Content optimization is the process of refining and improving digital content to improve its visibility, engagement, and effectiveness. The process involves ensuring content quality, including keywords, writing compelling titles and meta descriptions, and building authoritative backlinks.

Why is content optimization important?

Let’s say you’ve written a great top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) blog post related to your main product, and you want as many people as possible to see it. Two or three months after publishing it, you check the post’s performance and find that no one has seen it.

Why? Well, maybe:

• The keywords you have used have little or no search volume
• You have not covered the topic in any real detail.
• You have not used a consistent heading structure, so Google’s robots have had a hard time making sense of your article.
• Your title tag does not accurately reflect what the article is about.

Essentially, if you don’t optimize your content, your piece could disappear into the Google maelstrom. You may have written the best article in the world, full of unique insights and useful tips. But, if search engines can’t find it, it doesn’t interest anyone, or it’s targeted at the wrong audience, it’s unlikely to help you achieve your content marketing goals .

To help you avoid this, we’ve put together some helpful tips to keep you on the right track of content optimization and ensure your content marketing strategy is successful. 

Methodology

In our 2022 Global State of Content Marketing Report , we analyzed nearly 24,000 articles that appear in the top 10 results on Google. We then correlated their quality score in the Semrush SEO Writing Assistant (SWA) tool with their rankings. 

What do we find in common with the top-ranked articles? 

They received a perfect score (9 or 10 out of 10) across all four main pillars: SEO, readability, tone of voice, consistency, and originality. We found that 34% of articles ranking on the first page had perfect scores, compared to 13% of pages that had low scores.

In our research, we classified the scores as follows:

• Content with the highest score was considered to be anything between 8 and 10.
• Content with the lowest score was considered to be anything with a score below 6. 

Ergo, it’s safe to say that there is a strong correlation between quality content, what search engines like to serve, and what people find valuable amidst the digital noise.

Now, let’s move on to the specific tactics you can apply when optimizing your content for SEO, backlinks and shares, and conversions.

How to optimize content for SEO

Many marketers start by optimizing their content for search engines so that they can get more and more unpaid traffic to their page. Here are the top 10 ways to optimize content for SEO:

1. Target relevant keywords with traffic potential

The fundamental element of each piece of your content is the topic and the target keyword(s). It is important to identify these before preparing and writing your article.

Start with a broader topic you’d like to focus on. Google now pays more attention to how you cover the topic than to a single keyword.

Remember: Keywords are separate search queries that people use, while topics establish the semantic relationship between those keywords.

To speed up this process, you can use the Topic Research tool . First, write down a general idea that you think might resonate with your audience.

For example, if you’re a healthy food delivery service, you might want to start with a “healthy diet” theme. You can also select your desired geographic location: country, region, or city.