5 Tips to Optimise Content

Are you always struggling to find new content ideas? 🤷

Do you see SEO as a process of creating new content? ✍️

Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, spend some time working on what you already have. Most articles aren’t reaching their potential – fix those first!

Here are five tips to upgrade your content.

On-page tools give a quick view of what is currently ranking and make suggestions on the length and keyword density for your article.

While this is a fairly basic view of the content, we find that increasing the Surfer score in most cases improves traffic.

Don’t obsess over the Surfer score and don’t spend hours increasing it by five points, but do use it as a guide for length and keywords.

💡Before you make a decision on length, take out articles that skew the average length.

A great introduction keeps readers on your page. You can engage them early using a few tactics:

• If the article is about hair loss tease them with the value you’re going to provide: “Learn about three natural remedies that are proven to prevent hair loss.”
• You can also ask a question: “Are you struggling to find products that prevent hair loss?”
• Empathise with their pain or problem: “Are you starting to notice strands of hair come out when you comb?”
• Provide the reader with a table of contents, ideally where they can immediately navigate to the content they need—see below.

💡Connect on their pain problem > tease that the article has the solution > explain what you will cover

I appreciate this is a bit like telling a bad cook to just make something tasty, but there are a few principles to make content more interesting:

• Show don’t tell – Rather than explain how Google Ads works show an example of a great campaign.
• Keep your user in mind – Don’t think of this as an article going into the cyber-abyss. Imagine a stadium full of your ideal customers, waiting to hear what you have to say – create something that will make them listen and cheer.
• Take out the fluff – Anything that is hard to read or not helping should be killed ☠️☠️☠️

💡Ask yourself – is this article really helping/engaging the reader?

Most content is hard to read. It doesn’t get to the point and asks the reader to wade through heavy prose.

You need to make reading your article simple—this usually means breaking it down.

Really great writers can keep an article flowing while using longer prose. Most writers can’t so you should err on the side of making content simple, broken up, and visually appealing.

✅   Shorter paragraphs

✅   Less jargon

✅   Use emojis

✅   Bullet points

✅   Call out boxes

💡Most writers lurch between points, don’t fall into that trap by always telling the reader what is happening

Stock images can work but you are often compromising on what you really want and they’re just not as good.

Instead, bespoke photography or design can really elevate the content. Linkbuilder.io (a world-class link building agency) based in Edinburgh do this nicely on their new site.

Use images for maximum effect in a few places:

• In the title of the blog piece
• Tables or diagrams to make complicated points simple
• Small infographics to make key data stand out

💡Take a look at the “Wait But Why” blog here for an example of how images can elevate content.