So you wrote an article. You poured your heart and soul into it and your hard work has paid off! It is ranked #1 in Google and it seems like it will always remain there.
But one day, you notice that your article got dethroned and is now ranked #3. Later on, it fell to the fifth place, then the 10th, and now it’s at risk of disappearing in the void (second page of search results). Does it mean you have to abandon your masterpiece? No, it means you have to optimize it.
If you think content optimization is the process of adding more keywords and calling it a day, our team would like to say: You're wrong. After helping our clients optimize dozens, even hundreds of articles, we can confirm that SEO is only part of the process.
I prepared a list of best practices with some on-point case studies to tell you how you can breathe new life into your piece of content and make it come back to the top of Google's search results.
Let's start with when you should consider optimizing your content.
When to optimize your content
Declining performance
The reason for content optimization is to improve its performance, so when the performance declines, it's time to do content optimization.
- A noticeable drop in page traffic or page views. For example, you notice that a blog post, which used to attract around 5,000 visits per month, now only brings in around 2,000 visits.
- Decreased engagement. For example, a blog post that used to get dozens of comments, shares, and likes, now shows less engagement and the average time on page has dropped from 3 to just 1 minute.
- Reduced conversions. For example, a blog post had a CTA for downloading an eBook which used to generate 20 leads per month. Now, that number has dropped to just 2 leads.
Search engine update
After a major update to Google's algorithm, particularly if you’ve noticed a decline in performance afterward, it's time to rewrite your content.
As Kate recently mentioned on LinkedIn, Meg Prater, the managing editor of the HubSpot Blogs, shared an insightful case study on how HubSpot changed its content writing approach after Google's Core Algorithm update in March 2023.
In brief, HubSpot saw a drop in traffic, leads, and sign-ups. Instead of merely adding more text and keywords, they revamped the content by incorporating personal anecdotes, subjective insights, and objective observations. This fresh approach led to a significant increase in both traffic and conversions.
Content is outdated
When content contains old information, such as outdated facts, statistics, or details, it can quickly lose credibility and relevance. For example, a blog post that cites social media usage statistics from 2018 may mislead readers.
Also, when there are broken links within the content—such as a link to a resource that no longer exists—this can frustrate users and harm your website's SEO. Keeping your content updated ensures that it remains valuable, trustworthy, and effective in meeting the needs of your audience.
Shifts in the marketing focus
When your target audience shifts, updating your content will ensure it resonates with the new segment.
Similarly, if your business pivots from selling product A to product B, it's essential to update your content to reflect this new direction.
For example, when Bridge pivoted its business model from Employer of Record to tech-enabled global sourcing and recruitment agency, we refreshed all the content on the Bridge's website to align with this new focus.
Market changes
When competitors update their content, it can make yours less competitive. For example, new industry trends can emerge that your competitors start addressing while your content remains outdated. If they’re covering hot topics that you haven’t touched on, your content could become irrelevant, pushing potential customers toward your competitors instead. You need to update your content to make sure it maintains the edge. Just make sure you don't just copy whatever your competitors have written.
Seasonal updates
If you have content that has seasonal relevancy (e.g., holiday-related content), you need to update it regularly.
For example, we work with VeePN, a VPN service, and for this client, content around major sports events that happen annually can significantly boost traffic, by attracting viewers seeking to access them via a VPN. We update this kind of content each season.
Content consolidation
When you have several posts covering the same topic, merging them can improve SEO and provide a more comprehensive resource for readers.
For example, if you have three separate articles on "Copywriting Tips for Beginners," "Advanced Copywriting Strategies," and "Common Copywriting Mistakes," consolidating them into a single, detailed guide on copywriting can boost search engine rankings.
This approach not only improves SEO but also helps avoid content duplication and ensures that your audience gets complete information in one place.
Expanding reach
Expanding your reach involves adapting content for new distribution channels to maximize its impact.
For example, if you’ve created a blog post on "Effective Marketing Strategies," you can repurpose it for various platforms: share key insights and tips on social media, turn the content into a podcast episode, or create an engaging video summarizing the main points. By tailoring your content for these different formats, you can reach a broader audience.
With that being said, it’s about time I shared some practices for successful content optimization.
Essential practices for content optimization
We'll focus on two key strategies for content optimization: optimizing content for SEO and improving content quality. While these areas are interconnected, they require different expertise, so it's important to keep that in mind during the optimization process. With that said, let’s start with SEO.
Optimizing content for SEO
Our agency mainly focuses on creating quality content, so we won’t be trying to take the job from SEO professionals. Below you will find the most essential SEO practices we apply ourselves, and if you’re interested in diving deeper, Semrush or Ahrefs blogs will help you better cope with the task.
Improve internal linking
While reading articles online, you’ve surely noticed certain words being underlined. This is anchor text or links that lead to other web resources. When optimizing your blog articles, consider adding some internal links (links that move readers to another page within the same website). This will help Google bots scan your website pages more efficiently, while readers will be able to read other relevant content you've written.
When you embed internal links, make sure you avoid filler words such as “Click here,” and “Read this." Semrush recommends choosing relevant and brief words for the anchor text, so that both readers and search engines can easily determine what the linked page is about.
Learn what people also ask
When you google something, the search engine often includes the “People also ask” box, a hefty feature that responds to the user's related search queries:
How many people actually click on that box? According to Backlinko, only 3% of searchers interact with People also ask boxes. While 3% might seem small, the impact depends on the overall search volume. For instance, if a million people search for the same keywords, at least 30,000 of them will engage with the PAA box. That's a pretty significant number, don’t you think?
There are two ways to get your content on “People also ask”: answering the questions within the article or including a separate FAQ. The second method is much easier to implement. Just go through the PAA box related to your topic and add answers to these questions at the end of your article.
Include semantically related words
For your content to rank higher, search engines have to be sure you’ve explained the topic much better than the rest. But instead of reading your article and judging how interesting it is, search engines pay attention to words or phrases conceptually related to your article’s focus keyword.
For example, let’s say you’re writing a guideline with a focus keyword “how to develop a fintech app.” You can add words like “app development,” “finance app,” “financial technology,” and similar. All these words are semantically connected, so the search engine can understand the article’s intent better. However, if you add “ NBA finals,” “tater tots,” or else to the list, the search engine will start questioning the article’s intent and will rank it lower as an outcome.
Avoid keyword stuffing
It’s good to have keywords in your content, but it’s bad to have many of them piled together like fish in a barrel. Also known as keyword stuffing, such practice won’t do any good to your content. What you should do instead is pick one focus keyword and, as Ahrefs points out, enough secondary keywords for your content. Think of secondary keywords as subtopics to your content, having like 25+ subtopics would be a lot, don’t you think?
But as we mentioned, we’re not SEO megaminds here – we salute every SEO pro, but quality content is more our cup of tea. And we’re moving on to the content side.
Improving content quality
We can confidently say that none of our clients would have succeeded without well-crafted content on their blog. “Well-crafted” doesn’t mean they just ran their posts through Grammarly Premium and got a “Nice job!” It means their content is packed with expert insights that you won’t find anywhere else. Here’s what our team does when tasked to optimize content.
Create a MECE structure
To write an informative and clear piece, we recommend applying the MECE (mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive) framework. If you want to learn more about MECE and why it’s probably the best framework for content writing, Animalz wrote a very informative article about it. We can only summarize that MECE structure ensures clarity and completeness in writing by organizing content into distinct, non-overlapping sets that cover all relevant aspects of the topic. The article you’re reading serves as an on-point example.
Write clear and compelling headings
Now, if we talk about the article’s structure (meaning headings, subheadings and so on), make sure to use simple, yet informative headings with a clear hierarchy. There has to be only one main heading, which is H1, sections inside the article must start with H2, followed by H3s and onward.
At the same time, article headings should not be verbose, both humans and robots should quickly get what the upcoming section is going to cover without any need to read it, even.
Circling back to the SEO side for a bit, don’t forget about meta descriptions. Meta descriptions serve as a pitch that has to convince your potential readers to click your particular link. Descriptions should be brief (up to 160 characters) yet relevant and convincing (include action words such as “Read,” “Discover,” “Learn” and similar), so keep that in mind when optimizing your article.
Add visuals
You may be asking “Why should I care about visuals?”. There are two main reasons, which are information perception and brand awareness. Thanks to neuroscientists it was proven that our brains process visual information 60,000 times faster than text, which is, well, a lot. And given the fact that humans’ attention span is shrinking dramatically these days, we have to care about ways to deliver information to readers in the fastest and most convenient way possible. And here’s where visuals are irreplaceable.
But it’s not enough to toss a couple of stock images and say the article is good to go. Infographics, tables, and other relevant images should be considered during the optimization process to make your article more engaging and deliver as much value to users looking to solve their pains with your content as possible. And this is where we also recommend designing your own visuals to match the brand identity.
Why should you do that? To differentiate among competitors, of course. Images created in your own style make your brand more recognizable, which, in turn, will make readers remember who to thank for useful content.
Update the stats and facts
As mentioned earlier, stats, infographics and facts are very important when it comes to solving user pains, BUT only when they’re up to date. So during optimization, make sure that all numbers and statistical information are no older than 2 years to ensure relevancy.
For example, when the pandemic hit, there were numerous articles with stats highlighting a massive surge in remote work. But today, as COVID and lockdowns are long gone, this information has become outdated and no longer relevant.
Our world is a dynamic place, with new things happening every single day. That’s why when it comes to content optimization, aim for the latest data possible.
Repurpose your content
Content optimization is not just about fixing your article structure, updating stats, or simply adding more text – it’s about making your high-performing piece even more high-performing. You can achieve this by “repackaging” your existing blog post into other types of content, such as ebooks, LinkedIn posts, and so on. If you’re curious to learn more on the topic, consider checking out our article on how to repurpose content.
Add personal experience
Remember the last time you enjoyed yourself reading a Wikipedia article or AI-generated content? Me neither. And it’s not because people don’t like facts, no. It’s because we care more about personal experiences. Making your content personal and showing your expertise will make your content interesting and engaging.
So here are our recommendations on how you can approach content optimization. Sure thing, our list is not exhaustive, but we did our best to cover all the essentials.
And let’s take a look at some examples.
VeePN: Optimizing an article to promote a new product launch
VeePN, a premium VPN provider, has launched a new product called VeePN Antivirus. Looking to promote their new product to their audience, VeePN decided to optimize one of their most popular articles about ways to fix a hacked Android phone and asked Zmist & Copy for help.
For this optimization, we aimed to create a brief and concise how-to guide that would target two different scenarios: when a reader’s phone is already hacked and they’re looking for ways to get rid of malware, and when they want to protect themselves from a potential threat. VeePN Antivirus fit the first scenario perfectly, which is why it was decided to add a separate section with steps on how to run an antivirus scan.
The VeePN team has also added new images, showcasing the Antivirus functionality. This approach added more value to users looking to solve their problems.
During the optimization process, we managed to separate two different products from each other, with Antivirus helping to scan and detect potential threats and VPN helping prevent them through data encryption.
Lastly, we changed the final CTA, adding antivirus to the narrative and promoting both VeePN products as an “all-in-one security powerhouse”
As a result, the optimized article now continues to generate stable traffic while successfully promoting a newly launched product.
Eleken: Rewriting the article for the AI assistants era
In the previous example, the main goal for content optimization was to introduce a new product. But in this example, our goal was to reconsider the whole article.
The original article, written in 2022, targeted the keyword "AI UX," which had a modest search volume of 10 queries per month. The article was written for Eleken, a SaaS design agency, and focused on their approach to designing SaaS products with AI functionality.
By 2023, the search volume for "AI UX" had increased tenfold to 110 queries per month. With the introduction of ChatGPT, Eleken’s original article became outdated, and we needed to shift the angle and update the content accordingly.
We decided to focus on how to integrate AI features into SaaS products from the design perspective. This shift was reflected in the new article title:
Before
After
Next up was the intro. When the article was first published, AI was a technology for big companies with large budgets. But who could have predicted that within a year, an AI gold rush would begin? Naturally, we shifted the focus from AI being exclusive to industry giants to it becoming accessible to everyone.
Before
After
As new GPT versions appeared, the features they enabled presented both opportunities and challenges for designers. We reconsidered one of the sections dedicated to designing UI/UX features for AI and focused on the integration of GPT technologies instead.
Before
After
Unlike in the previous article, where we sort of aimed to “predict” the AI evolution in the bottom line, the new conclusion focused on the need for implementing the new technology here and now.
Before
After
Bottom line
Content optimization is the only way to maintain the performance of your content. It's not just about tweaking keywords; it involves updating information, adapting to market and algorithm changes, and improving content quality.
We recommend to regularly revisit your content to address declining performance, outdated facts, and shifts in market trends to ensure your content remains impactful and competitive in search results.
