areas across your business.

You might see, for example, an increase in conversions, higher numbers of website visitors or a greater number of enquiries and phone calls. Put simply, optimised content is search engine-friendly content – something that every business, regardless of whether they operate online or have a brick-and-mortar store, will benefit from.

What are the key components of content optimisation?

The components of content optimisation include the creation of meta titles, the incorporation of valuable keywords and the inclusion of links from authoritative domains.

We explore each one of these key components in greater detail below.

Keywords

Conducting keyword research is vital to ensuring search engines list your content in the appropriate places for the right people, promoting a higher CTR (click-through rate). Once you’ve identified relevant keywords with enough monthly search volume for the piece of content you’re trying to optimise, it’s important to include them throughout your work. You should also identify and include semantically related, synonymous and secondary keywords to increase the likelihood of your target audience finding your content.

However, it’s crucial that you avoid ‘keyword stuffing’ – the process of adding lots of very broadly related keywords into your content simply because they rank highly and not because they are useful or relevant to your content. Google and other search engines will not rank highly those websites that engage in this practice because it is considered to be misleading and unhelpful for the target audience.

Meta title, meta description and meta tags

Meta titles, meta descriptions and meta tags are instrumental for the ranking purposes of many search engines and encouraging the reader to click through to your website from the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

To understand more about the content of a page, search engines use invisible tags called meta tags (such as the <title> and <description> elements) to rank content.

The meta title, on the other hand, refers to the text that appears for any page in the SERPs. The terms and conditions page of your website, for example, will typically appear as ‘Website Name – Terms and Conditions’. Similarly, the meta description refers to the snippet of text (up to 160 characters in length) that appears beneath the meta title and encourages the reader to click through to the page itself.

Continuing with our ‘Terms and Conditions’ example, the meta description might state ‘Looking for our legal agreements? Find out more about the terms, rules and guidelines of using our website here.’ Combined, these meta components can significantly improve the ranking on a web page, boosting the CTR and even increasing conversions as a result.

Backlinks

What are backlinks and how do they work? Put simply, backlinks are links from one website page to a page on another website. Backlinks work like a vote – if a website links to your content, this website is, in essence, vouching for your content. While backlinks from websites with low domain authority scores can have a negative influence on where you content ranks, high-quality backlinks from domains with high scores can lead to fantastic SERPs results.

If your web page has plenty of domains with high authority scores linking to it, you’re likely to see Google and other search engines rank it higher than similar content from your competitors. Creating a backlinking strategy and using backlink outreach can therefore help you to secure valuable backlinks throughout your content.

Contact Aqueous Digital today!

If your business requires a helping hand when it comes to optimising your content and SEO efforts, why not get in touch today? Here at Aqueous Digital, we have years of invaluable experience optimising content and creating devising content strategies that deliver impressive results for a wide range of clients.

Regardless of whether you want to drive more organic traffic to your website, reduce your bounce rate, or encourage more customers to get in contact or convert, we can help. Specialising in paid and organic search, content and reputation management, we support our clients by helping them to reach their wider business goals. Ready to get in contact with our Liverpool team?

To find out more about our SEO and marketing services, please feel free to give us a call on 0800 285 1424 or send your enquiry to our team via email at agency@aqueous-digital.co.uk. Alternatively, we’ve also created a handy online contact form that can be filled in and submitted outside of our opening hours.

Once we’ve received your enquiry, we’ll ensure a member of our team gets in touch to discuss your specific requirements. From here, we can also provide you with a free website health check and a no-obligation consultation, providing you with plenty of free feedback and suggestions for improvement – we hope to hear from you soon!