The inbound marketer’s guide to content optimization

You’ve put time and effort into producing great content. You’ve promoted it using social media and email. You’ve set up forms that turn visitors into leads. Boom! You’re done! Ummmm… Not so fast. I’ve said content marketing is effective, but I didn’t say it was easy.

The best content marketing program in the world will fall flat without content optimization. What is content optimization? It’s the never-ending process of making it easier for search engines – and, by extension, actual people – to find your digital content. 

Over the past couple of months, we’ve talked about the various elements of content marketing (also known as inbound marketing), including blog posts, calls to action, and landing pages. Now it’s time to get technical. Here’s how to optimize your content in three ways:

Do your research

If you haven’t done so already, do some research to find out which keywords you should prioritize. A keyword is what people type into a search engine when they’re looking for information. Keywords generally fall into two categories:

• Broad keywords – Short (one-word or two-word) terms such as “marketing”
• Long-tail keywords – Longer phrases and questions that are more specific to your company or industry, such as “what to include in content marketing”

Keep in mind that, in general, the broader the keyword the more competition you’ll face to rank highly and land on that magical first page of search results.

If you use HubSpot, this research is easy: just log in to your HubSpot account and click Keywords in the Reports menu. The HubSpot Keyword Tool will crunch the numbers for you and tell you:

• Suggested keywords for your company and industry
• Which keywords will be easy for you to rank for

If you don’t use HubSpot, set aside at least a few hours for research and analysis. For a quick overview of what to do, check out these HubSpot articles: Background on Keywords and How to develop an initial list of keywords

Tag, you’re it

Once you’ve prioritized your keywords, make sure you’re using them! Analyze the content on your site and determine which 2-3 keyword phrases from your list accurately describe the content on each page. For basic content optimization, apply the keywords in title tags, meta descriptions, URLs and on-page text.

To take things a step further, optimize the content in your image tags, image alt text, and image URLs. Sometimes this can be more difficult than it should be. Some content management systems (including the one this blog is on … but not for much longer!) populate these items automatically.

Whatever you do, the important thing is to focus. Don’t stuff a page with 10 different keyword phrases.

Give the people what they want

Let me repeat what I said above: content optimization is a never-ending process. You can’t just update your tags and move on. Your keyword priorities should drive the content that you produce on an ongoing basis. Look at your keyword priorities. They’re high on the list because people are looking for information about this topic. For each high-priority keyword, develop content that answers their questions or helps them in another way.

Another way to optimize your content is to evaluate what’s working for you already. For example, I can look in HubSpot and see that this website gets a lot of visitors from the keyword phrase “importance of branding.” Clearly that means people want to know more about this topic – so we’re going to give it to them! I can also see which e-books people download from our site most often. That tells me we should produce more content about this subject.

The bottom line: content optimization is a science, but it’s not rocket science. Use the tools available to you (HubSpot or otherwise) and remember that when it comes to keywords, accuracy should be more important than trickery. 

- Andy

Andy Teipen is the director of business development at OSD and a regular blog contributor. Reach Andy by email at andy@outsidesource.com or by phone at 317-842-4853.