29 April 2021
5 Ways to Optimize Your Content Creation Process
Anyone with an affinity for writing, be it as a hobby or as a career, will have a content creation process. They may not be aware of it, it may be a subconscious thing, but it will be there. A content creation process is usually a highly personal thing for a writer too. Take the Seek Social team for example – Tom likes to put on a pair of headphones, listen to some music and be left alone to focus while he writes. Paula is more proactive in getting feedback as she composes texts, and is usually multitasking with something else at the same time.
Two very different approaches then, but both work for the person that employs them and the result is top-notch written content for our clients and their businesses – including (but not limited to Facebook and other social media posts, blogs, general site content, and marketing material If you’re a business owner, you’re also probably aware of the importance of marketing. When products and services are successfully marketed, this results in customer acquisition, retention, and generally higher sales. You might also know that maintaining a website is an effective marketing strategy, but the question is, can search engines even discover your site’s content?
Even if you publish the best articles in the world, unfortunately, if they aren’t optimized, they will never see the light of day. It’s important to also realise that optimising a text well starts in the content creation process. In fact, writers often need to incorporate a deliberate step into their content creation process where they plan what they’ll need in order to write a well-optimized text, and lay the groundwork for it. In this article, we’ll go over five tips to help you optimize your content creation process, refine it, and produce content that both search engines and humans will love!
Why is Optimization Important?
The first thing that you need to understand is that the ‘content creation process’, ‘content’ and ‘optimization’ are three entirely different concepts that go hand-in-hand. Content involves an audience. The right content (e.g. photos, videos, text, etc.) will attract the right users, encouraging them to take action, such as make a purchase. The content creation process is the steps that a writer takes to create that content, while optimization is intended for search engines. Its objective is to improve the website’s SEO ranking.
When content isn’t optimized, it won’t be noticed by the search engine, and therefore won’t reach the target audience. You can’t expect to boost your rankings on the SERPs simply by writing a 500-word blog post.
What Are Some Tips and Tricks to Optimize Your Content Creation Process?
#1 Publish Readable Content
SERPs can filter out articles that are too lengthy, have too many grammatical errors, and are difficult to read. Content-rich blog posts will rank higher in SERPs, plus they are more likely to receive shares across different social networks.
A longer article allows you to insert more keywords into the text, but it also raises the challenge of readability. Here are some ways you can make your blog posts more readable – including steps you can take in the planning and preparatory stage of your content creation process that we talked about above:
- Break up the text. Use headings, subheadings, callouts, bullet lists, and more. This allows readers to scan through the text and quickly find the information that they need.
- Mix different media. Don’t settle for text. Add graphics, photos, videos, and other types of media that will make your articles easier to understand. A professional graphic design agency in the UK can create original infographics to accompany text-heavy content.
- Run a readability test. The Flesch readability score indicates how readable your content is. Before publishing your content, subject it to a readability test on the Yoast plugin.
#2 Insert Relevant Keywords into Your Text
If you want to optimize your content, you need to insert relevant keywords into your text. This will enhance your content’s visibility and ranking on SERPs. There are many tools and plugins that you can utilize to identify the keywords you should be weaving into your articles.
Free keyword research tools such as Yoast SEO, SEMrush, and Moz Pro are a great way to get started, but you should consider hiring an SEO agency to ensure that your content outranks the competition for certain search queries.
#3 Make Your Website User-Friendly
Search engines like Google have a preference for websites that offer a great user experience or UX. Your content may be optimized, but you must also make sure that your audience can engage with your content. Here are some ways you can improve your site’s UX:
- Improve the page loading time. Users won’t stick around if the website takes more than three seconds to load.
- Use a mobile-friendly design. These days, most people access the Internet through their mobile devices. Your website’s design, layout, and contents should automatically adapt to any screen size. Users should be able to view content whether they use a laptop, phone, or tablet.
- Pick an appealing design. Treat your website visitors to a visually pleasing experience by hiring a web design and development agency in the UK. This ensures that your site’s design is eye-catching, easy to navigate, and memorable.
#4 Optimize Images and Videos
Blog posts should always have images and videos, as users are more likely to spend more time on your content if they have visuals. Visual content grabs the reader’s attention, increasing the chances of them converting. So you should definitely include time to think about images in your content creation process.
Before clicking ‘publish’, be sure to optimize all of the images and videos within your content. Add alt tags, resize the images, use keywords in the video’s title, and so on.
#5 Optimize Old Content
Over time, the content on your website will become outdated. Optimization strategies today may no longer be applicable. However, that does not mean that your content deserves to be deleted. Re-optimizing old content can help improve its ranking on SERPs.
Start by working with a digital marketing agency to identify which content requires re-optimization. From there, conduct keyword research to replace old keywords, spruce up your graphics, and more. This will give your old content a much-needed facelift! To help you stay on top of this task, why not make it part of your content creation process to set a review date as a reminder – a date in the future when you’ll come back to the piece of content you’re about to write and ensure that it’s still as optimized and accurate as it can be?
