Optimize Content: What Do You Need To Pay Attention To?

Rarely SEO is a focus from the outset when creating content for the website. If companies later develop an awareness of the important criteria for creating content that is also optimized for search engines, the question is: how to deal with existing content? Is it risky to revise content later (ie retrospectively) , do you lose rankings and traffic? What needs to be taken into account when optimizing to prevent this? My tips will give you an overview.

Status Quo: Evaluation of existing content

In order to assess whether it makes sense to optimize certain professional articles , blog posts, categories, product pages or other content pages, you should first rate them:

• Organic Traffic:

How many visitors are already coming to the site through the unpaid search results? Google Analytics provides information and indicates the development. If the site receives a significant number of visitors via the organic channel, caution is advised and further evaluations are important.

• Rankings:

How does the site average? Although only of limited significance, but nevertheless interesting, the evaluation is in the old "search queries" report. Here you can also see for which keywords the single page is already found.

• Keywords:

Based on the analysis of the search queries, the comparison is worthwhile: Is the page actually found for the search terms that are of particular importance to you for this particular page? If so, special attention should be paid to maintaining or even improving these rankings. You may also find that the results are already optimal and you can better focus the optimization on other subpages.

• Conversions:

In the best case, you have set one primary or multiple goals for each subpage. What should the visitor do on this page? Read more articles? Sign up for the newsletter? Make contact? Visit your social media channels, become a fan and follower? Buy the product described? Once you have defined your goals (and your Google Analytics is set up accordingly), you should evaluate whether the visitors of the examined page actually perform the desired action. If not, there is obviously a need for optimization, regardless of how well the site is found on the search engines.

Revision: Keyword selection and optimization

Once you have determined that the analysed page should actually be optimized, the question of important search terms arises in addition to structural aspects (correct assigning of headings). While these days it is less about optimizing for a single keyword, it's about increasing relevance to a topic, but keywords are still an important foundation for

doing so.

If your site is already running well enough for keywords that are meaningful and important, you should make sure that you keep them up-to-date. The title tag and headlines are particularly important here. If you want to optimize for other or additional keywords, compare the potential of old and new keywords:

• What is the search volume?

• Which keyword is more relevant / important to you

• Which keyword is closer to the desired conversion (eg the purchase in the online store)?

Once you have identified the 1-2 most important keywords and defined additional search terms that are relevant to the theme context, investigate the extent to which they are

placed on the page:

• Metadata: Title Tag and Meta-Description

• Headlines

• Beginning of the text

• In the course of further content

• At the end of the text

• In image attributes and image signatures

A concrete number for the "keyword density" has not made sense for years. However, the fact remains: only in exceptional cases will you rank for a term that is not placed anywhere on the page. (In the context of semantic search, this might change in the future, but it is not yet so far.) And still headlines and the title tag are important places to place keywords, even for visitors looking for these terms to give the feeling of being right with you.

Note: Conversion optimization is so complex that it cannot be dealt with adequately in this post. The reasons why a user does not convert and how this can be improved are manifold and can only be determined in a detailed analysis.

Success control: What did the optimization bring?

If you have revised a page in terms of content, it is important to regularly evaluate how the numbers play out through the optimization. Google Analytics (or another professional web analytics tool) and webmaster tools provide answers to questions such as:

• Has traffic increased via Google organic?

• Which terms will be used to find the page?

• Will the site continue to roll for the old keywords?

• How are the rankings of the new keywords developing?