4 Steps To Optimise Website Content And Improve SEO

If you run a small business that has a website,  there's a chance you've likely heard of SEO (or search engine optimisation) before.

SEO is the process of making your website more visible to search engines such as Google and Bing.

Better SEO has many benefits including increased website visitors, more contact enquiries and greater website sales.

But how do you actually go about doing that?

One way to achieve this goal is by optimising your website content for SEO.

Let's dive in...

Post overview - 4 steps to optimise your website content:
1. Check the technical elements of your website
2. Research and use keywords strategically
3. Build internal and external links
4. Create surrounding content

What is SEO Content Optimisation?

SEO content optimisation is the process of updating and optimising your website's content to be more relevant for users and in turn, more relevant to search engines.

Why is SEO Content Optimisation Important?

If you want your website to be successful, then you need to make sure it's optimised for SEO.

This is because continued success online depends on two things: website traffic and conversion rates.

While there are a number of ways to drive traffic to your website, one of the most effective is through organic search results - in other words, people finding your website through a search engines.

This is where SEO comes in.

By optimising your content for SEO, you're increasing your chances of appearing in the important organic search results—which in turn will increase the amount of traffic coming to your website; and more traffic usually leads to more conversions (for examples more sales, leads, enquiries etc.).

4 Steps To Optimise Your Existing Content for SEO:

While there are lots of different strategies to optimising your website content, we've handpicked four of our favourites to get things moving quickly. These are:

1. Check the technical elements of your website
2. Research and use keywords strategically
3. Build internal and external links
4. Create surrounding content

1. Check the technical elements of your website

You can't (easily) build a house if the foundations aren't solid - the same goes for optimising your website for SEO.

The first step is to ensure your website is mobile friendly by using a tool such as Google's Mobile Friendly Test.

Secondly, review the primary technical elements of your website or webpage. These include checking:

• headings (H1 through to H6)
• meta information (title and description)
• alt-text description for images

We use the SEOQuake browser extension to check these, particularly the headings.

Ensure your website has only one H1 tag on each page and uses a heading hierarchy as best as possible (i.e. H2 then H3 then H4).

Meta titles and descriptions are also key factors for SEO and should be optimised with keywords (see the next step).

Alt-text is assigning a text description to your images that help with SEO, but also importantly from an accessibility perspective for people who utilise screen readers or even if a website doesn't load properly.

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2. Research and use keywords strategically

Keywords are terms and phrases that can be implemented within your text in order of better matching a searchers intent to point to your content.

For example, keyword research might suggest that more users (i.e. higher volume) are searching for 'best electrician in hobart' as opposed to 'reliable electrician in hobart' - thus, effort might be placed on incorporating the former text instead of the later in your website.

You can use a tool like Ubersuggest or AHREF's free keyword generator to research the keywords that your webpage is already ranking for - or to look up keyword ideas or questions that may be more relevant.

One strategy we often implement is to look for 'low hanging fruit' - that's keywords with higher volume but low difficulty.

Once you've got a list of 5-10 keywords, you might identify one or two primary ones.

The next step is to implement these keywords in your written content, not only in the body of text, but also incorporating your primary keywords in the meta title, meta description and heading 1 area.

You can use the secondary keywords to inform the additional headings in the content (heading 2, heading 3 etc.).

It's important however to use these keywords strategically - that is to incorporate them naturally within your text and not to 'keyword stuff'; i.e. spamming the content with the keyword. This will lead to a negative impact on your webpage and website overall.

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3. Build internal and external links

Both internal links and websites that refer to your website are also important factors for SEO.

If other high authority website link to your content, this tells search engines like Google that your content is also reputable and should be prioritised over others.

The first step we'd recommend is to review your existing content and create some internal links - that is, linking to other pages on your own website.

For example, this blog post is on SEO services for businesses in Hobart and Tasmania - so you can see in the sentence before the internal link.

Not also that this is in the body of text, as opposed to a 'click here' link, which tells search engines nothing about what the link is.

External links from other websites, or backlinks, can be difficult to generate but some ideas include: 

• reaching out to other quality websites saying you've created some informative content and asking them to link to this;
• share your content on social media;
• create keyword optimised content to rank organically;
• think about creating surrounding content (see the next step).

4. Create surrounding content

If you're looking to optimise existing content to rank better, you might consider creating supplementary content that can both enhance, and link, to your existing webpage.

Examples of surrounding content could be:

• create a video and upload this to Youtube;
• create an infographic and upload this to Pinterest;
• create a carousel and upload this to Instagram;
• create a short overview and upload to TikTok.

For example, this blog post you're reading could be complimented by a short video running through the four steps in top-level detail.

All of the options above can link back to the primary content, whether that be a blog post or webpage, but may also start ranking in their own right (i.e. a popular Youtube video).

These platforms like Youtube and Pinterest have incredibly high domain authority too, so this is a useful and quality backlink generating technique.

Creating this media can also be really quick - as you've likely already generated the content for the blog or webpage.

We'd personally recommend to start this strategy by choosing one platform, doing it consistency and doing it well. An ideal timeline would be around 3-6 months.

You can see a real work example of this in the work we've recently been doing with Trout Tales Tasmania - generating short yet informative videos that help compliment the existing website blog posts and seek to improve the wider SEO efforts.

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In summary...

As a business owner in Hobart and Tasmania, it's important to make sure your website and its content are optimised for search engine optimisation (SEO).

Thankfully, this isn't always as difficult as it may sound.

If we had to create a cheat sheet for businesses looking to quickly optimise their content, we'd say:

• research and update your text and metadata with relevant keywords;
• make sure your website is mobile-friendly;
• build and create external and internal links;
• create supplementary content to your most popular posts.

If you do those things, you'll be well on your way to increased traffic and and improving the SEO rankings for your webpage.

We also understand that not every business has the time, budget or resources to improve their SEO - we offer affordable, targeted SEO campaigns for businesses in Hobart and Tasmania and are always happy to help.

As always, thanks for taking the time to read our blog posts.

- Dom