How to increase traffic with content optimisation

Intranet, Internet, emails, leaflets, direct mail, advertising. This list goes on. Offline, online or both, the content you produce tells a story.

In the context of a website, how do you solve a problem like content optimisation, the process of optimising your website content to be the best it can be for maximum engagement and organic ranking?

How should you create your content? How can your web pages be easily found? How can you increase organic traffic, conversions and reduce bounce rate? How can you outrank your competitors in search results pages?

Where the content journey begins

Content creation is a huge task. It mustn't, and shouldn't, be undervalued.

Every business has challenges when it comes to content. How often should it be produced and reviewed? What type of content should be produced, and what channels should be used?

Not so long ago we at Codehouse reviewed our content and found that we could be doing a lot better in terms of output, organic ranking and traffic.

So what did we do? We developed a content delivery and measurement model. In just 2 years our content production has grown and our SEO metrics have increased.

Our 'Visibility' for instance, has increased by 16%. Our 'Average Position' by 42%. We're outranking our competition in SERP and even have some snippets to our name.

Overview

One of our customers, a renowned international business, wanted expert guidance on how to increase traffic through engaging content and organic ranking.

We were confident, because of the success of our own content efforts, and our ongoing relationship with our customer, that we could offer an effective content optimisation solution that met the needs of our customer and aligned with their digital goals.

Process

After identifying our customer's goals, our digital experience team started detailing a content strategy and optimisation process. The initial proposal was to write and promote a series of articles focussed on specific keywords.

This process consists of 8 sequential content optimisation pillars:

1. Research

2. Persona definitions

3. Ideation

4. SEO templates

5. Content creation

6. Publishing

7. Tracking and monitoring

8. Continual optimisation

Each pillar has defined sub-tasks. When all sub-tasks are completed, the next pillar is tackled. For example, at the 'Ideation' stage of the content optimisation process, topic clusters are proposed. Each topic cluster is created to align with intent, relevant keywords and persona definitions, which all ultimately link together to drive traffic and boost organic rankings.

Delivery

With everything in place, we started researching keywords and the competition. We identified the top performing keywords and determined which ones to target for maximum traction.

The next phase was to explore the persona definitions and assign 'keyword buckets' to each persona. These buckets represent the suggested keywords for the content, targeting each persona and its needs.

The ideation stage amalgamates persona needs, competitors and keywords. Our team formulated effective topic clusters with the aim of creating relevant and engaging content. Each cluster has a pillar page with surrounding and interlinking topics to build link juice.

Our content optimisation experts then went to work creating the agreed content for the cluster. To guide our customer's marketing team a detailed SEO template was created for each piece of content.

The template is an overview of each blog post. It’s an essential SEO guide for content teams to refer to. It includes the keywords used, suggested meta descriptions and titles, readability statistics and a lot more.

After the content was written, it was approved by our customer's relevant subject matter experts and published. Upon publishing, all keywords and articles are tracked to measure performance on a weekly basis, where keyword performance and position tracking are analysed.

Results

The initial results from the content optimisation process are very promising. In the short time since the articles went live, organic ranking has a 27% share of the pie, and the bounce rates for the articles dropped by 20% against articles previously published outside this project.

Working with Codehouse

We're continuing working more with our customers so they get the very best from their content optimisation efforts.

If you want to improve your organic ranking and want a tried and tested approach to quality content our Content Optimisation service is for you. Get in touch to find out more.