7 SEO Tweaks to Improve Your Content Before You Hit Publish

Here are seven SEO tweaks that will definitely help you optimize any piece of written content. These content optimization tweaks are simple but effective. Let’s dive in!

Create High-Quality Content

There is no doubt that writing great content is key to your website’s success in search results. Optimization (the SEO tips and tricks I am going to talk about) plays an important role, but without content, you have nothing.

Stuffing a meaningless article with keywords and links and rewriting it several times, previously used to send your site to the top of the search results. Then 2011 came along, and Google made sure that you would be penalized for low-quality, keyword-stuffed content (Panda update).

But how can Google distinguish high-quality content from low-quality content? There are at least three main methods:

• Analysis of behavior factors
• Checkup for SEO guidelines compliance
• Use of human content raters

Optimize Your Content

To keep your content machine running, you need to demonstrate tangible results. And while content on its own may bring your site to the top, optimizing from an SEO standpoint can help you achieve even better performance.

While there many ways to approach content optimization, every piece of content should have:

• A catchy headline with a main keyword
• Subtitles featuring the main keyword, plus several LSI keywords
• The main keyword in the first paragraph (recommended)
• Titles and subtitles with H1, H2, H3 metatags
• Images with ALT tag (with main or LSI keywords)
• Naturally placed keywords and LSI keywords in the text
• A meta description with the main keyword or an LSI keyword

Include Visual Elements

High-quality articles are the holy grail for every digital marketer. It is no wonder you spend hours slaving away on your content. But let’s be honest here; you don’t do it to simply educate your target audience. Your goal is to attract, convert, close, and retain customers.

If your content drives traffic but no conversions, that is a big red flag. It may be that your content doesn’t bring any value, but most likely, your content is too crammed and visually boring to keep customers engaged.

To figure out what is wrong, I recommend using heatmap tools like CrazyEgg or LuckyOrange. Then, all you need to do is analyze how users interact with your content. It won’t take you much time to understand what makes customers leave your page. Maybe it’s bulky paragraphs or just lack of catchy titles and subtitles.

Boost Trust With Links

Once, search engine optimization was all about links. The more sites linked to a given page, the better rank it received in search engine results. This all changed in 2012 when Google Penguin rolled out, penalizing link farms and sites that purchased links to manipulate SERPs.

Links still matter, though. The only difference is, link quality, not quantity, makes all the difference. Your content must feature high-quality external and internal links to boost search ranking, improve trust, and bolster credibility.

External links should lead to trustworthy, relevant, and reliable web pages. By placing these links in your content, you demonstrate to Google that you can prove your point with facts while providing additional information for your readers.

Internal links are good for SEO as well. By linking your site’s content together, you facilitate indexing and pass valuable link juices to other web pages. Basically, this allows you to boost your site’s SERPs in a cost-effective manner.

Incorporate Social Elements

Social media is the lifeblood of digital marketing. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, Instagram, and other social networks are the perfect platforms to raise awareness, improve brand loyalty, and bolster credibility. It’s no wonder businesses dedicate time and resources to keeping their social subscribers engaged by publishing new posts, re-posting relevant content, running quizzes, arranging contests, etc.

The problem is, the success of any social media marketing strategy hugely depends on how well content is optimized for social networks. While content sharing is an ordinary thing for digital marketing experts, your customers won’t spend their precious time trying to figure out which button to click to launch your article or share it with friends and family.

Your content pages must feature convenient social sharing elements. By convenient, I mean that sharing buttons should be located either at the top or at the bottom of your page or follow your customers on the left or right as they scroll.

Add a Comments Section

A comments section is what you need to bolster engagement, nurture relationships, and collect feedback. By allowing users to comment your content, you show that you care (which is always important).

But why do you need comments for your SEO?

First, they help you answer any questions your customers might ask about this or that content piece, which attracts natural backlinks and shares. This can also signal to Google that you are all about providing value to customers (which is never a bad thing).

Second, comments keep your content fresh for a longer period of time. Comments are also content, and their weight matters to search engines (especially if these comments are relevant, featuring targeted keywords and high-quality links).

Having a comments section is not always great, though. If your comments section is crammed with spam, unrelated comments, and low-quality links, it will tank your search engine ranking positions. Be careful and never hesitate to delete comments that don’t provide value.

Place a Compelling Call to Action

A common practice is to place calls to action on landing pages, but I recommend incorporating them into regular blog posts, infographics and videos as well. Why? Because CTAs make your content actionable and push your site’s visitors down your sales funnel.

HubSpot’s blog demonstrates how this strategy works so well. Every article features product and service offers, related white papers, PDFs, and ebooks.

The clickable CTAs lead to customized landing pages, which greatly helps HubSpot get more leads, conversions, and customers. The HubSpot team utilizes all the power of their inbound methodology, smoothly leading users from one stage of their customer journey to another.

From an SEO standpoint, CTAs are great. They feed more content to website visitors and improve the average time on site metric. Basically, a CTA is your most valuable internal link which should be used to drive customers to the right pages (that move them forward along the conversion path). Don’t miss out on that chance.