6 optimisations that can make a quick impact on your business’s online presence

It’s not uncommon for businesses to enthusiastically engage in content creation with a focus on new content, and with no objectives or measures for success. When providing marketing consultancy services one of the first things we look at is the blog archive. Here there is often a treasure trove of old content ripe for optimisation and republishing.

But why stop there? By actioning 5 more simple measures your content will generate more impact and you’ll be able to measure the success. You’ll also put in place good, sold principles for your content strategy going forward.

Optimise old content

Use an on-page SEO checker like Ahrefs or SEMrush to establish what your pages rank for, and perhaps more importantly what they’ve ranked for previously. Are there terms you are surprised it ranked for? Capitalise on those.

This can be a really powerful process because Google and the page already have a history. You have probably already got internal links that go to this page and you may even also have some external backlinks. Revitalising and republishing content allows you to keep all of that and refine content to rank better for the terms you find.

Select the related terms you want that page to rank for and build them into headings, the page meta description, the first paragraph and body text. Finally, where appropriate to do so build the terms into the image meta descriptions, remembering that the description should remain accurate – accessibility tools use these to aid those requiring verbal descriptions of the images on the page.

Internal linking

So, you’ve reinvigorated your content, but what next? The visitor’s journey shouldn’t end there. And yet, internal linking is a chronically overlooked activity on the blogs and pages of so many business websites.

A lot of ‘blog content’ is what is considered TOFU, or top of funnel, that’s broader subject matter. The fact that the visitor on your site reading the content, tells you exactly where they are on their purchase journey.

You should have already considered where you want them to go next. Now that they have gained more knowledge, that might involve further educating them, or steering them to more information about your specific product or services.

Ensure that your website, specifically the pages that you have optimised, have conversion pathways built in. Consider where this content sits in the funnel:

TOFU – Top of the Funnel

MOFU – Middle of the funnel

BOFU – Bottom of the funnel

Then, move the prospect on accordingly. 

At the top of the funnel the visitor they may be completely unaware of products, services or solutions. These visitors are looking to have questions answered about problem or need that they have identified. 

If you have just provided this information on the ‘now optimised page’ it’s time to move them on to content at the middle of the funnel. This is where you start to describe the solutions – your products or services – to fulfil the need/want. 

Many organisations focus on the creation of new content without even considering the inclusion of internal links to other blogs or service pages. Why be the one to educate a prospect only for them to go elsewhere to find the solution?

And, this is where internal linking comes in, allowing you to steer the visitor onwards. Whilst this is perhaps the most obvious benefit, it’s not the only purpose internal linking serves, there is another very powerful purpose. 

Creating anchor links to other pages on your site effectively tells Google what you want that page to rank for – boosting its traffic, page authority and aiding Google’s ability to crawl and index it. Much is I talked about the power of external links from high DA (domain authority) sites, but…

Well-constructed content with a carefully considered structure of internal links can rank at the top of search. Now, of course this is dependent on the competitivity of the subject matter, but it illustrates just how much is in your hands before you start looking for external links.

Conversion mechanisms

Having created compelling content that brings prospects to your website, and internal links that channels them along your funnels, finally you’ll need to convert these visitors. For this, there are numerous mechanisms at your disposal depending on the objective. In its most basic form, there Call-to- Action (CTA) buttons that simply encourage visitors to ‘GET IN TOUCH’ or ‘ACT NOW’.

Call-to-Action boxes create a bigger visual display, an example can be seen below. I’d love for you to sign up for our newsletter and stay up to date with new content. If you are finding this blog useful, and think you’d benefit from more content of this type, now might be a good time for me to prompt you. That’s why timing or page position of your call-to-action needs to be considered and tested.

Other mechanisms at your disposal:

The above are either capable of bringing prospects into your ecosystem, providing the confidence for the prospect to complete the action, or in the case of live chat/chatbots – establishing immediate prospect engagement.

LinkedIn personal profile / LinkedIn banner

With your republished content live, internal links and considered conversion mechanisms in place, it’s time to publicise your content and give it an extra boost. There’s no better social platform than LinkedIn when it comes to reaching a B2B, it’s still possible to achieve huge reach outside of their paid offerings.

Higher visibility, and credibility will be achieved by posting from your personal profile rather than your company page. There are a few things to consider when optimising your profile, but the key things to take care of before you post are:

Once you’ve posted your not done, look out for comments and be sure to respond to them. Early engagement on LinkedIn is key to how long the algorithm will keep content live to a broad audience. Likes are good, but comments are better, and give you the opportunity to sustain visibility in your network for longer.

Google my business update post

If you’ve setup your Google My Business, it makes sense to use or adapt the LinkedIn post for an update post on the platform. This will help:

Accessing GMB for a single update can be protracted, instead it can be beneficial to use a platform like Publer. Their free account allows you to link 3 x social platforms, so you could also choose Facebook and Twitter, but it’s worth it just for the simplicity it brings to GMB updates.

Analytics & monitoring

There are plenty of 3^rd party tools that can provide highly granular data about site visits. However, at the very least, ensure that you have Google Analytics and Google Search Console set up.

Not to be overlooked, these free tools provide you with a tremendous amount of data and resources. Allowing you to determine, whether your republished content has gained traffic, the search terms visitors are using to find it and the sources. 

When combined with Google Tag Manager you can easily add segments of code (without coding) that will allow you to track website actions that will be reported in Google Analytics.

Start by define the interactions that you consider conversions, for example:

Once you’ve established what it is important to measure, you can configure triggers that will fire when a specific action takes place. For example, a ‘SUBMIT’ button on a form or a CTA button you would configure a click trigger and the number clicks will be visible in Google analytics.

Having these tools setup takes away the guess work and allows you to properly measure and assess the success of the measures that you carry out.

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