How to optimize website content for SEO
Statistic: 91% of content gets ZERO organic traffic from Google
Source: Ahrefs
Yikes! That means that only 9% of content created is getting any kind of traffic from search engines.
If you’re a content creator who isn’t using using SEO practices to optimize your content that stat kinda hurts. And then it makes you wonder - is your content working hard enough for you?
As you create and optimize content, keep the user experience in mind throughout the entire process. Search engines, through machine learning and AI, have learned to put a lot more value on quality content that engages readers and provides useful information.
Let us help you avoid becoming a statistic with these 5 steps to optimize your website content for SEO (for Beginners):
Step 1: Analyze your data
Use a tool like Google Search Console or Kafen8’s website audit tools to gather traffic and analytics data about your website. Google Search Console is free, and tracks vital user behavioral metrics such as number of sessions, number of unique sessions, bounce rate, and more. You can see how many of your website’s visitors are staying, returning, where they are going within your site, and if they convert.
Website assessments will give you valuable information about your website traffic so that you can see if your SEO and website content are on track.
Behavioral reports can show you what your visitors usually do when they visit your website - and it can show you what content gets the highest engagement, so you can make more of that type of content.
Step 2: Keyword research
Writing about a random keyword won't make your website rank. Think about what your target audience cares about, what questions they might have, and then do research around those topics. Those will become the topics you build your target keywords from.
Use tools like Google’s Keyword Planner or SEMRush to search for keywords suggest keywords that are related to your business or the topics your target audience cares about.
These types of tools will show you how many searched for various keywords so you can prioritize keywords and optimize your content around them. Look for “long-tail” keywords that might not be the most frequently searched, but that might be more relevant to the topics you’ve chosen in Step 1.
Step 3: On-page SEO optimization
On-page SEO is about optimizing the content on each page of your website so that your website is more visible and gets more traffic coming from search engines.
There are multiple factors that go into on-page SEO. Here is a basic checklist that you can use to check to see if each page and each blog entry on your website is optimized for SEO.
On-page SEO optimization checklist for beginners
Here are 11 things to do every time you write content for your website.
Bonus! Download our printable on-page SEO cheatsheet here.
Choose a primary keyword for each piece of content plus a few related keywords. For example, if your keyword is “cozy sweater”, choose related keyword phrases, like “how to style cozy sweaters” or “cozy sweater trends”.
Include your keyword in the title of your content, and place it as close to the beginning of the title as possible. Titles should be 60 characters or less.
Give your title an H1 title tag. Most website builders have this functionality built in, but if you’re not sure, search for your specific website builder along with “how to add H1 tag using Wordpress” or “how to add H1 tag using Squarespace”.
Write your high-quality content. The bare minimum length should be 300 words in order to get ranked, but ideally, you should aim for 1,000 words or more. Search engines rank more detailed content higher, so generally, posts between 1,000 words and 2,500 words are most visible. Make sure your copy is completely original by using a free tool like this one from Grammarly.
Ensure your keyword is included in your content. It’s a best practice to use your keyword at least 3-4 times within the entire piece, and more than than if you’re over 1,000 words or so. Be sure to use your primary keyword in your first and last paragraphs, too. However, don’t use the keyword repetitively or out of context. This is a common mistake in content marketing, and search engines don’t like keyword stuffing.
Make your content easy to scan. Short paragraphs, subheadings, bullet points, and callouts make content easier for the eye to quickly read and comprehend, so search engines prefer content that’s formatted this way too.
Add H2 tags to your subheadings, and use your keyword in at least one of your subheadings.
Add images that enrich your content and further bring it to life. For each image, add your primary keyword to the image’s filename, and to the image’s alt text. Alt text is a description of the image in words so that visitors who are unable to see can understand how the image adds to the written content. It’s also helpful when it comes to SEO, as alt text gives a better user experience and helps search engines better “see” image content. Tip: When writing alt text, be descriptive, but accurate. Avoid keyword stuffing in alt text.
Add the right kind of links. You want to use internal links that link to other content on your site, as well as external links to other sites that have high-quality content and good traffic. Tip: Be sure to set up your external links so that they open in a new page so that readers don’t navigate completely away from your site.
Write the meta description for your page. Meta description is a few sentences or phrases of information about the content on the site. Remember to use your keyword in your meta description, and include a call to action that encourages action, like “Read more about...” or “Check out this guide to...”.
And finally, when creating the URL for your page, use your primary keyword in the URL title, and remember to avoid using any filler or unnecessary words, like “the”, “and”, and “a”.
Whew! We know it sounds like a lot, but we promise you, it becomes second nature after you’ve gone through the process a few times. You can always hire help, too. If you do, here are five tips for hiring an outsourced marketing provider.
Step 4: Ensure your website content is mobile-friendly
According to Statista, mobile users account for about half of all internet traffic worldwide. That means that if your website isn’t optimized for mobile users, you’re missing out on half of your potential traffic.
Responsive design offers the easiest solution.
Most website builders, including WordPress offer themes with responsive design built-in, which means you don't have to worry about adding any extra code or customization to make your site mobile-friendly.
And of course, search engines look for good user experience, and this is reflected in how they rank websites that are mobile-friendly.
Step 5: Watch your page speed
Page speed has a significant impact when it comes to SEO and conversions.
Imagine visiting a website that takes forever to load. Most likely, you will lose interest and look for another option or solution.
Google's PageSpeed Insights can give you important data about how fast your site loads across all devices and even gives you specific advice about things to fix so that you can make your site faster.
The most common issues with site speed come from images being too large, heavy animations, or too many plugins running in the background. All of these can be cleaned up by an SEO expert or website developer.
A typical site should receive a score of 50-75 for site speed in order to be ranked effectively for Google.
Learn how to optimize your website content for SEO, and you’ll see results.
You work hard to create high-quality website content. Make sure it gets seen by following these steps to optimize that website content for SEO.
After reading all of this, you might be asking yourself, “But what about off-page SEO?”. Off-page SEO is very important for your site, too. But, off-page SEO is worthy of it’s own post, so we’ll cover that another time. Until then, here’s a great resource on off-page SEO from Moz.
If you have any questions about how to create great, high-quality content or blog posts for your website, give us a shout. We’re here to help.
And…don’t forget to download Kafen8’s free printable on-page SEO cheatsheet. Click on the thumbnail to the left to download.