How to Optimize Your Content for Search Engines (And Tap Into a MASSIVE Traffic Source)
If you're a publisher, this is a must!
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If you’re publishing content online, chances are you want people to actually read what you write!
But, in order to read your content, people need to discover it first. This is why you must optimize your content for search engines.
Search engines are a crucial part of navigating the web and discovering content.
Traffic from search engines, known as organic traffic, is the largest website traffic source. Approximately 63% of all referral traffic comes from Google!1
Note: Referral traffic means any traffic that comes to your website from a link on another website (like Google). Conversely, direct traffic comes from people typing your URL directly into their browser.
If you’re not getting traffic from Google, you’re missing out on most of your potential readers.
The first step to getting traffic from search engines like Google is to choose the right keywords. If you’re new to search engine optimization, make sure you read my guide to keyword research first.
But the job isn’t over once you’ve chosen the best keywords. To have the best shot at ranking highly for your chosen keywords, you must ensure your content is optimized for those keywords.
Today, we’re going to learn how to do just that.
Table of Contents
What Is Content Optimization?
Content Quality
How to Understand Search Intent
How to Create High-Quality Content
Where to Use Your Keyword
What Is Content Optimization?
Content optimization is the process of improving your content to improve its chances of ranking highly in search engines.
I think about content optimization in two parts:
Creating high-quality content that can compete against all the other content online.
Ensuring Google knows what your (high-quality) content is about.
Content Quality ✨
Google wants to keep its users happy so they’ll keep coming back and using Google for more searches. (Remember, showing ads to searchers is how Google makes money). If you can truly provide searchers with the best piece of content for a keyword, Google is more likely to rank your webpage highly for that keyword.
To provide the best content that is worthy of ranking on the first page of search results, you need to understand what searchers are trying to accomplish with their search, also known as search intent.
No matter how established your website is or what’s going on with the Google algorithm, the better your content matches the search intent, the higher your chances of ranking.
How to Understand Search Intent
Once you‘ve chosen a keyword to target and are committed to creating high-quality content, it's time to explore search intent. There are four ways I do this.