SEO content optimization: 10 tactics to improve articles

If you wish, here is a video summary of the 10 tactics:

Before optimizing our SEO content , we must understand a main premise: the optimization or the changes we make must add value and improve the experience of the person who is consuming it. 

Just changing the packaging, links or navigation will not necessarily improve your ranking on the web. 

Well executed , the above tactics can improve your site traffic by up to 411%. 

This was exactly what happened to us [click here if you want to go directly to the case study] .

What is SEO content optimization?

It means editing the main content of your SEO texts to improve the user experience.

Paraphrasing, changing some links or modifying the navigation of your site will not be considered as an “optimization” or as “fresh” content. Having a recent date in your content does not guarantee that you will increase positions in Google. 

In the end, that your content is useful , no matter when it was published, is what will allow you to maintain and improve the positioning of your website . 

When you are going to make a change in your texts, you should not only edit the focus and leave the same with other words. The idea is that:

• Improve the user experience.
• Answer any new questions about the topic or that you have not considered before. 
• Add important figures that expand people’s knowledge.

In this text you will also learn about the variables that affect your “freshness” score . You can click here to jump to that point.

How do I optimize my SEO content?

Below we detail each of the steps necessary to achieve it:

Find indexing errors in Google

The first thing we need to do is check if the content we want to optimize is in Google’s database. 

This is what allows the search engine to show our site among its results after a search.  

How is it done?

Place the URL (page) you want to optimize in the Google Search Console navigation bar and analyze it.

Google will directly show you if the URL is indexed correctly or if the page has a problem such as:

• Redirect errors. 
• Server errors.
• A 404 error. 

One caveat that can go “under the table” is that the URL is indexed in Google but not uploaded to a sitemap.

If so, add the URL to the file so that search engines understand where the page came from.

Review content performance in Google Search Console 

Analyze the impressions, clicks and average positions that the article to be optimized has, using the performance filters in Google Search Console.

This will allow you to know: 

• Approximate monthly search volumes. 
• Exact queries that users are making and with whom they get the content.
• Click Through Rates (CTR) for the queries where you want to increase positions. 

Analyzing this data will allow you to answer the following questions:

• How are people searching? 
• How do they get me?
• How high am I currently appearing on the results page?
• Is my target audience finding me?

Match queries with a lot of impressions with those that have the possibility of moving up in position

After evaluating the SEO difficulty of the queries you want to rank for, select those that have high search volumes (many impressions) and where you also have good earned positions. 

Attractive query example:

• You have between 400 and 500 impressions per month.
• Accumulate about 20 to 30 clicks in that time.
• It is, on average, between positions 5 and 6 on the Google results page.

Therefore, making it a possible first position would be interesting to increase visits to your website. 

Unattractive query example:

• It has 2,500 impressions per month.
• It has 0 clicks.
• His average position of 35.

Therefore, it is not a query on which you want to optimize your article.

Even if the impressions are high, this query is probably very competitive in your industry and therefore it will be difficult to reach the first page. 

So, select 3-4 queries that are interesting and focus on those. 

Choose target parent keyword and derivatives (long tails)

Select the new main keyword of the article according to the analysis of the previous step. Remember that this phrase has to be the backbone of the entire text. 

Derivatives are all the long tails and related questions on the topic that you must also answer in the article. 

Review the main SEO fields in the article

What title tag does it have? What is the H1 or main title? Is the meta tag being used correctly? Is the URL SEO friendly?

This review can be done in several ways: 

1. Do the search on Google and see how the search engine returns your page. There you see the current information that Google is using to display your site. 
2. If you use WordPress as a content manager, in plugins like Rank Math or Yoast SEO you can check these main fields. 

You must be very careful that the H1 and the title tag are similar because Google can take either one to show it on its results page.

Review the results page for your target keyword

Perform the Google search in incognito mode for the query with which you want to position yourself. Remember to configure the search engine and language so that it is the same as your target audience.

This step will allow you to ensure that your content is aligned with the search intent that Google gives to your parent keyword. 

If the keyword you selected responds to a commercial search intent, no matter how good your content is, the text will never be in the top positions on the first page. 

Look at:

• Enriched results: 

• PAA boxes.

• Related searches.

Evaluate the portals of the competition

Check what is your domain authority of the websites that appear for searches of your interest. 

Domain authority is not an official Google ranking factor, but after much testing in the SEO world it has been determined that:

• Number of backlinks received. 
• Website age. 
• Quality of published content.
• Good positions in Google (first page).
• User experience. 
• time on site.

They improve the “reputation” of websites and give them a greater chance of ranking over other domains. 

Then:

Is your site authority superior? Are you competing against companies that you can beat?

Lastly, evaluate:

• What questions do they answer within the content?
• What material do they have? What user experience do they offer?

After you have these answers, make sure your article can beat them. 

Check external and internal site links 

Check if any links within the content have expired or need any redirection.

Having links that don’t work affects the user experience and takes you away from satisfying what the person wants to answer. 

Optimize SEO content 

Once the investigation is finished, it’s time to apply the changes:

• Include your focus keyword in these fields:
  • Titletag.
  • H1.
  • Meta tag.
  • Alt text.
  • URL (slug).
• Answer in the first paragraph of the article the main answer of the text.
• Include tables, designs and resources that enrich the UX of the article .
• Add content that you didn’t include before and optimize subtitles.
• Add internal and external links that open in new tabs and complement the information in your content .

Adjust technical details

If the URL of your article changed to include keywords and make it shorter (SEO friendly), it is important that you create a redirect .

This will prevent the traffic received by the old URL from continuing to convert into visitors to your website.

Likewise, after making all these modifications, requesting the indexing of the refreshed article will help Google read your changes faster and, therefore, improve your positioning.

How often should I optimize my SEO content to improve web positioning?

As Amit Singhal, former Google executive vice president, explained at the time: “Different searches have different freshness needs.”

That is, depending on the essence of your content you should update the :

• Hourly.
• Once a week.
• Once a month.
• Annually. 

What are those types of content?

recurring events 

An event of this type is any event that occurs constantly over time. That is, it has several editions. 

If people are searching for the “men’s soccer world cup ”, Google probably understands that they want information on the next edition (Qatar 2022), because the algorithm is already prepared to give you the most up-to-date information about it. 

Therefore, when your contents are based on this format, you must update them with: 

• Teams classified to the next edition. 
• New records that can be broken in that World Cup. 
• Stadium information. 
• Interesting facts about the country. 

In this case, it is about changing the main content of your site. 

This way you will improve the positioning of your website in Google, because you are staying relevant both for users and for the search engine. 

Recent news or “hot topics”

This group of events includes any website that is responsible for providing the latest information on a topic, such as a news portal.

Here users can get pages indexed minutes before their searches. 

That is why it is extremely key that those who live from this find a way to:

1. Differentiate yourself from your competitors and thus always be the first option. For this, it is necessary to have high visit times on the site, high percentages of click through rate and low bounce rates. 

Perfectly understand the user’s intention to use the correct key phrases, optimize the content and improve the SEO positioning of each page.

To know how to position yourself in Google News, check out this article: SEO for media, journalists and news

recent updates

Here come the companies that sell products and services, as in our case.

Why?

Because, although industries are constantly changing, they are not usually a “news flash” or a “recurring event” like a World Cup. 

For example, in the web positioning industry , Google always updates its algorithm to improve the answers it provides to its users. 

Therefore, people searching on this topic will want to get the most up-to-date information on best practices for this type of work.

That is the key: always monitor how users are searching, what type of content is the best performing and what are the websites that Google shows in the SERP.  

Variables that affect the freshness of your content

Here we will evaluate what are the aspects that Google takes into account to grant freshness scores to each page that it indexes.

Content Indexing Date

Whenever we index an article in Google for the first time, we will have the most “fresh” content on the topic we are covering. 

This score will drop over time as new information comes out.

In addition , it also influences how relevant the date is for that topic:

If a person searches for “best phones”, they probably want to get the phones from that year.

Note that Google’s  rich result for the search does indeed contain the best phones of that year. 

What about this “freshness” variable?

That, again, you should carefully analyze what type of content you are offering, because depending on the search (intention) an old document may be more favorable than one that has just been indexed. 

This condition can come into play with academic, legal, or medical issues. Google will always place the reputation and trajectory of content creators above those topics that they put at stake:

Your life or your money.

Number of changes within the content: how much was added?

Google will likely ignore your edit if only some subheading names were updated or if it changed just one paragraph. 

This will not indicate to the search engine that your content is now “fresh” and that this information deserves to move up positions. 

So: what if I only need to change little information but it is key to the content?

In this case you could modify the following:

• The main answer of the article (depending on the intention that we want to satisfy the user). 

We always recommend placing the answer to the question or problem in the first two or three lines of the content. Thus, if the person does not read any more of the content, they will leave with the solution.

• Numbers that need to be modified. 
• Names of people. 

If the information is really that important, Google will take it into account and can improve the positioning of your website. 

Update that key information and request indexing in Google Search Console.

The same search engine invites you to notify it if something on your page (content) has changed. 

Also, always keeping the user in mind will increase your chances of earning a featured snippet or knowledge panel.  

The ideal case is, as I have explained throughout the article, to add entire sections and edit the main text of your article to answer questions that no company on the Internet is answering. 

 You can answer these by changing:

• Methodologies that you mention in your article.
• New case studies.
• Steps to perform or change.

According to Answer The Public , a social listening tool for content and market research, there are 3 billion searches on Google every day and 20% of them have never been done. 

What does this mean? 

That every day there are 600 million totally new searches on the Internet. 

Therefore, if you want to improve the positioning of your website, your content must always be updated with the new needs of your target audience. 

New pages created

Google needs to know you’re there. That you are always working on solving doubts about your industry. 

This is an important “freshness” sign. 

A company that is constantly creating content is a company that is on top of the latest trends in its business. 

At Pencil Speech we have already explained that your task should be to answer all the questions your users have about your services or products .

This is the best way to become the leader in your industry.

Why?

Because, quite simply, every time someone has a question about what you do or what you sell, your brand will be there to help. 

This will practically “force” the person to buy from you because you are the one who has always been there helping him whenever he has needed you. 

Of course, this will not happen overnight. That is why your writing efforts must be constant. 

For a company that writes a piece of content every 3 months, it will be more difficult to stay on the first page of Google next to a site that publishes a new text every month.

Inbound links to your content (backlinks)

An increase in the number of links that your page receives is a clear indication for Google that this content is useful in that period, so its web positioning will improve. 

Receiving all these new links can be a consequence of:

• Be the first to solve an important problem or question.
• Create a solution that even your users did not know they needed. 
• Achieve a major milestone with your content and get people to start linking to it. 

In the end, as you can see, to be successful in web positioning, the first thing you must take into account is your audience. 

If you give yourself completely to help them and meet the technical requirements , your web positioning will improve.

Beware : an exponential increase in links can also be the result of some corrupt SEO strategy. In the event that Google determines that this is the case, it can penalize your website and complicate its chances of positioning.

Pencil Speech Case Study: How It Improved Our Rankings 411% By Optimizing Articles

As of January 2020, the Pencil Speech website had 24 articles and 900 organic visitors per month. 

In July 2020, if we do not count this article, the website will blog 27 pieces of content. In other words, we have only published 3 new SEO texts.

However, our traffic from Google is currently almost 4,600 monthly organic users (4,589 in June). Which corresponds to an increase, compared to our activity in January, of 411% in visits. 

How many pieces do we update?

All. 

That, and only that, was what improved our web positioning. 

There was not: 

• Link building campaigns. 
• Exponential increase in our domain authority for any link we have received. 
• Accelerated creation of new content.

In the end, we had taken care of answering all the possible questions about web positioning and what we did was repeat the 12 steps that I mentioned at the beginning with each article.

As SEO consultants we understand that there are always new questions to answer and issues that had not been addressed at the time. 

This same strategy is what will allow this article, when its time comes, to climb positions within the first page. 

It will be my duty to observe its performance and adapt it to the most popular ways of how people are looking to improve the positioning of their websites on the Internet through articles.  

Notice that our graph for clicks received from Google in the last 6 months has been going up all year. 

Effort-results relationship: advantage of SEO over social networks

Although we have not been 100% consistent with the publication of content, we have also been able to continue increasing our:

• Visibility on the Internet.
• Traffic. 
• Sales of SEO projects. 
• Domain of authority within the industry. 

Why?

Because the questions and problems that people have remain the same.

We, with the good foundation that we had already built, only had to adapt to how people are currently expressing their needs and Google has continued to provide them with our content as solutions. 

In social networks you cannot afford to spend 3 or 4 months without making any publication. You must be there day after day and hour after hour. 

If the traffic of your website depends on the redirections that you make from your social profiles, you will never be able to improve the positioning of your website. 

Conclution

Think about your users.

Ask yourself how you can stay relevant to them and update your content with your audience in mind.

Make sure you are providing all the necessary tools for people to solve their problems. 

This is the way in which you will improve the positioning of your company.