Having a strong online presence is essential for any business or content creator who wants to be seen. And, if you want to be seen, being found via search engines is key. Indeed, you can create new content to drive organic traffic but optimising old content to achieve better SEO results can give you better leverage with a lower cost of effort. This article provides a more in depth look at strategies for optimising your existing content to make it more visible to the search engines without starting from scratch and creating new content.
Conducting a Comprehensive Content Audit
The first step to optimising what you already have is to conduct a detailed content audit where you check and see how the content you currently have is performing. For example, you’ll want to ask yourself which pieces are doing well, which are under-performing, and which you should remove. Start by making a list of every page and blog post on your website. Then check the performance of each page in your content inventory against your traffic, bounce rates, and time on page in Google Analytics and SEMrush. This will help you gain a data-driven insight into which content is actually working for your audience and toward your SEO goals.
In the audit, assess where your content falls in terms of its performance and relevance. Content that performs well is often capable of being polished up even more to squeeze as much return from it as possible. Content that underperforms might need an extensive update or just be scrapped. Old information, broken links and content that’s no longer on-brand or search engine-optimised (SEO) should be called out for review. A systematic content audit unearths your content’s potential and creates the roadmap to targeted optimisation efforts that can elevate your site’s SEO across the board.
Updating and Enhancing Content
The second stage is to go ahead and refresh and enhance your content. This starts with updating out-of-date content to ensure it is still factually correct. This means updating statistics, reviewing old references and adding any developments in the sector since you published your material. You can also go further and do some expansions: dig deeper into the topics you have discussed. Try adding new sections, examples, case studies or multimedia (videos, infographics and the like) that can help make your content more informative and interesting.
Another key component is keyword optimisation. Do some keyword research and see what terms and phrases people are looking for, and then try to sprinkle them into your content organically. Put keywords in headings and sub-headings, as well as in meta descriptions. All of this helps to increase the findability of your content by bots. One way we try to improve the findability of our content is by optimising readability. Much of writing advice can be seen from the perspective of how your content is being read by tech bots. There’s a reason why modern digital content tends to be more concise and ‘bullet-pointy’. Lengthy blocks or huge chunks of text with barely any line breaks or paragraphs are tough for our brains to parse efficiently, not to mention reading on mobile devices. Making small changes to how things are laid out can have a dramatic impact on the accessibility of your content. Use line breaks, create bullet points, and add clear headings. These elements not only improve user experience, but they also tell search crawlers that your content is relevant and timely when this information is captured through schema.
Improving On-Page SEO Elements
Some of the most critical on-page SEO elements in terms of how search engines view and index your content are your title tags and meta descriptions. Make sure that your title tags are appealing, keyword rich and appealing, and contain the most representative words for that page of content. If characters start being omitted for certain words, that’s fine, generally you want about 60 characters in a title tag, any more will likely be truncated in the page information. Also ensure that your meta description has compelling, prose and keywords are used appropriately and the description is accurately targeted to the relevant content. Your meta description is also likely the first thing someone will see about your page in search results, so keep it appealing and informative.
Then, fine-tune your headings and subheadings to include your keywords and create a logical hierarchy. Setting up your H1, H2 and H3 tags correctly will help your search engine bots understand what your posts are about and their individual themes. They’ll also help you once your article is published because you’ll no longer need to reread your entire post to find that one sentence you want to link to.
To optimise images, use descriptive file names and alt text for all images on your site, as well as compress images for faster loading times. Include internal links when possible to lead to more of your pages, to make your site easier to navigate, distribute your link equity and help search engines crawl and find your content more easily.
Enhancing User Experience (UX)
It goes without saying that good user experience will not only ensure that people stick around, but will also boost SEO rankings. First and foremost, make sure your site is mobile-friendly: today, more than half of the web traffic comes from mobile phones and tablets. Responsive Web design techniques will help you deliver the same experience across different form factors. Optimise your site’s loading speed by reducing the number of images, enabling browser caching, and trimming the number of HTTP requests. Faster loading times lead to a better user experience, and are thus a factor in good search engine rankings.
Last, but not least, user experience (UX) can be influenced by the overall design and layout of your website. Having a clean and easy-to-use interface that includes easy-to-read menus as well as clear calls to action will help your visitors find the information they’re looking for more easily and quickly. Make sure that users are able to access related articles or sections without having to waste any time. In addition to reducing the overall bounce rate and the time spent on your website, having a user-friendly layout also improves the user experience, and is a value signal to search engines. Regardless of the kind of feedback you gather, make sure to implement it into your website. Conduct user testing or run a survey more regularly to stay on top of opportunities to improve your UX.
Leveraging Internal and External Links
Link building is still an integral part of good SEO strategy. Internal links (when beginning at internal pages) and external links (when beginning at external pages to your site) lead the search engine ‘bots’ to other helpful content such as supporting evidence, sources, backstory, additional information, etc. With existing content that you optimise, look for places to link to related articles or pages on your site. This will allow people and search engines to navigate to more relevant content on your site. This will also pass the authority of that page to the internal links you add, improving your SEO performance. With anchor texts, be descriptive and use keywords to provide context for readers and search engines.
Earning backlinks from other websites with good SEO will make a big difference as well. As we noted above, you need to make sure you have a great backlink analysis to keep track of the backlinks you already have secured and to find ways to secure new ones. In other words, find the people, experts, bloggers and websites respected in your niche and reach out to them. One way to gain their attention and start a relationship in which they might be willing to link back to you is to share valuable content with them. Do this regularly and thoughtfully until you build up a relationship where they trust you and will link to you in article comments, guest posts or other places in which they create content online.
Monitoring and Measuring SEO Performance
Content optimisation is an iterative process of monitoring and measurement. After you’ve made improvements based on your chosen key search terms, continually check up on your optimised content. For this, you can use a range of SEO tools, including Google Analytics and Google Search Console, as well as Ahrefs. Key metrics to track are organic traffic, bounce rates, average time on page, and your conversions. Did the changes bring results? If so, what results and to what extent? If it didn’t have the expected impact, take a closer look to determine what needs to be adjusted. Track frequently your keyword rankings so you see whether you’re still competitive in search engine results.
Pick realistic targets for the SEO improvements, like increasing organic traffic by 10 per cent and make plans tracking that progress. Your targets could include improving your page-load times to hit a certain benchmark or gaining a number of new backlinks each month.A/B testing can be used to refine those SEO tactics that work and shed the others in a kind of constant battle to keep up – with constant progress and improvement Working with the data to constantly iterate keeps you more proactive, in terms of adapting and better preparing your content for what’s coming next and how best to do it.
Conclusion
Optimizing existing content for SEO is a powerful strategy that can yield significant results with relatively low effort compared to creating new content from scratch. By conducting a comprehensive content audit, updating and enhancing content, improving on-page SEO elements, enhancing user experience, leveraging internal and external links, and continuously monitoring performance, you can significantly improve your website’s visibility and organic traffic. Embracing these strategies not only boosts your search engine rankings but also ensures that your content remains valuable, relevant, and engaging for your audience. Start optimizing your content today to unlock its full potential and achieve sustained SEO success.