🥇 Content marketing services | Grow quicker with the best

While technical optimization ensures that Google can crawl and index your website, content optimization ensures that Google can understand the topics and themes of your website.

Content optimization can be broken down into two major components:

Researching keywords
Improving page relevancy (vis a vis targeted keywords)

Research Keywords

Keyword research is about determining how consumers are searching for your product or service. This is a multi-layered inquiry and can even lead to “Eureka” moments. At the simplest level, we research what language, words, colloquialisms, phrases and other terminology consumers are using when they research the kinds of products you are selling. You’d be surprised at how often entrepreneurs follow their gut instinct instead of conducting objective research before naming the products in their ecommerce catalogue. Whether you name that diamond ring you’re selling online an “engagement ring” or “diamond solitaire” will directly impact how easily consumers discover that ring. (Hint: you’re likely to be stuffed if you choose the latter.)

Next, we analyze the clusters of words associated with any given product or service for which you seek to rank well in search results, what are termed keyword clusters, and determine how to optimize the page content for that product or products, while avoiding duplication or cannibalization on your website.

For example, frequently-searched keywords which include the phrase “engagement ring” include “diamond engagement ring” “men’s engagement rings”, “tiffany [sic] engagement ring” and “sapphire engagement ring”. Perhaps it is a surprise that some of those keywords, like “men’s engagement rings” or “sapphire engagement ring,” are very popular. That is when a “Eureka” moment sometimes happens. Let’s take the case of “sapphire engagement ring.” If you’re a jeweler selling diamond rings, it’s very likely you’re stocking sapphire rings already. Some of these may even be single stone rings which can easily be termed “engagement rings”. Therefore, why not create a page on your website for “sapphire engagement rings” to capture the obvious demand for this kind of jewelry. As for the discovery that there is significant interest in men’s engagement rings, you don’t yet sell this product but could easily add it to your existing online catalogue. A page of “men’s engagement rings” would not only enable you to capitalize on the demand for this esoteric jewelry product but your product page would probably rank well because of the low competition for this keyword (provided your product page was informative and relevant).

As you can see, keyword research yields insights on many levels. On a simple basis, it ensures that the terms you’ve used on your site dovetail with established consumer behavior. At a deeper level, keyword research provides the occasion to spot tactical commercial opportunities which can not only improve search rank but lead to more business. It is this kind and depth of insight which can propel the visibility and success of an online business quickly.

Improve page relevancy

There’s a lot of groundwork that goes into making sure your website’s pages rank highly. After learning how consumers are searching for your products (see Keyword Research above), the next step is figuring out which keywords to structure your content around and what exact keywords and information those pages should contain. After that, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and start writing.

In a nutshell, the content optimization process entails:

Researching keywords and grouping them into clusters based on topic.
Mapping each cluster of keywords to a page on the site and prioritizing the keywords within that cluster to maximize our chances for “winning” high rank for that page. We make that judgment by weighing various criteria such as search volume, Keyword Difficulty and buying intent.
Some pages won't exist and will need to be created. Others will exist but may need to have their relevancy strengthened in relation to their desired keyword cluster. To assess the relevancy of any page, existing or new, we run the page through several cutting edge, natural language processing tools and compare our page to those ranked at the top by Google for the same keywords.
If the page’s relevancy is inadequate in relation to its target keyword cluster, we will need to modify the content, either by adding code and/or rewriting or augmenting the natural language. We would continue running diagnostics on each new version of the page until it began to show relevancy for its target keywords.
After the modified page is live, we would check its performance with Google Search Console to see where it ranks and how many clicks it's getting. Just as important, if we saw that the page was getting impressions for tangential keywords, we might choose to reinforce the content related to those new keywords or even create a new page to capture the interest in that content.

Besides the written content of your website, part and parcel of content optimization is enhancing the navigability of your website. Thus, Cogney advises on both URL structure (format, use of subdomains versus subfolders, etc.) and internal linking structure. Both are crucial to how Google and people discover and find information on your website.

Depending on your company’s resources and the importance of SEO to achieving your commercial objectives, content optimization can be a one-time project or, better yet, a virtuous feedback loop based on continuous analysis, testing and reinforcement. If you’re constantly augmenting your product catalogue, consider having Cogney train your team to learn best practice for content optimization so that your website can maintain its SEO edge over the long haul.