When you’re a business owner, it’s important to know how to properly market your brand. No matter if you have a huge business or you’re part of a start-up, things like customer retention, increasing traffic, and having a low bounce rate can make or break your online presence. 

The content you’re producing online plays a big part too. Even when you put a lot of hard work into your content and your website, you may not always see the results you were hoping for. If a search engine like Google or Bing isn’t finding your content, then you won’t be seeing any results. 

Fortunately, there are plenty of tips, tricks, and tactics on how to improve your content optimization. Below you will find 8 unique tactics that will help your online brand and increase the traffic to your site. Let’s first talk a bit about what content optimization is. 

What Is Content Optimization

If you don’t already know, content optimization is a way to be sure that the content you’re making will reach a large audience. When you optimize your content in a positive way, you will begin to see the fruits of your labor. Things like keywords, headings, and meta descriptions can make a big difference. 

You want content on your website that draws people in and keeps them around. The last thing you want is someone to click on your website, be bored, or get frustrated and leave. This will cause your bounce rate to increase and you’ll likely lose potential customers. By optimizing your content, you’re more likely to turn visitors into customers and create a positive reaction from their visit. 

How It Works

So, how does content optimization work? It’s similar to search engine optimization. It’s basically a way to optimize what you’re producing to make it stand out when people are searching for things online. 

Search engines have robots that rank content in a specific order; you want to be at the top. Being at the top ensures more traffic and keeps you from getting lost in the search results. There are a ton of ways to improve your ranking and optimize your content without needing to spend a ton of money. Don’t even think about throwing in the towel before you read the tactics that are listed below! 

Tactics To Improve Content Optimization

It may seem like a lot to take it, but optimizing your content doesn’t have to be complicated. You don’t need to pay a bunch of money and hire a team to get your website to rank towards the top of a search results page. 

When you use the tactics listed below, you’ll be able to see a difference in your ranking whether you’re just starting out or you’re a seasoned veteran in your respective field. The topics you’ll read about are the following:

• Choosing the right keywords
• Establishing authority and having knowledge about what you’re talking about
• Using images and videos (and optimizing these)
• Getting the most out of title tags and meta descriptions
• Including lower volume keywords in subheadings without overdoing it
• Having a call-to-action
• Using plenty of subheadings to break up content
• Create quality content

1. Choosing The Right Keywords 

When you’re choosing keywords, it’s best to have a main keyword and a handful of supporting keywords for the specific topic you have on your website. To do so, you may have to research, analyze, and choose the best keywords that will drive the most authentic amount of traffic to your website. 

You don’t want people visiting your website that won’t be spending any money or getting anything out of the information you are providing. If you do, you’ll see an increase in bounce rate. 

This is a tactic that can make a massive difference in search engine marketing. If you don’t use the right keywords, all of your work will be pointless, so it’s important to choose the best one for your niche. 

When you create a new campaign, you optimize your keywords, but this isn’t the only time you should do so. Having keywords will be on ongoing part of having a website and the keyword lists you have may need updating regularly. There are new keywords that come about that can help you reach a larger audience. 

A lot of business owners will tell you that creating a list of keywords to optimize is one of the most difficult tasks of search engine marketing. It’s also one of the most important aspects of SEO marketing. If you don’t use keywords, you’re a lot less likely to be found on search engines by potential customers.

I don’t know about you, but that sounds like losing money to me. The less you’re found, the less traffic you have, which in turn, equals less income. Using keywords will drive qualified traffic to your site over your competitors if done correctly. 

You’ll be able to see which keywords are getting the most searches and which ones you may want to switch out for new ones. This can help you gauge who is a potential customer and what they’re looking for. 

When you use optimized keywords in your content, it will help people feel like you’re speaking directly to them. Having a visitor feel like they have a personal connection with you because of keywords is an easy way to turn visitors into clients and customers. 

Lastly, using keywords will help you know what the customer is looking for. Once you know this, you can adjust your goods and services accordingly to better suit the customer. 

2. Establish Authority/Knowledge

Another thing you want to do is make sure you can establish authority and that people can trust what you’re saying. With so many websites available on the same topic, why should someone go to yours over your competition? 

The easiest way to win someone over is trust, and trust can be earned when you know what you’re talking about. It’s not the easiest job in the world to create established online content. Did you know that there are over 200 billion emails sent a day? There are even 2 million blogs that get posted every day. It can be hard to make yourself stand out from everyone else. 

Google has a high standard for quality content. If you want to have an established authority over other websites, you have to engage your reader from the very start. Then you want to make sure you have more information about the topic you’re talking about. If you have a more thorough blog than the next guy, you’ll likely have much higher traffic. 

3. Use Images And Videos

Another easy way to optimize your content is by using images and videos. Both of these can be eye catching and informative. It’s much easier for someone to click on a video to see how your product is used rather than reading an entire article about it. 

People enjoy seeing images and they often will catch people’s attention before text will. Putting images throughout your content not only draws people in more, but it helps to break up your content between paragraphs. You can use things such as alt tags and image tags to add a little bit more to your content.

Be sure that when you add a photo that the file size has been properly adjusted so that it will load correctly on your web page. 

When it comes to content that can be eye catching, images work great, but videos not only grab people’s attention, but they also keep them on the website longer. You can embed YouTube videos into your website or make original content of your own. 

Make sure you choose a great video title, add a detailed description, and be sure to add tags to each video. You can also use videos as a form of call-to-action, but we’ll talk more about that later. 

4. Optimize Title Tags And Meta Descriptions

A great way to optimize your content is to use title tags and meta descriptions. Title tags are essentially the coding of your page. The tags you use will help search engines find your page and tell the robot what your page is all about. 

A lot of people have opinions on whether or not titles draw readers in or not. If you don’t have a title, the search engine will create one for you. So, which is better, to write your own, or to have a robot do it for you?  

The answer depends on a few things. For starters, do you know what people are searching for when your link pops up? If you do, take the time to write an eye catching title. Usually people are looking to find answers about goods and services, so writing a proper title will let them know they’ve found the right place. 

You also have the option to use Google Suggest, which will auto-complete a title for you. If you’re not a fan of that, there are plenty of other tools available that help to create great titles that reel people in. 

Since you’re putting in a bunch of work trying to get your page ranked, it’s important for the search engines to know what your website is. Having a meta description is also crucial to the process. A meta description is what you see below a website link when you search for something.

If you decide not to include a meta description, search engines like Bing and Google with put one in there for you based on what you have on your website. You’re much more likely to drive traffic in when you write a meta description, instead of a robot doing it. 

Meta descriptions should never be longer than 156 characters. It should give the reader a brief description on what they’ll find and it’s best to try to hook them in so that they click your link and keep on reading. If not, they’re much more likely to click on a competitor’s link instead of yours. 

5. Include Lower Volume Keywords In Subheadings

Google says that a keyword, or keyword phrase, is considered low volume if it hasn’t brought in a lot of traffic. To quote Google, “a status that’s given to a keyword with very little to no search history on Google.”

If something hasn’t been searched often, if at all on Google, the search engine considers those keywords irrelevant. What happens when you use irrelevant keywords? Your ads will not show up when those keywords are typed in. I know, it seems redundant, but that’s the way Google has it set up. 

What you can do with keywords that are irrelevant and not triggering your ads is to tweak them or remove them. You could also leave them there and wait for that keyword or phrase to garner enough search volume to get it activated. 

Whether or not you keep the keywords and phrases how they are or you change them, is up to you. But what you can do in the meantime while you’re waiting for people to use the specific keywords or phrases is place them in subheadings. 

This will keep the words on your page, make readers more aware of these phrases and will eventually garner more clicks. 

6. Call-To-Action

A call-to-action, or CTA, is a crucial thing to have on your website. A call-to-action is usually put at the end of a blog or in a promotion. You may recognize other sites using phrases such as “buy now” or “sign up free!”

Often times these action phrases will have links attached. They can be to another website, a video, or even just to another blog of yours that’s relevant. A call-to-action keeps people around and lets them know where they should go next. 

If you don’t use a CTA, the person reading may not know what they should do. Is it time to buy the product they were reading about? Should they be signing up for a pre-order list? Using a CTA helps the reader finish the task they were doing on your website.

You’re also more likely to turn visitors of your website into customers when you use a call-to-action. You may not know it, but you can use several calls-to-action throughout a single page, but doing it too much can come off as salesy and pushy, which turns people off. 

Make sure to at least use a call-to-action at the end of blogs to help people know what to do next so that they keep interacting on your website! 

7. Use Your Subheadings To Break Up Content

The penultimate tactic you should be using for content optimization is to use subheadings to break up your content. If you just have a constant stream of words on your page, it can be overwhelming for the reading.

Just like how you’d use photos and videos to break up content, subheadings act the same way. Search engine’s love when websites use larger texts. If you take the advice from earlier and use keywords within your subheadings, you’re tackling two tactics at once! 

Breaking up content with subheadings also makes it much more skimmable for the reader. If you’re posting a blog all about coffee makers and the person is specifically wanting to read about pour overs, it will be much easier to find if you use a subheading to break up the different kinds of coffee makers you’re writing about. 

They’re also less likely to leave your website to find something that’s more digestible if you’re breaking up your content. On this same note, you can add a table of contents at the beginning of the article to make it even more user-friendly! 

Lastly, don’t shy away from updating your subheadings to match what Google is pulling up on the search ranking. Go back to old blog posts and articles and freshen them up to pull in new traffic. It shows readers that you care about your content and that you’re keeping things up to date. 

8. Create Quality Content

The most important tactic you can use to optimize your content is to create high-quality content. There are several ways you can make high-quality content on your website. For starters, use social media as much as possible.

If your company has an Instagram account, link your feed to your website. This will also be a way to utilize photos and videos. People visiting your website will now be able to see at least one of your social media accounts. 

A quick note about social media: Make sure the content you’re posting on there is quality as well. Consumers aren’t going to look twice at a low resolution photo from someone’s phone. Make sure you use a high-quality camera and have your product be the focal point of the photo. You’d be surprised how much aesthetics affect your brand. 

Another thing you can do is look to see what your competition is doing. How do they present the content on their website? Do what they do and do it better, but do not cross copyright laws when doing so. 

You could also make your content engaging! Create polls throughout to get people’s opinions.  People love feeling heard and being engaged while browsing online. Lastly, you could always add a frequently asked questions section to the end of an article. 

People are likely wanting answers and may have quite a few questions. Having an FAQ section provides both of those things, while keeping your bounce rates low! 

How Google Affects What Content You Post

Content is what Google uses to rank websites, and we both know that you want to rank high. If you don’t optimize your content correctly, you could fail at getting ranked at all. You used to be able to write a short post and start earning money, but people want great content that’s thorough and detailed. 

One thing you should be considering is why you’re putting out that specific piece of content. Make sure every piece of content you have has a purpose, whether that’s to help someone find a product, teach someone how to do something, or educate them on a particular topic. 

You’ll likely have several goals to meet within one piece of content. Sometimes you’re trying to increase your social media engagement, while other times you’re trying to earn links. You’ve learned a handful of tactics that Google uses and how you can incorporate them to please the search engines and rank higher! 

If you find yourself not ranking on Google, Bing, Yahoo!, or any other search engine, consider if you’re doing what those search engines need from you in order for you to rank properly. 

Final Words

You’ve read in detail how to use 8 tactics to increase your ranking, get more traffic, lower your bounce rate, and more. I know that running a business can be overwhelming and there’s never a shortage of tasks, but making sure that you’re focused on content optimization is key. 

Doing so is a great foundation to bring in more customers, create connections, and increase your net worth as a company. Whether you need to add in a few subheadings, get involved on social media, create images to break up content, use the proper keywords and phrases, or even adding a few calls-to-action, there are many ways to optimize your content. 

If you use any or all of the tricks and tips listed above, you’re likely going to see an increase in traffic to your website within days. Don’t be afraid to try all the tips, as they are all free to use and apply. You never know what will work until you give it a shot! 

I hope you were able to learn something new and apply it to your online presence to improve your overall brand. Good luck!