Your Complete Guide to Website Content Optimization 

If you want your small business to stand out, you need to create valuable content that will get them to your site in the first place. 

But it’s not enough for your content to provide value. You need to optimize it for readability and, at the same time, make it discoverable in the first place. In other words, you also need website content optimization. Website content optimization is a technique of updating and altering on-page copy like blog content (with its accompanying visuals) to make it more appealing to humans (readability) and search engines (SEO). 

With excellent optimization for readability and SEO, you can ensure your content marketing efforts yield the results you’re looking for. Here are some tips you should follow to ensure effective website content optimization:

Optimizing for Readability

You need to create your content a certain way for it to get readers’ attention and be consumed in the first place. For website content optimization for readability, follow the tips below:

1. Keep a Conversational Tone

Making your blog content sound human is a must when writing. A conversational tone doesn’t just make your content relatable. It also gives your SEO efforts a boost since it reflects how people search content online. 

So, instead of using a formal language, adopt a casual tone. Your tone should ideally generate a sense of familiarity. Use a language that the audience is comfortable with. If you can, write in the first-person to communicate personal experiences. 

Avoid words you would never use in real life, such as to “utilize” instead of “use.” Always go for the simpler term. It’s more important for you to get your message across than to impress with complex words.

Here are other guidelines for making your tone more conversational.

Including questions in your content is also a good idea. It alters the rhythm of your writing and keeps your audience engaged in the discussion. Also, applying storytelling techniques can improve the appeal of your information to readers. It has the potential to elicit personal feelings and empathy.

To ensure you write in this same style throughout your blog posts, you can use generative AI tools. You just need to upload your brand guidelines and they will create content aligned with your brand identity. A generative AI guide can help you get the most out of these tools that can also help you scale your content creation.

2. Include Short and Clear Phrases

Potential clients do not want to spend time digesting fancy terminology to learn about your organization or products. You must apply words and phrases that are short and easier to read and comprehend. Don’t make readers spend more time than is necessary to extract the information they need from your article.

Start by shortening phrases when writing your ideas. Use commas or semicolons instead of conjunctions. Alternatively, break your ideas into shorter, separate sentences. Also, use the active voice and eliminate any redundant words. For instance, “In the event that” can be reduced to “if.”

Consider the following excerpt from Neil Patel’s post. He divides his thoughts into many phrases. His phrases are short and to the point, and he uses an active voice.

Keep your main idea at the forefront of your writing at all times. This way, you won’t deviate and write unnecessary sentences that don’t add value to your content.

3. Add Simple Calls-To-Action

A call to action (CTA) is one of the most critical parts of any content. It’s instrumental to converting readers. CTAs allow your readers to take the next step in learning more about your business and in their buying journey. 

You can incorporate different CTAs in your blog articles. You might tell your readers to “comment below to express your opinions on this post.” Or you may encourage them to sign up for your newsletter, listen to your podcast, join your membership program, or follow you on your social media sites. Just identify where your readers are in the user journey to identify the best CTA to use that aligns with your content marketing strategy. 

Ensure your CTA is well-positioned and well-designed as well. A/B test your CTAs to see what performs best for your target audience.

4. Proofread 

Poorly written content will not generate as many leads or convert as many prospects as properly produced content. Therefore, proofreading is a crucial step in the writing process that you should never overlook. It is one of the final processes of improving your blog posts before publishing it.

Besides, Google pays attention to the content quality. If your content has many grammatical and spelling errors, chances are, it won’t rank.

You must carefully check your work to detect and correct typographical flaws and faults in language, style, and spelling. Also, correct all formatting, page numbers, headers, and anything else that can cause readers to lose interest in the article.

To identify all of your errors, it’s a good idea to go over your content and read it out loud repeatedly. You can also use tools like Grammarly and Writer to check your grammar and spelling errors. 

5. Feature Visuals

Visual content has been shown to improve the content value, user experience, and engagement. That’s why with visuals uploaded on social media platforms, you can easily boost Instagram likes, increase Facebook shares, and enhance X comments. 

When used in websites, visuals encourage visitors to stay longer on your pages and pay more attention to what you’re saying. So, it’s crucial to include as many visuals as possible in your own blog content. These visuals might be an infographic, a video, screenshots, graphs, and so on. Make sure they complement your written copy.

Your videos and images should have optimal quality. Avoid pictures that are out of focus and have poor lighting. For blog posts, image dimensions of 1200 x 630 pixels are recommended. If you’re using video, an aspect ratio of 1280 x 70 is ideal. Make your visuals big enough for people to understand what they’re about, but not too big that they will affect your page speed negatively. We’ll talk more about how to optimize your visuals for SEO later.

Optimizing for SEO

But how can people read your content in the first place if it doesn’t appear in search engine results pages? Follow the tips below to ensure website content optimization, this time, for search engines. 

1. Incorporate Keywords Into Blog Posts

When creating website content, you need to make sure it incorporates the right keywords for it to rank in SERPs. To determine the best keywords to use, you can use tools such as Ahrefs and Semrush for keyword research. The tools can give you insights into what terms people are actually using to search online when they have queries.

Another option is to just check Google. Input your target keyword, for example, “email marketing,” and keyword variations typically used by users will appear.

If you scroll down a bit, you’ll also find the People Also Ask and Additional Searches sections. These can be a goldmine for keywords to use in your content:

When creating your content, though, make sure you avoid keyword stuffing. A keyword density of 1% to 2% is ideal. 

2. Focus on Your Visuals

Your newly-posted visual content must also be optimized for search engine visibility. Visual search results, just like Google search, are based on keyword research. 

So, if you’re using video content, create a compelling title and a description that incorporates your target keywords. Both the description and title should say what your video will cover. When you embed your content, the file name must also accurately convey the content.

For image SEO optimization, you must optimize metadata, including alt tags, meta descriptions, file names, and the title with the targeted keyword. 

Metadata provides essential contextual information to search engines. Additionally, optimized images improve website page speed, resulting in higher user engagement and search engine ranking.

Optimized alt tags help describe images when they cannot be shown or load too slowly on a webpage. A good alt tag adds context while also assisting search bots in indexing your image content accurately. Insert semantically related terms to increase exposure. Just stay away from keyword stuffing.

The meta descriptions must be relevant to the image tags and correctly describe what is in the image.

Just like your videos, make sure you pay attention to your image file name when uploading your picture to your site. It’s critical to pick the correct file name for your page’s SEO and image search results. 

If you’re using WordPress, the image title is usually derived from the file name, so you may leave it alone. However, if you don’t use WordPress or the title doesn’t adequately describe the image, rename it using the appropriate keywords.

As a final tip, you’ll want to check if your page loads quickly, even with the visuals there. The recommended loading time is 0-4 seconds. If your page takes longer than that to load, choose better web hosting for beginners that has the features you need and the price you can afford.  If you have no idea about graphic designing or editing, you can use free high-quality templates available online to design your social media post.

3. Carry out a Content Audit

We’ve talked about how you should optimize new content for readability and SEO so far. But what should you do with the content that’s already published on your site? Improve it to ensure it still engages and ranks. 

That’s why a content audit is important. A content audit is the process of gathering and assessing existing website content like blog posts to determine which material to update, rewrite, or eliminate for user intent.

If you want to be successful in your content audit, start with defining clear goals. So, in this case, your content audit could be “to improve your blog content engagement by X percent by the end of the month.” The more specific your goals are, the better.

Once you have your goals, it’s time to assess your website. List all your existing blog content pieces. For each content piece, determine, based on your analytics tools, engagement. How many have read your blog post?  Does that engagement meet your standards? If it doesn’t, make a note beside that content piece. Specify what you’ll do to improve that content. For this, you’ll need to check how content ranking for that same piece’s target keyword is written. 

Let’s say you have a blog post targeting the keyword “email marketing tips” that isn’t ranking so well and has low engagement. Then Google “email marketing tips.” These are the top results you’ll get:

Notice that the ranking content for “email marketing tips” are listicles with a maximum of 13 tips provided. So, if your “email marketing tips” content only has five tips, for instance, you’ll need to add more tips until you reach at least 13 or more. Since these blog posts offer examples for each tip, you’ll need to do the same, too. 

In other words, look for the common characteristics of each of these top-ranking content pieces. Then make sure your content piece targeting that keyword has those same characteristics. Use an AI-based sentence rewriter to restate existing content in a more compelling manner. This way you can successfully add relevant keywords and entities as well as more unique aspects and key insights. This will help increase the chances of ranking this content piece for that keyword. 

You may use content auditing tools like Ahrefs, Buzzsumo, Google Analytics, and others to assist you in your content audit. 

Follow the steps above to assess each of your content pieces and come up with a content audit report, like the one below from Semrush:

Also, pay attention to the keywords used by your competitors in their own content. What keywords are helping them rank? What keywords have they dismissed but have a lot of potential? Then create your own keyword strategy and apply it to your existing content based on what you found. 

Wrapping Up

There’s a strong correlation among high-quality content, what customers consume, and what search engines serve. That’s why you need to optimize your website content, not just for readability, but also for SEO. This type of content ranks for relevant keywords, establishes brand authority, and converts leads into paying customers.

You learned tips you should follow to ensure website content optimization. To optimize for readability, keep a conversational tone, include short and clear paragraphs, add simple calls-to-action, and proofread your work. Don’t forget to feature videos and images in your content. Incorporate keywords into your content, focus on your visuals, and carry out a content audit as part of your website content optimization for SEO.

Follow these tips and you’ll achieve content marketing success.