optimise your web content

Feel a little like this when checking your website organic traffic stats or your google analytics?

You wrote an awesome blog post or know your home page should be getting more hits, but it’s just not happening. It’s time to look at optimising your website content to ensure it’s getting the love it deserves.

Website content optimisation is, "the practice of updating and adjusting on-page copy and coding to make content more appealing to search engines and, by extension, human searchers" - Brafton

Let's have a look at 4 quick ways we can do this.

Manage your internal links

An internal website link refers to when you link a user to another page on your website to continue or complete their user journey. This is an example from our blog about planning for your new website.

The blue text links to our team, our work and client testimonial pages .

Internal links

You can make sure your internal website links are relevant by acting as a user would when they reach your site. Go through the clicks they would make to reach the intended information from your home page and other landing pages. Although some users may use the search box on your site to find information, these aren’t favoured by search engines and won’t help Google in recommending specific pages for the user, so you shouldn't rely on this.

Making sure internal pages can be easily reached by a user and are good for Search Engines involves using descriptive linking text. Writing, "For more information on our work click here" is not optimal, however, writing "Have a browse of the work we have done for our clients", is much better. This helps both users and search engines to understand and search your content better.

The optimal length

Buffer discovered that the ideal length for a blog post was 1600 words (7 minutes reading time) words and Hubspot told us that the optimal length is 2100 (7 minutes reading time), so I guess it depends how long you take to read. However, for their own blogs, the sweet spot was 2250 to 2500 words, showing that optimal length for optimisation will depend on your content and who you’re writing for. The main takeaway is that although you might want to pump out five 500 word articles for ‘good SEO’, this doesn’t mean they’ll experience good organic traffic or be of any use to your audience. Find the sweet spot for your organisation by testing a variety of different lengths and the resulting amount of traffic you experience. And don’t write a long blog post just for the sake of it.

remember that quality wins over quantity.

As far as general content length goes, ie. your 'About Us or 'Team' pages, we recommend keeping it concise. Just note down the essentials, encourage click-throughs to other pages and ensure each page has a call to action.

Maintenance

Updating old blogs with new information and relevant links is a great way of optimising it after its initial post-date. It’s easy to be overloaded with the amount of information out there and feel the need to continuously write new blogs, but sometimes it’s just not necessary. You may have already written something completely relevant and valuable a year ago. By simply revisiting the blog and doing some maintenance by checking your links still work, updating any stats, keywords AND the publish date, is a simple but effective way of optimising the content. Create a couple of new social media tiles to go along with the blog, share them on your socials and ta da ! You have new visitors learning important information from your old work. Search engines will also fa vour c ontent that has been recently published or updated.

Understanding user search intent

User search intent refers to the reasons behind what an individual is searching for. Search intent falls under 4 categories;

informational (searching for general information)
navigational (searching for a specific site)
transactional (searching with an intention to buy) and,
commercial (searching for information with an intention to buy soon).

Depending on your business you can determine what type of intention your users are searching with. For us, a web and mobile development business, we can identify that people who find themselves on our website would be searching with informational or navigational intent. An individual might find themselves on our website through this blog if they search, ‘how to op timise w ebsite content’ or ‘how to increase visitors on my website’ and as such, we would include these key terms in our blogs meta-data. Similarly, for navigational, a user may search ‘Web development companies Perth’ and again, including these terms in our home-page meta keywords will help lead users to our website.

Having an understanding and doing some research around keywords and user search intent will help you determine how you can tailor your content to be greater op timised f or organic traffic.

A few quick and easy steps can make a world of difference to the organic traffic your site experiences, let us know how this works for you.